Eurydice
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse Theater

Pulitzer Prize-nominee Sarah Ruhl brings a fascinating odyssey to Milwaukee audiences with the opening of her play Eurydice. Based on the ancient tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, Ruhl unearths fresh insight into the famous story of love and loss. Specifically, she plays with the notion of life and death as being intertwined states of being.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2008
What's That Smell: The Music of Jacob Sterling
New World Stages

What's That Smell? The Music of Jacob Sterling, with book and lyrics by David Pittu, music by Randy Redd, co-directed by Pittu (who stars in it) and Neil Pepe, is a great satirical romp with music. It's the interview of a gay composer/singer (Pittu) by an old queen of an interviewer (the terrific Peter Bartlett) and the singer's life and songs. They are two very amusing caricatures. Numbers include "The Private Benjamin Musical," "An International Foods Song," "Sounds of Human Loving," a song based on "La Femme Nikita," and a Boob Job song.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2008
Mouth to Mouth
Acorn Theater

Although Kevin Elyot's Mouth to Mouth, about the interactions of an English family and their homosexual close friend, held my interest, it seems to be a themeless soap opera, with all the revelations, secrets, disease, misfortune, and occasional comic tangents of that genre. David Cale as the lead catalyst is very strong, and Lisa Emery gives a powerful, moving performance. The actors are all first rate, each deep into his or her character (or caricature), and the play is clearly directed by Mark Brokaw on simple settings by Riccardo Hernandez.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2008
Saturn Returns
Lincoln Center - Mitzi Newhouse Theater

Saturn Returns by Noah Haidle concerns three times in the life of a man, played by three actors -- age 28, age 58, age 88 -- as he relates to and then remembers his dead wife and daughter. It starts with the old man (wonderfully played throughout by John McMartin) and his caretaker, and that works as a bit about his past is revealed.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2008
Billy Elliot
Imperial Theater

Freedom from persecution for one's sexual orientation is vitally important, but so is freedom from the bonds of stereotype. The stage musical Billy Elliot,like the beautiful film that inspired it, is about an adolescent boy who wants to become a professional ballet dancer even though he's not gay - or, to use the British slang terms, not "bent" or a "pouf." And shouldn't a kid be allowed to love classical dance without everyone assuming he's a proto-homo?

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
November 2008
Streamers
Roundabout - Laura Pels Theater

David Rabe's Streamers is historically significant in that it was written more than 30 years ago by a heterosexual white male, yet it's an ultimately sympathetic play about sexual, racial and class tension in the military during the Vietnam era. The Roundabout's gripping Off-Broadway revival at the Laura Pels Theater is one of the company's finest productions ever to be offered in that venue.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
November 2008
American Buffalo
Belasco Theater

When I first saw David Mamet's American Buffalo in 1976, it was just a short time after the United States Supreme Court opened the way to free verbal expression on the stage, and the use of vulgar expletives was new, groundbreaking, shocking. Now, "fuck," the word that got Lenny Bruce arrested, is so common in everyday speech, it is used as an adjective, and most comedians overuse it in their routines.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2008
Billy Elliot
Imperial Theater

"Billy Elliot," a very moving film about a coal miner's son who wants to be a ballet dancer, written by Lee Hall and directed by Stephen Daltry, came out in 2000. The same team wrote and directed the musical now on Broadway, with music by Elton John, and it's a deeply layered piece with cinematic power that only many years of work, including a long run in London, can produce.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2008
Daly News, The
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

Milwaukee Chamber Theater ends the year with a world premiere of The Daly News, a musical written by local actor and playwright Jonathan Gillard Daly. The tuner is based on the Daly family's real-life experiences during World War II. Daly's grandfather, a man who died before Jon was born, carefully chronicled the events at home and abroad during the war in a weekly family letter he called, "The Daly News." Each "edition" updated family members on the lives of four Daly boys, all of whom served their country during World War II.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2008
Confession, The
Presbyterian Church

