Hamlet
Coronado Playhouse

 This is Hamlet for those who've feared the complexity and intensity of the Bard's dramas. Since it's been over 400 years since the original manuscript, director Keith A. Anderson changed some of the archaic words. As an example, the original, incomprehensible "fardel," a bundle of sticks, has been changed to "burdens." Also the director did a bit of script surgery. Hamlet has a normal performance time of three hours, while the version at Coronado Playhouse is just a tad over two hours.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
September 2009
Fiancee
Dive In Theater

 My first question: What did I just see? Was it a play? A Musical? An entertainment? I am not quite sure.

The venue was in the huge L'Auberge Del Mar complex. One parks in the underground garage, takes the elevator to the main floor, goes past the front desk and several of the hotel's venues, through the tennis courts, finally coming upon the venue for San Diego Actors Theater's Fiancée.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
September 2009
Speed-the-Plow
Sushi Space

 David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, Ion Theater's current offering, is the first of three similarly themed works. He satirically revisited Hollywood in the 1997 film, "Wag the Dog" and again in 2000 with "State and Main." This view of filmdom is way over the top, presented for its comedic effect.

Circa 1980s, Bobby and Charlie (Claudio Raygoza and Matt Scott) are mid-level Hollywood producers about to promote a mediocre script to their boss...a script that is meritless but should return a hefty profit. They are hyping each other prior to a script conference.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
September 2009
Master Builder, The
Albery Theatre

 Coming late in Ibsen's career, The Master Builder is his most autobiographical work, inspired by his infatuation at 61 with the 18-year-old Emilie Bardach. The titular character, Halvard Solness, ruthlessly treats his office staff: old Knut Brovik, architect, and the latter's draughtsman son, Ragnar, and bookkeeper niece, Kaia. Conscious of waning powers, he fears being supplanted by the younger generation and is caught in a loveless marriage with the gloomy Aline, who has never gotten over the death of their two-week-old twin sons.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
July 2003
Measure for Measure
National Theatre - Lyttelton Theatre

 Words seem inadequate to describe a Measure for Measure production that uses every possible technical means (lasers, neon, TV, computerization) in performance to match Shakespeare's scathing prose and deep poetric expression. Modern dress emphasizes the applicability to today of the unsettling state of Vienna in the play. Beginning on a bare stage with a steep rake, there unfolds Duke Vincentio's divided responsibility: city and suburbs; civil, moral, religious law.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2006
Meeting, The
Royal Lyceum Theatre

 To mark the opening of Scotland's new parliament, the Edinburgh Festival, founded in 1947 and Grec Festival, Barcelona, which was formed in 1976 against the background of the transition to democracy and in reaction to the restrictions of the Franco regime, and which runs every year from June 21 to the end of July, have each commissioned a play from a leading playwright of the other's nation. This project is in partnership with Scotland's home of new writing, the Traverse Theatre.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Merchant of Venice, The
Royal National Theatre

 Using a score of players from the National Theatre's permanent (for one year) company, director Trevor Nunn (who now heads the institution) has performed something of a miracle in his production of the ever-problematic Merchant of Venice, staged in the National's intimate Cottesloe venue. With imaginative vision Nunn has imprinted a unified context in which everything makes sense, if at times in a brand new way.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Midnight's Children
Royal Shakespeare Company - Barbican Theater

 The title "Midnight's Children" refers to those Indians born within the first hour of Independence, August 15, 1947. Of them, Saleem Sinae, who arrived on the stroke of midnight, tells us time is running out if he's to do something meaningful before he dies. For he is "literally disintegrating." He then takes us between the present (where we meet mother and, eventually, a witch) and the past, starting with his physician-grandfather's courtship of his grandmother through a hole in a sheet! From that moment, the fate of the family and their country intertwine.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2003
Midsummer Night's Dream, A
Festival Theatre Stage

 Many theater lovers do not realize the many themes the William Shakespeare combined to create one of the most performed plays in western drama. The Elizabethans' profound belief in the fairy world, the parodies of the foolish lengths mortals and immortals go through in their obsessive pursuit of love, along with the challenges of parents trying to guide their teenage offspring are universal themes, written with wit and wisdom.

