Pretty Fire
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

The first Milwaukee Black Theater Festival grew out of a response to the George Floyd killings of 2020. A few members of Milwaukee’s theater community gathered after the tragedy to discuss how to heal the community, and how to attract more black audiences to mainstream theaters that were considered primarily-white enterprises. Thus, according to co-founder Malkia Stampley (see below), the Milwaukee Black Theater Festival became the first of its kind, not only in Milwaukee, but throughout the Midwest.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2021
Merry Wives
Delacorte Theater

Merry Wives, Jocelyn Bioh’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s bawdy comedy of laundry baskets and bedroom antics, is a significant event not because of its slight whimsy but because it marks a return to live theater after nearly a year and a half of COVID restrictions. This first production at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater since the shuttering of stages due to the pandemic in March 2020 is a celebration of the power of theater to unify a community and needs to be cheered for that. The show itself is fun and silly, perfect for a light summer frolic.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
August 2021
For Love or Money
Broadwater Black Box

”Ye cannot serve God and Mammon” said the bible.  Mitch Feinstein tried to do both, as he confesses in his one-man show, For Love or Money, now running at the 2021 Hollywood Fringe Festival.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2021
La Divina: The Last Interview of Maria Callas
Hudson Guild Theater

Shelley Cooper makes us believe she is Maria Callas in La Divina, her one-woman show about the legendary opera singer. That’s no small feat, as Callas was a prodigious force on stage, not only as a singer but an actress. Fortunately, Cooper excels in both those departments, having appeared in such previous musical-theatre roles as South Pacific, The Barber of Seville, and Sweeney Todd, to name but a few. She has also worked as a director/choreographer.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2021
School Girls, Or, The African Mean Girls Play
Goodman Theater

Don't be fooled by the title. If you arrive at the Goodman Theater expecting a cross-ethnic copy of the seminal 2004 Hollywood film involving spoiled, shallow, WASP-y suburban teenagers and their clueless parents, you won't find it at this long-awaited return to one-room live-action entertainment. The setting of Jocelyn Bioh's play is the West African republic of Ghana in 1986, and the stakes are much higher for the young women lucky enough to receive an education at the Aburi Girls Secondary School.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2021
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A
Greendale Gazebo Park

There is perhaps no scenery more suitable for A Midsummer Night’s Dream than a park. In the Optimist Theater’s production, a lovely green expanse of lawn, surrounded by mature trees, was an ideal setting for their truncated version of Shakespeare’s comedy.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2021
Rounding Third
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

In Round Third’s small American town, a Little League baseball team includes two boys whose fathers coach the players. Brusque Don, veteran head coach, comes on as a man who owns all (us audience “players” too) and the game. His opening talk insists winning is everything. When modest businessman Michael stumbles in late, he’s made assistant coach. Still he has his say — that playing ball must primarily make each player happy. Don and Michael are obviously an Odd Couple.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2021
Todd Robbins's Haunt Quest
Soho Playhouse

Todd Robbins is our host for and the only cast in Haunt Quest, a “séance play.”

The evening I attended included an audience of ten, socially distanced on folding chairs in a bare room. This arrangement is part of the event’s idiosyncratic charm. We’re not in a show; we’re at a séance, a paranormal inquiry, with nothing so vulgar as a program.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
July 2021
Fruma-Sarah
cell theater

It’s appropriate that the first indoor production with live actors I’m reviewing since the COVID pandemic shut down all NYC stages over a year ago is a celebration of theater and how it can heal communities and create families. E. Dale Smith’s Fruma-Sarah (Waiting in the Wings) is such a celebration but this backstage comedy is flawed and somewhat forced. Fortunately, that prickly comedienne Jackie Hoffman makes it fly. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2021
Winter's Tale, The
Havenswood State Forest

Under a towering grove of old-growth trees, on an exceptionally balmy evening, the Summit Players were hurriedly making preparations for their latest production of free Shakespeare in Wisconsin parks. This year’s production is a lesser-known play, The Winter’s Tale.

