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Israel Horovitz's Free Gift is a sweet, tender play. Yes, I wrote "sweet."
Roselle (Kathryn Kelly), a white English woman, found a baby in a box on her doorstep 15 years ago. It was Heather's (LaNae DePriest) baby. Heather, a black girl, had just turned 15 years old. After years of legal machinations, Roselle and her husband legally adopted the child, which they named Max (Ty'Reek Hill). Subsequently, her husband died leaving her a single mom.
When Kate Alexander directed Susan Greenhill last season as the frumpy conservative Haddie in "...And L.A. is Burning," I wrote that the two were becoming a first-class FST team, bringing out what's deeper in women characters than seen on the surface. With Shirley Valentine, the team scores again, sending an empty-nest wife, too long bound to routine and house like a prisoner in limbo, on a voyage of self-rediscovery.
I'd like a superior Roxane and a slightly more theatrically vivid emphasis and pacing in direction, but this Cyrano de Bergerac is intelligently directed, beautifully cast, and handsomely, if rather darkly, designed. Colm Feore played a flashier one at Stratford in 1994; but this subtler, more thoughtful Cyrano is certainly romantic and filled with action and poetry.
For me, the looks of this production diminish its rhetorical and dramatic excellence. Director James MacDonald crafts a reasonably conventional and straightforward version of the popular history play, making gestures with modern-looking designs and props and suggestive video effects toward emphasizing contemporary political relevance. Nothing new there: my first recollection of Julius Caesar is a revival I saw of Margaret Webster's interpretation which incorporated World War II uniforms and Nazi symbols.
It's odd and pleasing to realize what a superb and influential composer Stephen Sondheim has become. When this musical debuted, most thought him a great lyricist (he had already written the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy) but not an impressive writer of music. In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, only "Comedy Tonight," the famed number that opens and closes the musical, has a memorable melody. But it demonstrates that inevitable wedding of words, music and unique style that has come to define Sondheim's leading stature in the genre.
In The Amish Project, written and performed by Jessica Dickey, this amazing actress shows extraordinary ability to capture, with total immersion, a display of characters of all ages and both sexes with a wide range of accents, attitudes and postures.
The laugh lines in The New Century pile up quickly, but playwright/screenwriter Paul Rudnick is dealing in quantity, not necessarily quality and not always for the broad audience at GableStage in South Florida. There may be something in the play for almost anyone, but there are stretches when there's almost nothing for everyone. Reaction can be spotty: a couple of guffaws from one part of the audience now, some chuckles from another pocket later.
Everyone loves a good thriller, and because we have had so few lately, the National Actors Theater revival of Emlyn Williams' 1935 chiller Night Must Fall proves a real treat. To hear an entire audience scream with the curtain up only a few minutes into the play should say something about its power. Actually, it says more about the cleverness of director John Tillinger, who has devised a stunning new opening sequence. We get a glimpse of a nude man burying a body.
Act One of the revival of the musical Nine, with book by Arthur Kopit and songs by Maury Yeston, is really two shows: one when Jane Krakowski takes the stage, and one when she is not. She enters and the stage lights up -- our eyes open wide, our anticipation tingles - something is happening! I want it to last. Jane is a Broadway show in herself, beautiful and sensual in her magical floaty costume by Vicki Mortimer. When she enters, drifting down from the flies, she's an angel; her ascending exit is a moment I'll never forget; she sings, and her lovely voice reaches deep inside us.
(see all listings under "Seven Hundred Sundays")
It was love at first sight when Giulia Alfani (Claudia Shear) saw David for the first time. It was at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence in 2004, 500 years after a 26-year-old Michelangelo finished the work in two years. The was statue started by Agostino de Duccio in 1464, who quit. He was followed by Antonio Rosselino, whose contract was soon terminated. Eventually, the completed statue was placed at the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio. In 1873 it was moved to the Accademia Gallery in Florence to protect it from further deterioration.
Wow!!! A cast of 11 in 27 roles singing and dancing happily through the music of Paul McKibbins and the lyrics by BT McNicholl in Michael Small and McNicholl's The IT Girl. director Thomas Fitzpatrick, musical director Rick Shafer and choreographer Alisa Williams, with their talented cast, have created a production with great audience appeal.
Philip King wrote See How They Run in 1942 and 1943; it opened in London as Christmas entertainment on December 21, 1944. Two weeks later, it moved to the Comedy Theatre in the West End to rave reviews. Opening night, three V-1 flying bombs exploded nearby.
