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The opening production of A Play, A Pie and a Pint's 13th season at Oran Mor, Fly Me to the Moon, is a small comic gem about the wages of venial sin. Francis (Katie Tumelty) and Loretta (Abigail McGibbon) are two dim-bulb Irish orderlies working at a hospice. Think Laurel & Hardy in medical drag.
Thanks to remarkable acting (especially by Judith Ivey as Amanda) and directing, Tennessee Williams' 1945 family drama, The Glass Menagerie, finds new, reverberating life in this production at the Mark Taper Forum. Gordon Edelstein, who recently mounted the play at his Long Wharf Theater in New Haven (and then at the Roundabout in New York), has not only brought out the play's poignancy and despair but its oft-overlooked humor.
Ruined, Lynn Nottage's 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about the atrocities endured by women in the embattled Democratic Republic of Congo left me feeling both moved and frustrated.
Set in a brothel in a small mining town, Ruined focuses on the madam (Portia) and three of her "girls," all of whom have been forced to turn to prostitution for survival in a war-torn, lawless and dehumanized society.
With blank pages awaiting sketches and a huge white canvas that will need painting in, Georges Seurat defines his challenge as, "to bring order to the whole." Manatee Players face a similar dare: to make a holistic production from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's semi-operatic version of a 19th century artist's and his fictional great grandson's need to create original art. No matter the difference it makes to their personal, even most intimate relationships. Yet how much it matters to others involved.
Even those who have never heard Oliver Hardy utter his famous expression, "Well, that's another fine mess you've gotten us into [sic]," will find a lot of humor and affection in Tom McGrath's biography. Laurel and Hardy pays tribute to one of the great comedy duos of all time. The show has an ideal setting: Milwaukee Repertory Theater's most intimate performance space, the Stackner Cabaret. This allows audience members to get a life-size glimpse of these great comedians. Two actors, plus an exceptionally versatile pianist, comprise the show's cast.
Next Act Theater opens its new season with a new play for Milwaukee audiences and also a new performing space. While its new, 150-seat theater is under construction this year, the Next Act season is happening at the nearby Tenth Avenue Theater. Next Act is doing a shorter season (i.e., fewer plays) during this interim year, but they've got a good start with Four Places.
Leap of Faith, the 1992 Paramount film starring Steve Martin, has now been turned into a full-out, gospel-tinged musical by the LA-based Center Theater Group. Original screenwriter Janus Cercone was brought back to write the book, along with Glenn Slater, who also wrote the lyrics (to Alan Menken's music). Both Slater and Menken have toiled long, hard and successfully for Disney -- especially on "The Little Mermaid."
"Oh, the Women!" is not only sung joyously about the gals at Maxim's of Paris but also those at the Moravia Paris Embassy ball honoring the musical's titled widow. Appropriate, since it's the actresses who give life to the shortened story and cast of a classic lavish operetta turned mini-musical.
The play begins and ends with the same simple words. A man, standing alone onstage, tells the audience that My Name Is Asher Lev. That may be the only simple thing about this highly complicated drama that pits identity against religious beliefs, father against son, and tradition against contemporary ideas.
Before the closed black curtain, at each end of the stage, a scantily clad gal gyrated, butt up. We walked through an aisle and up stairs strewn with colored packs of condoms. On the other side of that curtain, we sat as close together as metal folding chairs permitted. We viewed a cramped, messy hostel room in 2004 Amsterdam's red-light district, as if seeing the action through an opening in the (imaginary) wall. Much larger than afforded by a peep hole in a sex shop, the perspective given was yet similar.
The young African-American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins lights a theatrical firecracker with Neighbors, now in its explosive West Coast premiere at the Matrix. Rude, funny, ballsy and pugnacious, the play dissects race and color in America in a highly original, un-politically correct way, slicing and dicing every taboo it encounters.
America's obsession with physical beauty is brutally examined in Neil LaBute's reasons to be pretty. (sic) With the same colorful language and scalpel-like precision one finds in the works of playwright David Mamet, LaBute tears into our preconceived notions of the price we pay in the name of beauty. In a powerfully acted production by Renaissance Theaterworks, four actors take the audience on a breathtaking ride through the triumphs and pitfalls of beauty, commitment and friendship.
Milwaukee Chamber Theatre opens its fall season with the Milwaukee premiere of Main-Travelled Roads, a musical based on the stories of a notable Wisconsin author. Hamlin Garland was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author known mainly for his short stories. His book, "Main-Travelled Roads," was published in 1891. That might have been a good book title, but it seems rather ho-hum for a musical. Especially this musical, which bursts with energy, ambition and the satisfaction that comes from hard work.