As in past years, the play has been trimmed to a 75-minute show without intermission. This makes it a perfect length for squirmy kids (who are a most welcome part of the audience), and for older audiences who want to transport themselves into a brief foray into Shakespeare-lite.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2021
Shades of Buble: A Three-Man Tribute to Michael Buble
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

The Three “Shades” of Canadian Michael Bublé’s musical repertoire are: Sinatra’s and his type of songs, well-liked contemporary pop tunes, and finally Motown and Rock hits. Going through representative selections at Florida Studio Theater, three men sing and act in different “shades” but also in excellent harmony together. What’s old seems new again, and what’s new is up-to-the-minute relevant.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2021
Octoroon, An
The Fountain

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins launches an all-out farcical attack on America’s history of slavery in An Octoroon, now in its West Coast premiere in an outdoor production at the Fountain Theater, directed by Judith Moreland.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2021
Fruma-Sarah
Cell Theater

The very mention of the New York City’s own wildly popular actress and comedian Jackie Hoffman – she of 1000 facial expressions, bodily quirks, a score of well-placed adlibs, and a mesmerizing voice that takes you prisoner with a waterfall of precisely enunciated words – signals that somewhere lurking around a corner is yet another not-to-be-missed Hoffman Happening.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
July 2021
Tiny House

As theaters across the country announce the return of live, post-pandemic performances, the number of Zoom and virtual shows has waned. But companies are presenting intriguing and innovative offerings via the Internet. Perhaps this hybrid of theater and technology will become a permanent new media, expanding the possibilities and accessibility of intimate performances. One such computer-broadcast play is Michael Gotch’s pleasant and proficient family comedy Tiny House, presented by the Westport Country Playhouse through July 18.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2021
Tevye in New York!
The Wallis

Live theater returns to The Wallis with the world premiere of Tom Dugan’s one-man show, Tevye in New York!. Dugan, whose previous solo shows were Wiesenthal and The Jackie Kennedy Project (which he directed), takes on the persona of Tevye the Milkman, the flamboyant patriarch in Fiddler on the Roof.  Dugan asks us to believe that Tevye has gone on to a new life as an immigrant in New York’s Lower East Side, where he sells ice-cream out of a pushcart on the corner of Delancey and Orchard.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2021
My Lord, What a Night
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

The exclamatory title is what all the characters experience in Deborah Brevoort’s play detailing a 1937 link forged between Albert Einstein and Marian Anderson.  She’d just ended an appreciated concert at Princeton but been denied a room at all-white Nassau Inn. Her admirer Albert Einstein, who’d experienced anti-Semitic danger in Germany, then invited the diva to stay in his campus home.  Their friendship, affected by visits from a Jewish academic administrator and a black woman civil rights activist, must end in important decisions for all four.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2021
Minnesota
online

Playwright Justin Tanner bares his soul in Minnesota, his gripping and revelatory monologue which is now streaming online in a production directed by Lisa James.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2021
Dingleberries
online

Susan Chenet's self-described "crappy comedy" hearkens to the "Hollywood-is-Full-of-Greedheads" plays—vitriolic diatribes penned by incensed playwrights following their initial forays into big-time industry screenwriting.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2021
Tennessee Rising
Cell Theater

The night I attended a live production of Jacob Storms’s one man show, Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams, held at the Cell Theater in New York City, it was raining lightly. Though the playwright-actor was protected by a small overhang which covered the staging area, the umbrella holding, stage-facing audience, seated outside in the theater’s lovely garden, was not. Ironically, this being a second rain date, it was touch and go as to whether this play would go on at all.