Fortunately no explosions were heard at PowPAC last week when we viewed the current production. Raylene J. Wall directs an experienced cast in the farce, which, despite much dated language, still elicits laughs.
The humor is as broad as the Glaswegian accents in Cooking with Elvis, the revival of Lee (Billy Eliott) Hall's 1988 comedy at the Tron Theatre. Originally set in Newcastle Upon Tyne, Cooking has been transposed to Scotland by director Andy Arnold, who has also pumped up the action with outrageous and bawdy bits of comedy that might make even Benny Hill blush.
You Can't Take it with You garnered a Pulitzer in 1936. It was the longest-running work (837 performances) of playwrights George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart (their third collaboration). The '38 film version won an Oscar for best picture. It has had two (1965 and 1983) highly successful Broadway revivals, and it established a formula in which a loveable but chaotic family overcome obstacles, resolve all their problems, and everybody lives happily ever after. Now doesn't that sound like today's sitcoms on television? OnStage Playhouse went back 72 years for this classic.
Gideon (Miranda Porter), Giddy for short, is tired of the single life and ready to settle down with Mr. Right. Could it be a collapsed Boston Marathon runner, who has lost his memory? A cop, Jud (Steven A. Rich), has carried the runner up to her apartment. Since he couldn't remember the runner's name name, she calls him Antonio (Frank Guttiere) and claims he is a plumber and her husband. For her roommate Charlene (PJ Anbey) and Charlene's fiancée, Dex (Steve Stetak), she creates another set of lies.
Few musicals pack the dramatic punch of The Phantom of the Opera, one of the top-selling entertainments of the 20th Century. There's the spectacle, the huge cast, the costumes and the slightly scary (thought sometimes romantic) plot. So it's no wonder that Phantom returns to Milwaukee for its third run. Happily, this engagement welcomes the show's national tour. In every respect, this Phantom is the "A" team. There's the crashing chandelier and the blink-of-an-eye escapes and the boat rides through a candle-filled lake.
Opening the Shaw Festival's new, intimate Studio Theatre, this potently staged and skillfully acted revival of John Osborne's brilliant, biting drama is, I suppose, a triumph for this great theater company, except that it has always been too long and too unpleasant to feel like a triumph. I'm not sure what it means that this is the first production I've seen [of three, including the original with Laurence Olivier] during which no one noticeably walked out.
Two actresses stand erect on the stage, emitting occasional throaty sighs and grunts. Their right arms gesture. They're clad in gray from head-top turban to the toe-top ends of their wide-cut pants otherwise called, appropriately in this case, elephant-leg pants. Their characters are elephants, and soon enough they're talking in a new play of much heart and many laughs getting a sterling premier in Fort Lauderdale by The Women's Theater Project.
David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, a look at cutthroat decision-making in the movie business, gets an appropriately speedy production at GableStage: start to finish in under 90 minutes.
Outside of adjusting for inflation and for changing attitudes toward indoor smoking, there's no time warp two decades after its Broadway debut. But in what has become a 24/7 celebrity-driven information cycle, there may not be many surprises either. Still, the cast -- Paul Tei, Gregg Weiner and Amy Elane Anderson under director Joseph Adler-- keeps things steaming along.
The stage is one of the biggest in San Diego. The roof is stars. The theater is about 1,000 feet long and cluttered with aircraft. Yes, the USS Midway is Christian Community Theater's summer production venue. This year they bring us the world premiere of Eric Vest's musical, Let Freedom Ring, a patriotic score of music from WWI to the present under the direction of the composer and Paul Russell.
At least once in your lifetime, you should attend a Tupperware party. It is an anachronism from the '50s. Usually a group of women (although I've seen men at some parties) marvel at the latest in the, then, best plastic storage devices. It was a social gathering as well as an event to purchase whatever was the newest container.
Call it Greater Tuna for the upper crust. Sean Campion and Conleth Hill are undeniably marvelous as they play two dozen distinct, dimensional denizens of a small Irish town overrun by a Hollywood film crew. Longish and a bit predictable but also droll and good-hearted, with a second-act dance to rouse even the drowsiest.
The Taming of the Shrew gets a lively, commedia dell'arte-style staging in South Florida that delivers lots of laughs. It really isn't much of a stretch: The go-for-the-gags style was big in Italy, where the play takes place, at about the same time Shakespeare was working in England.
Shatteringly powerful is the best way I can describe The Dentist, the one-woman show now playing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Starring Razia Israely, the monologue proved to be one of the best things I've ever seen in the theater, drama of a rare and memorable quality.
