I, Malvolio
Traverse Theater

For some years now, Tim Crouch has been working on a series of solo shows designed to turn youthful audiences (11+) on to Shakespeare. In 2003 the performer/playwright chose The Tempest and approached the play through Caliban's eyes. The next year he looked at A Midsummer Night's Dream from Peasblossom's point of view. In 2005 it was Banquo's turn with Macbeth. Now he has tackled Twelfth Night in a show called, I, Malvolio.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2011
Ten Chimneys
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse Theater

The Milwaukee Repertory Theater opens its 2011-12 season with the regional premiere of a play that pays homage to one of the theater's most famous acting couples. Ten Chimneys refers to the summer estate of the late Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt. A Wisconsin native, Lunt bought the property in tiny Genessee Depot, about an hour's drive from Milwaukee. The home was more than a private getaway for this celebrity couple. Over the years, the Lunts were frequently visited by members of Broadway's "A" list.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2011
Seven Deadly Sins
02ABC

The Seven Deadly Sins, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's 1933 "Opera-Ballet," is dusted off and given new life by co-producers Scottish Opera and Company Chordelia. Credit for the successful revival of this period piece must go to director Kally Lloyd-Jones and designer Janis Hart, who have figured out a way to make everything that happens on stage look not only fresh and appealing but pertinent to our times.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2011
Henry V
New Theater

The version of Shakespeare's Henry V on stage at New Theater in South Florida has a cast of nine: five men and four women -- playing more than 30 roles, with Henry, the carouser-turned-monarch, played by a slender black actress. But the casting anomalies are pretty much put aside after the lights come up on the first act. There's no winking gender-bending here, just actresses playing men (no actors playing women) on a tiny stage in a production made memorable mostly by its big-hearted second half.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
August 2011
Penny Dreadful's Etherdome
Asembly Bosco Tent

Penny Dreadful's Etherdome is a lunatic comedy about three 19th century quacks competing with each other to find a pain-free anesthetic for surgeons and dentists. The play embraces elements of Grand Guignol, vaudeville, buffoonery and Punch and Judy to tell its bizarre, bloodstained story. Think the Three Stooges on psychedelics.

Mavis Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2011
Kiss the Moon, Kiss the Sun
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Director Carole Kleinberg makes all the right choices interpreting a script that could have focused us to "look on the sunny side" and "moon over an adorable guy with a handicap." Instead of coming over as a story of a dying mother trying to get her mentally challenged son a keeper for when she's gone, the Banyan production of Kiss the Moon, Kiss the Sun centers on a choice that must be made by a young single mother.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2011
Crimes of the Heart
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

Seeing a production of Crimes of the Heart after almost 30 years only seems to make the play seem stronger, funnier and more touching. Beth Henley's play, winner of the 1981 Pulitzer Prize, is set in a Mississippi backwater. It is the tale of three adult sisters, one of whom lives with their grandfather in the girls' hometown. The grandfather is absent, as he is hospitalized throughout the duration of the play. Still, the sisters discuss him enough to give audiences a clear sense of their relationship to the old man.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2011
Savannah Disputation, The
Florida Studio Theter - Keating Mainstage

Two very old-style Southern Catholic sisters don't stop an ultra-evangelical young Protestant sect proselytizer from trying to convert them. Divorcee Mary (impressive Lisa McMillan), who obtains status from her religion and parish, had at first slammed the door against Lindsey Wochley's missionary fervor as Melissa. But she stubbornly returned to confuse mousey spinster Margaret (Susan Greenhill, involving and involved), who took a liking to her.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2011
Homecoming, The
Stratford Shakespeare Festival - Avon Theater

The Homecoming, perhaps Harold Pinter's funniest and most disturbing play, was recognized from its first performance in 1965, as a masterpiece. Its supercharged original London performance seemed unimprovable until the New York debut, later filmed, substituted the great Irish actor Cyril Cusack as Sam. But a recent Broadway revival was discussed as equal to that great original, so I guess it's the play that's daunting, not its productions. Its energy is hypnotizing, its surprises unending, and its wit and wisdom a treasure lode.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
August 2011
Phys Ed: A Story of a Rugby Hero
Assembly Hall