Ed Rubin
Date Reviewed:
June 2021
Ride Share
online

In 1990, Will Kern's long-running Hellcab documented the work-day of a Chicago cabbie on a Christmas eve conspicuously lacking in holiday spirit—a stygian slog rife with scenes of contention, selfishness, misanthropy,  exploitation, and misery beyond our humble servant's power to remedy. Ah, but just when the ugliness of the universe brings him to the brink of a cosmological crisis, his despair is alleviated by one of those tiny miracles that spring up when most needed.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2021
Great Balls of Fire
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

Just as Jerry Lee Lewis shaped  Rock & Roll, Jason Cohen embodies him and his super-energetic performances in “Great Balls of Fire.”  He gets help from a multi-talented band, who often back Cohen lyrically as well as instrumentally. No doubt, though, from madcap antics to keyboard tricks to crooning love lyrics, Cohen becomes Lewis, the central singer and musician.  His “trick” is to also stay himself paying a tribute to the earlier star.  

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2021
Titanic (Scenes from the British Wreck Commissioner's Inquiry, 1912)
online

When choosing between recording fact or legend, the saying goes, what usually endures is the legend—in this case, the real-life morality fable of the sumptuous trans-Atlantic cruise ship that crashed into an iceberg in 1912, killing most (but not all) of the personnel aboard.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2021
Best of Brink Briefs

See listing under Best of Br!nk Br!efs (exclamation points for the letter i)

Best of Br!nk Br!efs
Renaissance Theaterworks

Renaissance Theaterworks, Milwaukee’s only women-founded and women-run company, ends what must have been an exceptionally difficult season (as it was for all theater companies nationwide) with its annual 10-minute play festival, called “Br!nk Br!efs.” The current production incorporates some of the “best” short plays from past seasons, interspersed with some new ones. All of the plays presented here were written by women playwrights living in the Midwest.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2021
Sophie Tucker: Last of the Red-Hot Mamas
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

To celebrate the opening of a season long delayed by pandemic restrictions,  Sophie Tucker: Last of the Red Hot Mamas returns to Florida Studio Theatre where the show originated in 2000. The latest in subsequent reprises, this year’s has more scenic opulence. That matches goings-on as an older, wiser-cracking Kathy Halenda interprets Sophie Tucker’s big fat life.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2021
Tiny Beautiful Things
online

Tiny Beautiful Things, George Street Playhouse’s filmed play, based on Cheryl Strayed’s book, “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar” (2012), a collection of Strayed’s columns, is beautifully brought to life by actress Laiona Michelle, who as Sugar, plays a down-to-earth, expletive-spouting advice-giving columnist. While the play’s three accompanying actors, John Bolger, Kally Duling.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
May 2021
Natural Shocks
online

Fans of popular contemporary playwright Lauren Gunderson won’t want to miss one of her newest plays, Natural Shocks, now available for virtual viewing from Milwaukee’s Next Act Theater.

The play, which opened in New York Off-Broadway in 2018, already has been produced at Colorado and California theaters. This filmed version for Next Act originally was produced for another Wisconsin theater troupe in tiny Sturgeon Bay, Wis. It is presented as Next Act’s final show in its all-virtual 2020-21 season.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2021
Bintel Brief, A
online

Pacific Resident Theater delves deep into Jewish immigrant history with its digital production of A Bintel Brief (“A Bundle of Letters’). The letters were addressed, over a 60-year period, to the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, the paper of choice of the Yiddish-speaking, first-generation Jews in New York City. Confronted with a strange new world—not to speak of a brand-new language—the immigrants often turned to the Forward’s advice column for help and guidance.>

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2021
46 Plays for America's First Ladies

See listing under FORTY-SIX PLAYS FOR AMERICA'S FIRST LADIES

Forty-Six Plays for America’s First Ladies
online

It’s clear that as much as we know (or seem to know) about America’s past presidents, we tend to know a great deal less about their First Ladies. Madison, Wisconsin’s Forward Theater Company launches an ambitious project that gives us a brief glimpse of all of these women throughout history. The plays begin with Martha Washington and proceed chronologically.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2021
Sistas in the Name of Soul
WBTT

A tribute to singing gals’ groups and their founders of the late ‘60s through ‘70s, Sistas in the Name of Soul is currently WBTT’s lively “mainstage” musical.  Although the amount and range of songs are limited, the talents of their current interpreters are not. While each is vocally distinct, they’re all great at harmonizing as well. Their “We Are Sisters” number is totally believable.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2021
Pipeline
West Coast Black Theater mainstage