Do you love an old-fashioned, high spirited, tap-dancing romantic musical with some really great performers and an airy, imaginative Deco set (by David Gallo)? Take a trip to New York in 1922 and to Thoroughly Modern Millie; you'll have a good time.
See review under "Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The"
See review(s) under "Jay Johnson: The Two and Only"
The thin red line between cop and crook is traced indelibly by playwright Tommy Carter in Hellz Kitchen Ablaze, a gutsy, blisteringly powerful drama about eight members of a gold-shield, NYPD narcotics squad trying to steal a huge pot of money from some Colombian drug dealers. The detectives, mostly Italian-Americans, consider themselves a family, having functioned as a unit for many years, doing the tough, dangerous kind of undercover work that leads to convictions and commendations.
In Neil LaBute's In a Dark Dark House, a disbarred lawyer doing time in a comfortable, substance-abuse rehab center has summoned his underemployed brother for a favor. A therapist suspects that Drew's adult troubles are rooted in events from childhood involving an ostensibly friendly handyman his older brother had cautioned him about. Drew, the ex-lawyer, wants the scuffling Terry to confirm the story to the shrink and hasten his release.
See review(s) under "Bill Maher: Victory Begins at Home"
Wicked, with songs by Stephen Schwartz and a book by Winnie Holzman, about the friendship between Glinda the Good and The Wicked Witch of the West in "The Wizard of Oz," is, as we say in New England, "wicked good." Kristin Chenoweth is the greatest comedienne Broadway has seen in a long time -- she isn't "Glinda the Good," she's "Glinda the Great." With superb comic timing that takes her lines far beyond the text, inventive character quirks that delight, and a singing voice that can chill you with its beauty, she is a star not to be missed.
There's nothing wrong with John Woods' revival of Macbeth; it just lives up to the reputation of Shakespeare's "Scottish Play" (theater folk superstitiously don't like to even say its title) as impossible to play successfully. I've seen at least a dozen Macbeths. Some were great productions, some had a great Macbeth, some had a great Lady Macbeth -- and none with even two of the above.
That Marston's no Shakespeare doesn't prevent Dominic Cooke treating the former's Jacobean melodrama as if political poetry. He transfers the tale of deposed Genoese Duke Altofronto to 1970s Latin America, where he seeks vengeance disguised as malcontent Malevole. Though rival Pietro (staid Colin McCormack) is the usurper, the ultimate Iago-like villain is the ultra-ambitious Mendoza (slick Joe Dixon). Throughout disguises and dissemblings, torments and sudden turnabouts, conflict settles on greasy malcontent vs. murderous greaser.
One of Lorca's earlier dramatic efforts from 1925, Mariana Pineda has lived in the shadows of his more popular late works. Late is only relative, since Lorca was assassinated by Franco's fascists at age thirty eight. This production turns out to be the Austrian premiere of Lorca's homage to an early nineteenth-century rebel from his hometown of Granada in Spain.
In Marry Me!, interactive bits allow us to ask questions and comment at various stages of the romance between dweeby English teacher Brian and stylish French secretary, soon to be his student, Marie Helene. However inauspicious their initial meetings, he's convinced "She likes my method; my method is me." So, unfortunately, is his poor French, leading him to mistake publicity for a movie (which he can't talk to her about) and get a sky-high flat, to which the elevator is always broken.
Ryan Cunningham (book and lyrics) and Joshua Salzman (music) were in their early twenties when they wrote I Love You Because. It is their take on what love is about in your late twenties. Yes, you've had a bit of experience in your teens, but now it gets even more serious. Romance becomes much more complex. These are the early stages of the quest for a life mate. Incidentally, it was their thesis project at NYU's graduate musical-theater writing program -- definitely cashing in on their formal education!
I'd like to preface these comments with memories. More than a half-century ago, we college students enjoyed laughing together at party records. Often we'd put them on among dance records until listeners caught on that something peculiar was going on. I remember three as funniest.
If you go to one play this season, it has to be Scripps Ranch Theater's, I'm Not Rappaport. This is the best play I've seen in several years, so dial 858 578-7728 right now and then read this review.
Despite its dour-sounding title, The Government Inspector opened the Milwaukee Repertory Theater's fall season with a dose of nonstop laughter. This adaptation by Minneapolis playwright Jeffrey Hatcher is anything but dour. Hatcher takes more than a few liberties with the original play, written by Russian playwright Nikolai Gogol and first performed in 1836. The play's setting, its basic plot points and characters remain the same; what's changed is the contemporary update. It entertains and then some, with enough physical humor to fill a Marx Brothers movie.
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