The agony and ecstasy of competitive sports is splendidly dramatized in Phys Ed, a monologue performed by Nicholas Osmond at Assembly Hall as part of the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Writer Simon Carter packs a lot into the monologue, which is subtitled "The Story of a Rugby Hero." The subtitle is a little misleading in that Neville Trellis (Osmond), the man delivering the monologue, is someone whose twin brother Ed was the true rugby hero. Neville wanted desperately to excel at the game but could never match his brother's gift.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2011
Hosanna
Stratford Shakespeare Festival - Studio Theater

Watching this rare revival of the leading French-Canadian playwright Michel Tremblay's early, memorable play Hosanna tested my memory of its brilliant Broadway premiere in this apparently inspired English translation in 1975. First of all, I thought I'd seen it in the 1960s, because its unblinking portrayal of a flamboyant young transvestite fighting with his/her older biker lover in their bizarre apartment seemed newer and more daring than it does now.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
August 2011
Misanthrope, The
Stratford Shakespeare Festival - Festival Theater

Let's get my impolitic reflections out of the way: there is nothing wrong with David Grindley's direction or the acting of Peter Hutt, one of Canada's finest and most versatile actors; but Brian Bedford, the super-specialist director/actor for works of this sort, especially by Moliere, was originally scheduled to direct this production and play Oronte; and I cannot help but wonder what this Misanthrope might have been like had Bedford done so.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
August 2011
Circle Mirror Transformation
Boulevard Theater

It would be difficult to imagine a more low-key opening than the one in Annie Baker's comedy, Circle Mirror Transformation. Five adults walk silently onto the stage. They unroll yoga mats and lie down (face up). That's it. Nothing happens for at least 30 seconds (which seems like 30 minutes). Then the actors randomly count from one to 10. Here's the catch: if two people happen to say the same number simultaneously, they have to start over.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2011
Wheel, The
Traverse Theater

In The Wheel, playwright Zinnie Harris riffs on Brecht's Mother Courage, giving us a powerful woman who journeys through the heart of a terrible war, refusing to let the horror and brutality crush her indomitable spirit. But where Brecht's heroine is also a cunning selfish bitch who profits from war, Harris's Beatriz (the superb Catherine Walsh) is more of an innocent, an unwitting participant in the surrounding madness.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2011
Three Graces
Ice Factory

Three Graces dramatizes the Cretan struggle for independence in poetic and imaginative fashion, using music, dance and (live) puppetry to enliven the story and give it a feminist slant.

Mariana Newhard plays Irini, an earth-mother figure who serves as a kind of narrator and guardian angel. The time is the 1800's: Greece has been under Turkish occupation for four centuries, but now the natives led by Michales (the dynamic Newton Pittman) not only want their freedom but are ready to fight and die for it.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
Peg O' My Heart
June Havoc Theater

Peg o' My Heart at the June Havoc Theater is a delightful, charming 100-year-old musical that has more going for it than most of today's Broadway musicals:

Hit songs - including several that still resonate today, including "I'd Rather Be Blue, Thinking Of You," "Peg O' My Heart," "They Go Wild, Simply Wild Over Me" and "There's a Broken Heart For Every Light on Broadway."

Original play by J. Hartley Manners, book by Karin Baker, music by Fred Fisher and lyrics by eight men including Billy Rose.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
Little Journey, A
Mint Theater

Rachel Crothers wrote A Little Journey in 1918, and it is set in a Pullman car of a train heading West in 1914. Jonathan Bank's Mint Theater has created something of a masterpiece in this production in classic three act play form. Passengers from vastly different backgrounds are in transition in their lives - some of them footloose, some fancy free, some in inner turmoil, and we become involved with their problems as they become involved with each other.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
Master Class
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Tyne Daly inhabits the fury, if not the sound of bigger-than-life coloratura, Maria Callas, in Terrence McNally's 1995 award-winning, Master Class. Under Stephen Wadsworth's direction, she delivers the complexity, the conceit and paranoia, and the passion of the legendary La Divina, who was adored for her theatricality as much as her singing.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
Master Class
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Terrence McNally's Master Class, ostensibly showing the great singer Maria Callas giving a public demonstration of her teaching three opera hopefuls, gives us one of Broadway's finest actresses, Tyne Daly, as Callas. She's funny, egotistical and sometimes profound, and Daly is splendid in the part.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
Silence! The Musical
Theater 80

