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The eponymous "Irish curse" of the title of this funny and fast-moving play on stage in South Florida isn't politics or potatoes but the size of a penis. Well, of several penises.
Family legends and urban myths say Irish men are prone to a shortcoming in that area, according to Martin Casella's play, which manages to deal seriously with the social anguish and physical difficulties that can attend being smaller than average where it's assumed size matters.
An exceptional cast and a gorgeous set are the highlights of the Milwaukee Chamber Theater's production of Mauritius, Theresa Rebeck's contemporary drama. The plot revolves around a deceased relative's stamp collection, which may or may not be extremely valuable. Although the topic of stamp collecting sounds dull, Rebek artfully uses it as a device to make her points about human relationships and the things people truly value.
Mauritius had a brief Broadway run in 2007, starring F. Murray Abraham (who won an Oscar for his role as Antonio Salideri in "Amadeus").
We contemporary critics are not exempt from the myriad musical-theater complexities that may have troubled audiences in 1984 when the groundbreaking Sunday in the Park with George opened on Broadway to mixed reviews. With its book by James Lapine and haunting music by Stephen Sondheim, ten Tony Award nominations followed, but only two awards for design were granted.
It was a pleasant mild Sunday afternoon outside, but inside, at the Nancy Bock Performing Arts Center, it would soon be raining in the most delightful way. Only the producer, Keith Brumfield, and his daring Class Act Productions would attempt such a thing, and along with the skillful direction of Larry Smiglewsky they pulled it all off splendidly in several Thanksgiving weekend performances.
Recently, following what he called a "shellacking" for the Democratic Party in the 2010 election, President Obama remarked that " sometimes you hit homeruns, and sometimes you have to settle for base hits " Baseball fans know it is also possible to strike out. They may be flirting with that possibility over at the Texas Repertory Theater where the current offering of Plaid Tidings is a considerable disappointment. I say this only because that wonderful theater has hit home runs with so many enjoyable past productions.
It was Saturday night on September 11th, a somber date in American history to say the least. So it was most appropriate that before the Crighton Theater curtain rose on Ira Levin's hilarious comedy, No Time for Sergeants, director, Carolyn Corsano Wong, came onstage to welcome the audience, and asked that everyone first rise for a moment of silence in memory of the lives lost on that unforgettably tragic day.
A rarely seen Ibsen play, The Lady from the Sea blends a great deal of poetic symbolism and language with his dramatized psychological realism and social (especially feminist) and scientific concerns. Some consider the work to be atypical because it has a happy ending. No doubt, there's a larger than usual cast for a domestic as well as late Ibsen drama.
More than 40 years have passed since the first strains of the anthem-like "(Age of) Aquarius" rippled across the American stage, and Hair was born. Now the much-acclaimed 2009 revival comes to Milwaukee for a one-week stay. And what a lovely sight it is .
Theater can't be all things to all people, and it shouldn't try to be. Audiences who attend a play called, Murder at the Howard Johnson's shouldn't expect to see Hamlet or Death of a Salesman.
Still, the production launched by In Tandem Theater is a far cry from the level of, say, Neil Simon. Billed as an "uproarious comedy," Murder at the Howard Johnson's never rises above "mildly amusing" or "silly." There are laughs, to be sure. But most of them are one-liners, and they don't come frequently enough for this production to take off.
Upstairs of the Shear Madness beauty shop, someone with a scissors has cut off landlady Isabel Czerny's life. Because the once-famous pianist had notified police she thought she'd be blackmailed, they're on the scene.
Everyone in the shop had a motive and chance, however short, to kill. What will Officer Nick O'Brien (hard-working Timothy C. Goodwin) find out about their pre-homicide goings-on? He will question not only the suspects but us, the audience, including during intermission.
Tennessee Williams' final play, A House is Not Meant to Stand, premiered in 1980 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. Written as a short, it was later expanded by Williams into full-length form which he then tinkered with until his death in 1982, giving the work various titles, all of them cumbersome, especially the one that stuck.
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom transports audiences to 1920s Chicago specifically, to a shabby recording studio where renowned blues singer Ma Rainey is supposed to cut a record. August Wilson's play is based on the real-life Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, a Bessie-Smith style singer with a large black following.
Good People by David Lindsay-Abaire, now on Broadway, gives smart people great room for conjecture as it demonstrates the beauty of ambiguity. People stood around in front of the theater after the show debating, "He did!", She did!","Why wouldn't she?" "Why wouldn't he?"