From the moment The Wanderers insist "Let's Go to the Hop," in the doo-wop tradition that sounds newly minted, it's an invitation hard to refuse. Like their black (jackets and pants) and blue (shirts and pocket handkerchiefs) outfits, they're a harmonious combo. Great, because representing 1950s and 1960s guy groups, harmony is what they're all about. Bop, bop, ding, dong, with lots of energy and clear enunciation, they easily shift from solo turns to backup and in-between progressions to quartet.
South-African playwright Athol Fugard continues his ongoing relationship with LA's Fountain Theater with the U.S. premiere of his latest drama, The Train Driver,. The 99-seat Fountain has mounted four previous works by Fugard, beginning with The Road to Mecca in 2000. All the works have been treated to excellent productions and won numerous prizes, which is undoubtedly why Fugard, who now lives in southern California, considers the Fountain his artistic home.
Combine the same ingredients that worked so brilliantly in The Producers, and you'll get similar results, right? Well, not exactly. Young Frankenstein, the musical based on the hit 1974 Mel Brooks film, doesn't pack the same emotional wallop as its predecessor, The Producers.
An American flag that's the curtain spanning VT's wide MainStage promises an epic quality to Ragtime -- the musical it opens on. And this production of the musical makes good on the promise.
It starts basically yet spectacularly: Groups central to the action introduce themselves in turn, then cross to their places on sides and up from down center. Visually, they're also depicting what they do in life at the start of the 20th Century.
Credit Two Gentlemen of Verona as being Shakespeare's earliest comedy, and its debits (e.g., silliness, excessive punning, one unsympathetic hero) aren't dire. With so many literary sources and reliance on Elizabethan manners, morals, motifs, it's a wonder it's so neatly structured. The leads are the two young men of the title and the two women with whom they'll make two couples. There are two observant servants, two fathers who dictate to their sons, and two clowns.
Thirty years after its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum, Tales from Hollywood returns to L.A. in a stylish production at the Odyssey Ensemble Theater. Christopher Hampton, who wrote the play on commission from the Taper, took the WW II German refugee community in L.A. as his subject -- such famed writers as Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger and Bertolt Brecht.
It wasn't so long ago that Leonard Bernstein was almost as popular as a rock star. The composer/pianist/conductor was not only successful in those three creative fields, he was also a famous and dashing figure on television, lecturing on classical music to a mass audience. That was in the days when the networks felt they had a responsibility to provide the public with not just low but high art. The notion seems quaint, even faintly ridiculous, today.
Milwaukee Chamber Theatre continues its series of producing Pulitzer Prize-winning plays with The Subject Was Roses. In 1964-65, the show won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for Best Play. The original cast starred Jack Albertson as the father, Irene Dailey as his wife and Martin Sheen as their son. Both Albertson and Sheen also starred in the 1968 film, with Patricia Neal as the mother.
In Lulu's Last Stand, an elderly matriarch, Abby (Irene Roseen), brings her three adult daughters (Christine Joelle, Julie Lancaster, Elizabeth J. Carlisle) together at the family house in Georgia (fabulous set by Meghan Rogers) and drops a news bombshell on them. "Your father," she tells them, "was secretly married to three other women." How Abby, Bailey, Charlene and Lena cope with this shocking revelation forms the basis of Lulu's Last Stand, a play now in its world premiere at Theater Forty.
The sins of the fathers are visited on the children" is the theme of The Little Flower of East Orange, Stephen Adly Guirgis' powerful family drama now in its West Coast premiere at the Lillian Theatre.
Therese Marie (the remarkable Melanie Jones), was brutally abused by her father yet insisted that he had good qualities. Her love-hate feelings were absorbed by her children, Danny (Michael Friedman) and Justina (Marisa O'Brien), who remain forever in the grip of those clashing emotions.
With all the holiday shows floating around Milwaukee this season, the funniest has got to be Scrooge in Rouge, a send-up of the Dickens tale set in a Victorian music hall. Scrooge is the creation of a couple of guys from Atlanta, who started performing it a few years ago in a small Atlanta theater. Luckily, the plucky In Tandem theater company caught wind of this show and the rest is history. This is the show's second annual appearance and, judging from early reports, is probably going to be another sell-out.
Without scenery, costumes, props (not a lit sabre or steering apparatus), Charles Ross summons audience imaginations. If they have seen any or all of the "Star Wars Trilogy," he evokes their memories of those films as well. In fact, without knowledge of these movies, Ross' performance must seem an exercise in sound and fury. But for
"SW" aficionados, his musical intro to the film -- whose title is projected upstage in backward tilting white letters on black -- is an overture to a classical symphony.