Silence! The Musical, a hilarious satire on the film "Silence of the Lambs" by Jon Kaplan and Al Kaplan (music & lyrics) and Hunter Bell (book), pushes the boundaries of what one can say (or sing) on the stage -- yea even beyond The Book of Mormon." Jenn Harris gives a brilliant comic performance as Clarice Starling, the FBI fledgling, with the sshhushing of "S" sounds like Jodi Foster, the Starling in the movie, and with nuances of expression in which a half-raised eyebrow sets off laughter in the audience.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
New Eyes
Odyssey Theater

Move over "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and "Jamaica, Farewell," and make room for New Eyes. Performed and co-written by Yafit Josephson, New Eyes is every bit as skillful and delightful as those other contemporary solo classics.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
South of Delancey
Fremont Centre Theater

What a disappointment. South of Delancey sounded promising, even delicious -- a play based on a famous Jewish arbitration court of the 1930s. Forerunners of Judge Judy and Doctor Phil, the court could be heard in NYC over such Yiddish radio stations as WEVD and WLTH, with rabbis, senators and lawyers adjudicating cases brought before them by members of New York's large immigrant community who didn't understand or trust the American justice system.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
Stop the World, I Want to Get Off
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

The title of Stop the World, I Want to Get Off refers to anti-hero Littlechap's realization, late in life, that it has been so superficial, his world deserves to come to an end. Until he answers the question "What Kind of Fool Am I?" and decides to leave his whirling world with true regrets, he's the 20th-century type who'll do anything to succeed.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
Titus Andronicus
Stratford Shakespeare Festival - Tom Patterson Theater

Although Jacobean tragedy is generally regarded as a shift toward melodrama and lurid excess, Shakespeare, influenced by Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, early in this Elizabethan drama topped them all. We see such outrageous onstage violence as rape, cutting off the hero's hand, bringing on two of the hero's sons' chopped-off heads, and his daughter appearing raped and bleeding from having her hands and tongue cut off.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
Twelfth Night
Festival Theater

Stratford's artistic director Des McAnuff has fashioned a first-rate, lively and beautiful-looking Twelfth Night that should be one of the season's great successes. I find it impossible to explain why one shift in style or inserted anachronism seems true to an author's intent and another, no-more daring one, seems stupid and disrespectful; but though McAnuff's production ranges through music and props and clothing styles of several places and eras, it seems to me to be attuned to this play's irresistible spirit.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
Julius Caesar
Oregon Shakespeare Festival - New Theater

The most notable thing about this production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is the most obvious one. Caesar is played by a young woman (Vilma Silva). For theatergoers who didn't catch this gender change prior to the show, Silva announces the fact in the show's prelude. The prelude also includes a warm-up cheering routine for the audience (when the name "Caesar" is announced). Director Amanda Dehnert earns points for her reverse-gender casting and for engaging the audience in an interactive exercise.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
Julius Caesar
Oregon Shakespeare Festival - New Theater

Vilma Silva begins the performance of Julius Caesar at OSF by informing us that she will be playing the title character. With the help of other cast members, she then rehearses the audience in cheers that we are to shout when we see a gesture of two raised hands during the performance. You know, "Hail Caesar!"

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
Animals Out of Paper
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Between strains of rap music and scenes introduced by projected geometric figures on hanging boards, three lives come together like folds of paper into origami. What kind of structures result? How do the lives change? What happens to the relationships of the people to the art and to each other?

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
Jersey Boys
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

There are regular musicals, and there are mega-musicals that become an industry in themselves. Witness the success of Cats, Phantom of the Opera, Wicked and now, Jersey Boys. This show, about four male singers who captured the hearts of a generation in the early 1960s, has made its mark on American theater. It travels around the world and it is still filling seats on Broadway. Finally, Jersey Boys makes its first Milwaukee appearance.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
Ghost Light
Oregon Shakespeare Festival - New Theater

Among its many offerings this season, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival produces the world premiere of Ghost Light. Despite its ethereal title, Ghost Light is rooted in stark reality. Specifically, it deals with the very real murder of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, the supervisor of the city's mostly gay Castro district.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
Rap Guide to Evolution, The
Soho Playhouse