One way that the advent of cinema changed the face of live entertainment was to acclimate us to visual immediacy. Literature demands that our imaginations construct scenarios based on verbal descriptions, but 'moving pictures' reduced the cognitive lag inherent in mentally processing the written word. But in doing so, it likewise diminished our appreciation of the contemplative depths, unimpeded by the necessity of external manifestations, facilitated by the slower comprehension time of information absorbed through reading.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2008
Belle Barth: If I Embarrass You, Tell Your Friends
No Exit Cafe

After Sophie Tucker, but before Rusty Warren (and LONG before Sarah Silverman), Belle Barth asserted the right of women to engage in previously male-dominated bawdy humor - not as the objects of ridicule (e.g., shrewish wives, air-headed odalisques), but as the instigators. During the repressive 1950s, when Lenny Bruce's angry diatribes on social and political attitudes led to arrest and notoriety, Barth's earthy, Yiddish-laced observations of male and female sexuality never impeded her popularity - except once.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2008
Beauty on the Vine
Raven Theater Complex

Zak Berkman's play, Beauty on the Vine, begins as a diatribe on talk-radio cults, quickly morphs into a whodunit and finishes up as a feminist call-to-arms, with plenty of discussion en route on the folly of judging books by their covers. And damned if it doesn't do all this with such seamless guile that we remain as unaware of the transitions, as does the uncomprehending assassin whose refusal to look beneath the veneer of public images sets the plot in motion.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2008
Dining Room, The
Alliant International University - Legler Benbough Theater

I remember my grandmother's dining room as elegantly furnished, even more elegant than Scripps Ranch Theater's current production of The Dining Room. Like the theater, the table was elegant with carved chairs and a huge buffet whose legs, like the table, were thick and carved. My parents followed the tradition, but with a much simpler design. Even today our dining room is many steps away from the kitchen and ready to entertain eight guests. It includes a glass buffet not unlike the set at the theater.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
Golddiggers of 1633
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

A colorful, cartoonish house, bricked-in from its Parisian surroundings but for a huge gate to one side, sets the tone for a mix of 17th-century Moliere and modern delightful silliness. Enter the cast, on strings like puppets, in pop-period dress and wigs -- all but two masked men in black tux. A throwback to the zanies or traditional masked clowns of Italian commedia that so influenced Moliere, they function also as French puppet manipulators who are seen onstage and often act as narrators.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
Mamma Mia!
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

Is Mamma Mia! becoming the new Cats?

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
Tale of Two Cities, A
Al Hirschfeld Theater

A Tale of Two Cities, with book, lyrics and music by Jill Santoriello, 'tis a far, far better show than I expected.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
Three Movements
Studio Theater

Martin Zimmerman is a young playwright whose reflection on George Balanchine and his wives has a good outline, interesting performers (Mike Timoney as an overbearing pain-in-the-ass choreographer, the lovely Erin Fogarty, who is quite a good ballet dancer in the clear choreography of Avichai Scher, as the ingénue; and Maria Portman Kelly as the polio-ridden wife who also gets to dance in flashbacks) and needs a a blue pencil.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
All My Sons
Gerald Schoenfeld Theater

Arthur Miller's great play, All My Sons, now on Broadway, is given a great disservice in a destructive, misconceived production directed by Simon McBurney. He seems to have no faith in the play and none in the fine actors who portray the members of the Keller family in this post-World War II drama about the devastating consequences of greed.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
Body of Water, A
59E59 Theaters

Lee Blessing's A Body of Water is one of the world's strangest plays. Each day starts anew with no memories for the (probably) married couple who wake up next to each other in bed every morning in a beautiful house on a gorgeous lake (Neil Patel's superb setting changes with the hours and the seasons, abetted by Jeff Croiter's fine lighting). Actually not so strange if you've seen Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore's film "50 First Dates." Same premise, except that in the film, only she had the aberration.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
Love Child
59E59 Theaters

Playing in rep with Lee Blessing's A Body of Water at off-Broadway's 59E59 is Love Child, written and performed by Daniel Jenkins and Robert Stanton, a two-hander about show business that takes place backstage, on stage and in the audience. The two versatile actors play about twenty characters between them - actors, agents, audience members, relatives, male and female.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
Equus
Broadhurst Theater