Congratulations to Geva Theatre in Rochester, New York! With this production of August Wilson's final play, Radio Golf, Geva Theatre Center becomes the first theater to present all ten plays of Wilson's cycle of African-American life in the sequence of their decades.
According to an old Chinese proverb, "only when one cannot sleep does one know how long the night is." That rings true for some of the characters in A Sleeping Country by Melanie Marnich. Next Act Theater's production of this quirky play is under the direction of artistic director David Cecsarini.
In Las Meninas ("Ladies in Waiting"), Lynn Nottage makes a case for there having been a love affair that produced a child of Queen Marie Marie-Therese and her African dwarf-fool, Nabo, 1664 in the French court of her husband Louis XIV. Nottage explores the truth of this through Louise Marie-Therese, a novice on the eve of permanent vow-taking in 1695 in the Moret convent where she grew up. She also wants to substantiate herself as the royal black child, yearning for freedom just as the parents did.
Tracy Letts' comedy, Superior Donuts, has a distractingly large hole in it, but at
GablesStage in South Florida the performances are enough to make for a pleasant couple of hours at the theater. Funny and sweetly touching, it goes down at easily.
The play debuted in 2008 (GableStage sets it in 2009 and 2010), the year Letts won the Pulitzer for August: Osage County, and it is sort of a two-act mini opus to that magnum opus.
It's also a paean to multiethnic Chicago.
It takes guts and maybe a touch of madness for an actor to take on the part of the genius known as Pablo Picasso. Herbert Siguenza (one of the Culture Clash comedy team) is a case in point. Not only does he dare impersonate the famed artist in his solo show, A Weekend with Pablo Picasso, he risks ridicule by trying, right before our eyes, to paint like him.
Woody Guthrie Dreams, written by and starring Michael Patrick Flanagan Smith, is a hodge-podge of style, emphasis and capability of the performers. As Smith and others narrate Guthrie's life, the show begins with a surreal, expressionistic representation of capitalism with people in black, wearing derbies, smoking cigars. It soon veers away from this style.
The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O'Neill is a brilliant conception by its director Christopher Loar, beautifully carried out by a great ensemble cast, all members of the long-running New York Neo-Futurists. O'Neill did not trust actors and was notorious for his detailed stage directions (e.g., He throws himself into a chair; She covers her face with her hands.) Here, a narrator reads the directions, and the agile, super cast of three men and three women literally carry them out.
Cirque de Legume ("Circus of Vegetable") is a great clown show performed hilariously by Jamie Carswell and Nancy Trotter Landry as part of the annual Imagine Ireland Festival. They are classic red-nosed clowns, with a novel idea (vegetables), creatively directed by Pablo Ibarluzea. A head of lettuce is an animal who follows orders, does tricks and barks. Carswell becomes a horse: expressions, trots, movements that are real and satirical at the same time. Landry beats the horse with a leek stalk and feeds it carrots, which it eats and spits -- vegetables fly.
Florida Studio Theater strives to be all kinds of things in theater to all kinds of people. In the case of FST Improv, it succeeds in bringing the fun form to every kind at once. Now, in the off-season for mainstage and cabaret shows (though not for children and teens), comes "Just Desserts," FST's newest venture. It is a contest among directors of improvisational skits, using each other as actors and with audience input on types of characters, situations, emotions and the like to be portrayed.
It takes courage to mount a Holocaust play at this point in time, if only because so many people are convinced the subject and their sensibilities have been put to the test once too often. The Odyssey Theater has bravely bucked the tide with Way to Heaven by Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga (translated by David Johnston).
Date of a Lifetime, book and lyrics by Carl Kissin, music by Robert Baumgartner, Jr., is a witty musical on dating, courtship and marriage performed by two terrific singer/actors with strong lyrical voices: Farah Alvin and Jamie LaVerdiere. It is his, then her vision of what a life together might be, cleanly directed by Jeremy Dobrish, with lively choreography by Wendy Seyb. The lyrics are clever; the catchy tunes bounce.
Sean McLoughlin's Noah and the Tower Flower gives us two top-level actors in a touching drama about bottom-level solo people, Darren Healy and Mary Murray, whose bleak lives have a crying need to connect with a possible romantic liaison. These actors are both extraordinary in their conviction and total immersion into their roles, and Healy's performance is enhanced by his physicality and impressions as they play a fragile former junkie and a man just released from prison.
Jonathan Bank and his Mint Theater Company now give us another superior production in Temporal Powers, the 1932 play by Teresa Deevy about working-class Irish in 1927. This complex tale of money/poverty, right/wrong, working the land/working at a job and, basically, surviving in a broken-down economy, has a flawless cast topped by the radiant Rosie Benton who taps the deep wells of emotion and into her stoic husband played by Aidan Redmond.