Baba Brinkman's The Rap Guide to Evolution is one of the most original and provocative one-man shows I've ever seen. Brinkman, a Canadian performance artist with a rarefied pedigree -- he holds a Masters degree in Medieval and Renaissance Literature - explicates Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution in hip-hop fashion, using video projection and the original music of d.j. Mr. Simmonds to buttress his two-hour presentation. Brinkman manages to be informative, captivating and funny all at the same time.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
Masked
GableStage

At GableStage in South Florida, Masked is a suspenseful dusk-to-dawn story of three West Bank Palestinian brothers during the 1987-90 intifada. Because of its title, we're pretty sure secrets will be revealed; because of its setting, we suspect these will involve more than mere family grudges left over from boyhood. Strong performances (and with accents consistent and convincing), quick pacing and evocative tech make for a successful hour.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
July 2011
Camelot
Stratford Shakespeare Festival - Festival Theater

Canada's great Stratford Shakespeare Festival opened its 2011 season with two gala productions of extravagant works in their magnificent Festival Theater. Both Shakespeare's slapped-together comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Lerner and Loewe's overreaching musical, Camelot, are deeply flawed works, but beloved. Camelot, which I prefer to discuss first, is a monster covering the origins and development and demise and eternal afterlife-in-legend of the whole courtly romance of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2011
Superior Donuts
Geffen Playhouse

Tracy Letts' Steppenwolf/Broadway play, Superior Donuts, has been given a strong production at the Geffen. Director Randall Arney and the playwright share some history, Letts having appeared in the former's Chicago premiere of Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile, playing the role of the bartender.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2011
Merry Wives of Windsor, The
Stratford Shakespeare Festival - Festival Theater

Stratford's opening night was a gala production, and joyously received, but though it was unusually handsome looking and boasted a cast of literally great actors, it was not great Shakespeare because The Merry Wives of Windsor isn't. Despite occasional delicious castings, the basically nonsensical play usually strikes me as Shakespearean self-parody that becomes tiresome as it repeats itself and throws in everything including the kitchen leftovers (and also some non-salacious dirty laundry).

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2011
Yanna Avis
Metropolitan Room

Yanna Avis is a beautiful woman with a pleasant voice and loads of appeal in her performance of songs in French and English (with a touch of German). She exudes a lovely sensuality and is more of an entertainer than a singer. Sure, she stays on key, but it's her that's important rather than the voice. Some of the performance is in shprichtzimmer, and it works in the context of her musical vocabulary.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
June 2011
Cowgirls
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

With such great musicianship and fine singing, Cowgirls would be a feast even without a plot. But the story's ingredients -- distinctive characterizations and suspense -- add flavor to lyrics and sound.

Central character Jo Carlson (Angela C. Howell, strong in song and demeanor) must have a blockbuster weekend to save her family's saloon-with-stage shows. She's booked the eastern, classical Coghill Trio to do the trick.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2011
Bakersfield Mist
Fountain Theater

Skilled actors Jenny O'Hara and Nick Ullett turn Stephen Sachs' short, slight comedy, Bakersfield Mist, into something of a romp, thanks to their highly polished, hilarious performances. The set-up is this: foul-mouthed, trailer-trash Maude Gutman (O'Hara) believes a painting she bought for $3 at a garage sale is really a Jackson Pollack original worth $30 million. Snobby Brit art appraiser Lionel Percy (Ullett) shows up to evaluate the work. A battle ensues, with Lionel calling the painting a fake, Maude defending it.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2011
Jesus Christ Superstar
Festival Theater

Ontario's Stratford Shakespeare Festival's opening week presented only five productions this year, possibly because all five were big blockbusters. The final opening of the week was Artistic Director Des McAnuff's re-creation [may I call it a "resurrection"?] of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2011
Richard III
Stratford Shakespeare Festival - Tom Patterson Theater

Of the five openings in Stratford's knockout opening week, Richard III was the least exciting, but certainly anything but ordinary. This production achieved unusual interest by casting the title-role of the villainous king with actress Seana McKenna, a justifiably highly regarded leading lady at Stratford. McKenna will also repeat her performance later this season as Shakespeare's wife, Ann Hathaway, in Vern Thiessen's one-actor play, Shakespeare's Will.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2011

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