There’s apt literary start (Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool”) and end (Richard Wright’s “Native Son”) to the “Pipeline” that affects young Black men in a racist society. But their families aren’t usually uninvolved, as Dominique Morisseau emphasizes in her prescient play of that title. It particularly binds Nya, a teacher in a community school, and her son Omari, whom she’s placed in an upper class boarding school to give him much greater than local opportunities.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2021
Blindness
Daryl Roth Theater

If a live event has no live actors, stage, sets or costumes, is it really theater? That’s the conundrum posed by Blindness, the unique gathering at the Daryl Roth Theater and the first indoor New York performance presented on or Off-Broadway since all NYC stages were shuttered due to the COVID-19 pandemic over a year ago. The piece was conceived in response to the pandemic and opened at London’s Donmar Warehouse last year.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2021
Measure for Measure
online

If the Goodman Theater's shocker of a Measure for Measure in 2013, or the touring Pushkin Theater's Brechtian explication in 2016, weren't enough to convince audiences that autocratic munificence and compulsory matrimony do not a happy life-affirming ending make, Henry Godinez's adaptation for Chicago Shakespeare Theater makes a compelling case for further examination of Shakespeare's most unromantic and uncomic romantic comedy.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2021
John Cullum: An Accidental Star
online streaming

 Still spry and charismatic at 91, John Cullum offers an enchanting and charming solo turn in John Cullum: An Accidental Star, a 80-minute career retrospective with songs. This virtual cabaret piece, available online until April 22, 2021, was produced by the Irish Repertory Theater, the Vineyard Theater, and Goodspeed Opera House, three theaters Cullum has worked with, and is simplicity itself. Cullum relates stories about his seven-decade career with subtle musical accompaniment by pianist and musical director Julie McBride.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2021
Lewiston/Clarkston
Overture Center

Head west to the small town of Lewiston, Idaho, and you’ll discover how the town got its name. One of the town’s main attractions is the Lewis and Clark Discovery Center. Located along the banks of the Snake River, the center chronicles the journey of 19th century explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Right across the Snake River is Clarkston, Washington, which also owes its name to the famous pair.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2021
The Summer of Daisy Fay
online

When you hear that Ed Howard's play is based on a novel by the author of "Fried Green Tomatoes," it's only natural to expect a nostalgic warm-hearted comedy featuring familiar regional archetypes and a heroine whose spunky resourcefulness leads to happy-ever-afters. If you can park your between-the-lines red-flag radar behind the sofa—along with any first-hand memories you might harbor of experiences similar to those recounted by our suspiciously unreliable narrator—you won't be disappointed.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2021
Julius Caesar
online

What we have from the Asolo Conservatory in these days of pandemic danger is an equally dangerous rendering of Shakespeare’s play into a modern play. The guiding principle of multiple changes in characterization is to eliminate typical gender roles.  That meant casting women in men’s parts and dividing some into two people of opposite gender identity.  It is perplexing to me how these changes bring out the meaning of Shakespeare’s play as a profoundly political one.  Hasn’t it always been?

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2021
Voyeur: The Windows of Toulouse Lautrec
Duplex (outside)

COVID vaccinations are ramping up and restrictions are beginning to loosen, but variant strains threaten another pandemic surge. Thus the reopening of Broadway and Off-Broadway theaters is still months away, probably the fall of 2021 at the earliest.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2021
Three Pianos
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

Celebrating musicians whose pianist abilities girded other facets of their musicianship, Three Pianos reopens Florida Studio Theater’s largest theater, the Gompertz, for the first time since March 2020. What might have been an original cabaret revue expands in a venue that provides plenty of space for social distancing on and offstage. Personal interaction among the pianists, therefore, suffers not a whit. And the audience seems to enjoy having space to stand and applaud throughout.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2021

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