Alan Raeburn
Date Reviewed:
November 1999
Midsummer Night's Dream, A
Stratford Festival - Festival Theater

 Several hundred amazingly respectful school kids attended the matinee I saw of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and seemed to really enjoy it, despite the wrongheaded production. Stratford's eye-popping, elaborate stagings, performed by some of the world's best-trained, most gifted classical actors in these state-of-the-art theaters are likely to be the best you will see, even when they're ill-conceived. So the kids were right to feel well entertained.

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
September 2004
Miser, The

 (For Comedie-Francaise production in Paris, France, See review(s) under "L'Avare")

Date Reviewed:
2000
Misfits, The

 (see Criticopia International review(s) under "Mal-assortis, Les")

Date Reviewed:
1999
Miss Saigon
Drury Lane

 Tawdry sentimentality is alive and well at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London as Miss Saigon continues to play to packed houses. A hybrid of Romeo & Juliet, Liat and Lt. Cable in South Pacific, and Les Miserables, Miss Saigon pales when compared to any of the above.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
September 1995
Mistinguett
Salle Favart at Opera Comique

 As in a boit de nuit, tables are set in the pit with candles, glasses, and wine buckets that waiters run in to fill with champagne for "front row" theater-goers. An actor-producer appears and gets the audience to go along with chorus-dancers in singing "C'est Vrai," and the red velvet curtain parts to reveal arches and stairway. Chorus girls are rehearsing when joined by an attractive girl carrying (to sell?) flowers, who's chosen on the spot to join them. (She'll eventually be second lead singer and, at very end, more important still.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Moment Before Dawn, A

 (see Criticopia International review(s) under "A un passo dall'alba")

Date Reviewed:
1999
Money
Royal National Theatre - Olivier Theater

 This is a wondrously rich, full, and instructive comedy, worthy of being praised in the same breath as the masterpieces of Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope. Alfred Evelyn, the central character, is a poor cousin who has underestimated the love, virtue, and wisdom of the woman he hopes to marry, Clara Douglas. She rejects his suit because she believes that Charles must marry money to fulfill his potential. From the bitter example of her own father, Clara sees that her lack of money will hold her beloved back.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
June 1999
Mortal Desires
Teatro Mercadante

 (see Criticopia International review(s) under "Desideri mortali")

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
January 1997
Mother Clap's Molly House
Aldwych Theatre

 Warnings come up front: "contains language and scenes some people may find offensive." Well, what's a writer to do, after he's trotted out something called "Shopping and Fucking," to maintain momentum? How's a production going to live up to its poster picture? (A woman in 18th-century dress tightens a corset with strings brushing the rectum of a nude young man -- something that doesn't even happen in Mother Clap's Molly House.)

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2002
Much Ado About Nothing
Stratford Festival - Festival Theatre

 We don't know just what directors Stephen Ouimette and Marti Maraden did for this production of Much Ado About Nothing because it was announced that Ouimette was bowing out of his Stratford directing assignments for this season due to exhaustion and would be replaced by several directors -- in this production by Marti Maraden. At any rate, this is a coherent and reasonably effective Much Ado, but it hasn't a distinctive, memorable quality such as I would expect from either of those directors.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2006
My Friend Hitler

 (see Criticopia International review(s) under "Il mio amico Hitler")

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
May 1997
Night of the Iguana
Lyric Theater

 If anything makes more strange bedfellows than politics, it's Tennessee Williams. And the strangest of all, for having had and still succumbing to so many, is his alcoholic hero, Shannon. In1940, in Mexico, where he's working for a cheap tour company guiding a Baptist ladies' group on holiday, Shannon (so world weary in Woody Harrelson's interpretation) strands them at the cheap motel of old friend Maxine Faulk.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2006
Nineteen Fifty Three
Bouffon Theatre