A Night with George by Brenda Murphy and Donna O'Connor is now being performed by O'Connor at the Times Square Arts Center. She brings home a cardboard cutout of George Clooney and talks to it about her life, her dreams, her angers and frustrations.
O'Connor is an exciting, powerful, totally convincing actress in a play filled with humor. If you are familiar with the West Belfast accent, you'll understand all of what she's saying; if not, it's tough. It's very frustrating to not understand more than half of what this dynamic actress says.
Here's my view of the new edition of Follies: I'll start with the strengths- great, beautifully performed solo numbers sung with depth and passion by some of the very best musical-theater performers in the world: Jan Maxwell, who blows the roof off the theater, the lovely, lyrical Bernadette Peters, Danny Burstein whose comic turn surprises and delights (in the leading roles as part of the two older show-business couples, each of whom may have married the wrong person), and another three women who each do a show-stopping number and then disappear from the show: Terr
Victor L. Cahn's Dally with the Devil deals with politics, machinations and to smear or not to smear. The drama examines the power of a blogger who is approached by the aid and advocates of two opposing Senate candidates.
From My Hometown, a buoyant musical filled with almost 40 R&B hits of the 1950s and '60, makes its triumphant return to Milwaukee. This is the third time since 1998 that the musical makes its appearance in the cozy Stackner Cabaret. The cabaret is the smallest of the theaters operated by the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. Cabaret audiences sit at tables, relaxing with drinks and desserts during the show.
Tarell Alvin McCraney, wunderkind playwright and Miami native, finally gets one his plays produced in South Florida and directs it himself, and the result is must-see theater but not in a breathless, TV-series-hype sort of way. Rather, The Brothers Size at GableStage is time well spent because of the alchemy of staging and live performance that makes this production more than the sum of its parts.
Theresa Rebeck, who seems to write a play or two every year (plus TV and novels), turns an acidic eye on marriage in her latest, Poor Behavior, now in its world premiere run at the Taper.
Mark Weston's Harry & Eddie gives us the friendship between Harry Truman and the Jewish Eddie Jacobson who served together in World War I, became partners in a men's clothing shop in Missouri after the war, and remained lifelong friends - even after Truman became President of The United States. At a critical moment, Jacobson was able to get Truman to meet Chaim Weizmann, the acclaimed scientist and Jewish leader, which probably influenced Truman as he immediately recognized Israel when they declared themselves to be a state in 1948.
The tyranny of property and one's next-door neighbor provides the dramatic fodder for Stephen Metcalfe's latest play, The Tragedy of the Commons, now on tap in a superlative production at Ruskin Group Theater. Metcalfe, author of such previous works as Emily and Strange Snow,zeroes in on a long-married couple, Dakin and Macy Adams (the estimable Brian Kerwin and Leslie Hicks), whose fragile relationship is put to the test when they learn that their neighbor Carl (Edward Edwards) has put his house up for sale.
At the Mint Theater, Teresa Deevy's Temporal Powers tackles the moral and practical issues of right and wrong through the lenses of Michael and Min Donovan's relationship, a once-passionate marriage that is now as eviscerated of its inner vitality as its material possessions.
On September 10, immediately before the 9/11 flood of horrifying reminiscences of the disaster ten years ago, Geva Theater Center in Rochester, New York, ended its opening night performance for the 2011-2012 season with the audience's bright, enthusiastic applause.
The fiery, spirited, independent and charming Katharine Hepburn comes to life once more in Tea At Five. The Milwaukee production of Matthew Lombardo's one-woman play was such a hit when it played here in 2009 that the theater decided to offer it again this year as a "summer bonus show." Both productions featured Angela Iannone. For those who missed the 2009 production (like this reviewer), the show is as welcome on a warm summer's night as an ice cream cone.
Wartime England, bombs falling on London, swing music on the radio. Sarah, a young girl from the East End, has a love affair with Joe, an American soldier. The odds are against them ever marrying, not only because he's black but because Sarah has a secret in her past -- an illegitimate child.
The theme of the 2011 Edinburgh International Festival is East Meets West, which explains the attention paid to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a world-premiere adaptation of the novel by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. Two Americans, Stephen Earnhart and Greg Pierce, wrote the piece; Earnhart also directed, leaning heavily on his background in film production.
The Ducks is the kind of play you hope to see at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival: cutting-edge work by a skilled young playwright, acted by equally young and gifted performers.
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