John Lithgow's star power and impressive acting chops turn what might have been a boring evening -- the reciting of two short stories -- into a surprisingly engaging experience. Lithgow, who also conceived and wrote Stories by Heart, first performed this solo show at Lincoln Center Theater three years ago, with Jack O'Brien directing. O'Brien's name is no longer attached, but things still move smoothly thanks to Lithgow's winning ways with an audience.
The closest thing to enjoying Dame Edna Everage's outrageous comedy on Broadway is to laugh 'til you cry over Michael L. Walters' Dame Edna. You may even find yourself (like my husband) enjoying his royal romp more. Not only is it every bit as funny, but at the Golden Apple, it's more intimate. While kinder to audience participants, the show still plenty edgy. In the second half, Dame Edna uses actual questions from you -- no canned come-ons or predictable answers. But clever ones. Walters makes you confident s/he has heard it all. Yet, being in a new context, everything's fresh.
Hard rock and provocative lyrics introduce scenes of cacophonous relationships among four "friends" who make up couples. No less piercingly for the opening emotional blast, Steph assaults Greg with a barrage of invective. At a party, he'd agreed with Kent, his supposed pal since high school and in recent years co-worker at a factory storage facility, about the "hot" looks of a new gal there. By comparison, Steph's face is, Greg admitted, "ordinary" -- though Greg loves her and her looks.
Supposedly a contemporary play, La Bete is written in rhymed couplets and with many references to Moliere, his company, and his times. In Asolo Rep's production, it takes place in a Dorothy Draper-baroque style grand hallway of the home of Prince Conti
(earnest Jud Williford). Cartoon-inspired paintings of Shakespeare and Moliere look down from side walls.
As behooves the "Valentine treat" the Golden Apple offers, I Do! I Do! is tasty as chocolates and tasteful as well. It chronicles the life of a couple from moments before their marriage in 1895 to their retirement and leaving the family home in 1945. A nostalgic piece when in opened on Broadway in 1966, it's now an even
further "look back" but no less heartwarming.
For a number of reasons, Milwaukee theatergoers rarely get to see locally produced plays that are still running on Broadway. But in the case of The 39 Steps, only a week or so passed between the hit show closing on Broadway (and re-opening off Broadway) and its Milwaukee premiere. The timing couldn't have been better.
"A Round-Heeled Woman" is based on the story of Jane Juska, a retired teacher of high school English in Berkeley, California, who placed an ad in the New York Review of Books: "Before I turn 67-- next March I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me." She received more than 60 responses (by mail -- this was 1999).
Nicholas Kazan, inspired by Kenneth Tynan's profile of actress Louise Brooks, sought out the silent film for which she was famous -- G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box. That in turn led him to Pabst's original source: two controversial plays by German playwright
Franz Wedekind. Known as the "Lulu plays," 1895's Der Erdgeist (literally,
earth-spirit) and 1904's Die Buchse der Pandora were banned in Europe for many years, thanks to the frank, daring way they treated sex and eroticism. Later, Alban Berg turned the plays into an opera, Lulu.
The themes of trust and forgiveness come into sharp focus in Speaking in Tongues, produced by the Milwaukee Repertory Theater in its intimate Stiemke Studio.
With Race, David Mamet is at the top of his game as a provocateur on the titled subject.
A rich and famous, married white businessman, Charles Strickland, accused of raping a black woman, wants a firm of one white (Jack Lawson), one black attorney (Henry Brown) with a newly hired black female lawyer (Susan), to defend him. First this leads to a debate over whether to take the case, then to if and how the firm can win.
New Theater in South Florida opens its 25th season with The Tempest, its 15th entry as it works through the Shakespeare canon. Adapted by director John Manzelli for the Coral Gables theater, this version of the late-Shakespeare play is set in the early 1900s, allowing the assorted nobles who have washed up on Prospero's island to wear derby hats and Edwardian-cut jackets. A nice touch is that the jacket backs bear the crests of the appropriate nobles, Milan or Naples, but the embellishments are so poorly executed, they distract more than they enhance.
Powered by Jane Fonda's star turn and by magical production values, Moises Kaufman's 33 Variations manages to overcome script deficiencies in its L.A. premiere at the Ahmanson Theater.
Actress Barbara Sloan is literally engaging even before she takes the stage in South Florida as the funny, good-humored, terrified-of-heights Narrator in High Dive. She's in New Theater's tiny lobby or outside on the Coral Gables sidewalk a half-hour before curtain, affably and enthusiastically recruiting audience members to play onlookers or family members more than 30 mostly one-line roles.
Duffy lifts the lid on communist East Germany in Puzzler, his world-premiere play at Sacred Fools. The intrigue, duplicity and betrayal that kept that criminal enterprise going for nearly 50 years are well-dramatized in Puzzler, which is set in Berlin in the early 1990s.
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