 Adapting Racine's classic, Andromaque, based on the Greek myth, Craig Raine imagined that in place of Greeks and Trojans, the Axis powers and the Allies were battling, with losers and victors reversed. In the year of the play's title, a radio blasts "The British Empire is dead!" General Von Orestes acts as Hitler's secret envoy to Rome to return to Berlin - and certain death - the imprisoned son of Lady Annette LeSkye and the late English king, and to persuade Vittorio Mussolini to marry German Princess Ira.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2000
No Man's Land
Sudden Theater

 Everything is symmetrical (chairs on each side of an oriental rug on the floor and elegant tapestry hanging in back, slick lamps -- 2 tall, 2 squat with white shades) in the drawing room in Hirst's North London home. All is centered by a cabinet holding liquor. Everything that is said or happens is affected by drinking, which Hirst and Spooner keep up as they have since meeting at Jack Straw's Castle pub. Hirst, a wealthy popular writer, serves downtrodden poet Spooner, but the host's cordiality comes "by the book." What's under the surface?

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2002
Noble and Middle Classes
La Comedie Italienne

 (see Criticopia International review(s) under "Noblesse et Bourgeoisie")

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2001
Noblesse et Bourgeoisie
La Comedie Italienne

 Another triumph for the sole traditional Italian theater in France, and, because roles are so evenly distributed, a triumph for each actor of the spunky troupe! If anything should act as a cure for the post-September 11 gloom that enveloped Paris theater, let it be Carlo Goldoni's satire ridiculing the corrupting rich, greedy middle class and corrupted servants in mercantile Venice. So period funny, yet so timeless.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2001
Noises Off
Stratford Festival - Avon Theatre

 In Michael Frayn's broad comedy Noises Off,Brian Bedford's "let-it-all-hang-out" direction turns one of the most successful laugh-getting plays about the theater into the funniest play on the topic ever. I was lucky to sit next to a sophisticated couple who told me that they have been attending Stratford theater since 1961: Neither knew this play, and they shook with laughter all through it.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
August 2004
Nora
Vigszinhaz

 Nora's trajectory toward self-realization, simultaneously cathartic and tragic, is familiar to most theatergoers. By accepting responsibility for her actions (including forging her father's signature on a contract), she unravels a tightly-woven cocoon that has insulated her from adult responses -- principally toward her domineering and patronizing husband. To help understand the choices available to Nora in A Doll's House, Ibsen plants numerous signposts along the way. Her maid left a bad marriage but managed to raise her children, and friend Mrs.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
November 2001
Old Masters, The
Comedy Theater

 As opposed to his sunny Villa I Tatti and its verdant surroundings outside Florence, the finances of Bernard Berenson and wife in 1937 are as dismal as their political situation under "the duck," as he calls Mussolini. In constant pain, Mary wants to ensure an inheritance for her children by a previous marriage. Despite having to share BB (charming Edward Fox) with his secretary Nicky and a masseuse, Mary loves him nonetheless. (Barbara Jefford applies her impressive Shakespearian experience to suggest a certain grandeur in Mary along with intelligence.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2004
Ruby, Tragically Rotund
Los Angeles Theater Center

 Fat people are funny goes the cliche. In Boni D. Alvarez's Ruby, Tragically Rotund, they are that and a lot more -- including angry, defiant, bawdy, proud and, ultimately, victims.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2009
Mary's Wedding
Off-Broadway Theater

 Next Act Theatre opens its 20th season with an irresistible love story, Mary's Wedding. As the title suggests, the play is set (briefly) on the eve of a wedding. Mary, the glowing, bride-to-be, is looking over some old letters she hid under a plank in an old barn. On the eve of her new life as a married woman, she has come to say goodbye to her past. This fact doesn't become apparent until well into the play, as we come to know and love the two characters, Mary and Charlie.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2009
Rock `n' Roll
American Heritage Center for the Arts

Tom Stoppard's 2006 play, Rock 'n' Roll -- about music and a whole lot more -- gets a splendid southeastern debut in South Florida at Mosaic Theater. Hop-scotching between Cambridge, England, and Prague, and between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the openness of 1990, the play is rich with riffs on politics and friendship, ancient Greek poetry and cancer, and matters of mentorship and of mind vs. brain and of spy vs. spy. There's love and marriage to deal with.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
September 2009
Oliver!
Princess Of Wales Theater

 This new production of Oliver! must wait for a large enough venue before opening on Broadway to accommodate the huge sets designed for this revival. Visiting Toronto following its record breaking, three-year run at The London Palladium, Cameron Mackintosh, (Les Miserables, Cats, Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon) whose career, ironically, began as an assistant stage manager for the 1960 original, assembled some of London's most creative music theater talents to "re- imagine" Lionel Bart's brilliant, tune-filled work for a new generation.

Alan Raeburn
Date Reviewed:
November 1999
Oliver!
Stratford Festival - Festival Theatre

 After leaving Stratford and achieving a higher profile in films and on television, Colm Feore returns this season in star-actor form, displaying his versatility by playing Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Moliere's Don Juan (in English and in French) and Dickens' Fagin [acted, sung and danced in Lionel Bart's Oliver!]. If he was put off by losing the limelight to a tiny, baby-faced tot in this production, he didn't show it.

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2006
On the Road to Madison!
Marigny-Robert Hossein

 see review(s) in Criticopia - International listed under: Sur la Route de Madison

Once in a Lifetime
National Theatre - Olivier

 In 1927, with Al Jolson making a hit singing in the first musical film, what's in store for Jerry and May, a New York vaudeville team? Why, they'll sell their act and go to Hollywood to, as George says, "do something in movies." May hits on opening an elocution school for actors. On the Pullman to L.A. they (George, with Jerry and May, a perpetual unwed couple) meet Helen Hobart, the syndicated critic/columnist, who decides to go into business with them. Susan Walker, a movie-star wannabe, is on the train, captivating George.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2006
Only Macbeth - Last Act
Teatro Verdi

 (see Criticopia International review(s) under "Solo Macbeth - Ultimo Atto")

Date Reviewed:
December 1998
Orlando Furioso
Teatro Goldoni

 Nearly the last in a sixteen-part homage to Ludovico Ariosto over four months, this was a semi-staged dramatic recitation of the very last section of his classic epic, Orlando Furioso. Most of the sessions were at Castel Sant'Angelo or, like this performance, in the Teatro Goldoni within Palazzo Altemps. (A similar series concentrating on Agostino Tassso's epic Gerusalemme liberata took place in Florence.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
May 2001
Our Late Night
Duke of York's Theatre

 The Royal Court Theatre sponsors a series called "Playwrights' Playwrights," in which dramatists are asked to choose a play to direct in a one-shot afternoon staged reading. The distinguished playwright Caryl Churchill selected Wallace Shawn's Our Late Night, never done in Britain although its premiere at the New York Shakespeare Festival earned it an Obie in 1975. Churchill said she likes "the unexpectedness of the detail and his use of words, just the way his writing sounds....It's upsetting and it makes me laugh."

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Outrageous
Berkeley Street Theater

 Liza, a teenage schizophrenic who has escaped from a Toronto mental hospital, and hairdresser Robin Turner, an aspiring female impersonator who adamantly eschews being called a drag queen, become devoted friends after circumstances throw them together as roommates. The result is an occasionally raunchy, sometimes funny tale which, onstage, has become disjointed in its telling, unsure of its focus.

Alan Raeburn
Date Reviewed:
October 2000
Overcoat, The
The Vancouver Playhouse (1/24-2/5/2000); Toronto's Canadian Stage, 2/14-3/18/2000; Ottawa's National Arts Centre, 3/22-4/8/2000; Winnipeg's Manitoba Theatre Centre, 4/12-5/6/2000.

 A piece of theater so rich, so fresh, so brilliant as The Overcoat has rarely been staged. This wild experimental show with no words clearly projects its mimed message over the footlights to the powerful music of Dmitri Shostakovich. There is not an ambiguous nor unnecessary movement in the entire execution; the actors move in precise synchronization as they jostle along to work on the crowded subway, slog through their drudgery at the office and energetically operate machinery at the sweat shop. This is not to say they are like a chorus line of indistinguishable moving parts.

Lynn Rosen
Date Reviewed:
February 2000

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