Equus by Peter Shaffer is a fascinating exploration of a psychiatric aberration: the treatment by a psychiatrist of a boy who has blinded horses. It's a stunning production - a brilliantly done work of theatrical art with perfect, specific lighting by David Hersey on a great arena set, with the greatest costumes in town, all by John Napier, whose horse's heads and hooves are frighteningly dazzling.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
Edward II
Navy Pier

It wasn't just that King Edward II was homosexual - gay monarchs have reigned capably in all countries of the world since the dawn of time - but he couldn't keep his personal life from interfering with his job. Lavishing expensive gifts - including several privileged government titles (after dispensing with their rightful owners) - on one's paramour is certain to breed civil animosity, leading to savage retributions beyond the boundaries observed by a legal and humane society.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
Chiaroscuro: A Study in Shadow
Bailiwick Arts Center

What we know about Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio was that he founded the 17th-century iconographic style now dubbed Mannerist, depicting his mostly religious subjects with a disturbing vigor and sensuality heightened by dramatic (and often wholly unrealistic) contrasts of light and darkness. It is also a matter of public record that he was given to drinking, brawling and fornicating with both men and women - chiefly, the commoners that hired to be his models - and going to great lengths to achieve his shocking visual effects.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
Dancing at the Revolution
EP Theater

Don't be misled by the title. While the legendary "Red Emma" Goldman may have declared, "If I can't dance, I don't want your revolution," author Michael Bettencourt chooses to focus on one of the most inert epochs in the turbulent life of the famous left-wing agitator once called by J. Edgar Hoover, "the most dangerous woman in America."

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
As You Like It
New Theater

As You Like It, as staged by New Theater, probably deserved more laughs than it received at Sunday matinee in September. Its fundamental are sound, and it gets a big assist from small touches and tech work. This is the play that gives us the Seven Ages of Man speech. It's the comedy in which all sorts of people are drawn to the Forest of Arden.

A younger brother, Orlando, complains that his older brother has failed in his duty to their late father to care for Orlando and see to his education. Orlando is then banished and goes to the forest.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
September 2008
Enter Laughing
St. Peter's Church

No one loves a good dramatic musical more than I do -- but sometimes, rather than cry along with the music, you just wanna laugh. Thanks to two of New York City's best Off-Broadway theater companies, the York and the Atlantic, we have two great new opportunities to do just that.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
September 2008
What's That Smell?: The Music of Jacob Sterling
Atlantic Theater - Stage 2

No one loves a good dramatic musical more than I do -- but sometimes, rather than cry along with the music, you just wanna laugh. Thanks to two of New York City's best Off-Broadway theater companies, the York and the Atlantic, we have two great new opportunities to do just that.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
September 2008
Ella
Geva Theater - Mainstage

We still have performers famous enough to be identified by their first name only and to attract large audiences, but the main interest in the best-known ones these days lies in whether they'll get jailed or publicly display their genitals. "Ella" refers to America's most honored jazz singer, Ella Fitzgerald, who was not only queen of an earlier era when jazz concerts reached an international peak, but also had almost no personal biography that her fans were especially aware of.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
September 2008
American Buffalo
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Two years ago, several beginning FSU Conservatory students did a regular "Asolo Late Night Series" stint with David Mamet's powerful play, American Buffalo, about three low-lifers who simulate businessmen to plan a "deal" of a robbery. Just before their last year toward the M.F.A., the student-actors now became what their Mamet characters are: entrepreneurs.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
September 2008
Spring Awakening
Eugene O'Neill Theater

An actor friend of mine complains that he'll never be able to get a good part on Broadway unless he first becomes a known quantity on television -- and, let's face it, he has good reason to feel that way. More and more often, performers with various amounts of TV-Q are hired for plum Broadway roles, usually as replacements, because the public-recognition factor is seen by producers as guaranteeing good box-office for the shows they join. This sort of thing leads to much consternation and carping when the actors in question can't cut the mustard.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
September 2008
Desire Under the Elms
San Diego State University - Experimental Stage

Eugene O'Neill gave birth to Desire Under the Elms in 1924, placing it in rural New England. The 1958 film version starred Sophia Loren, Anthony Perkins, and Burl Ives. Under director Randy Reinholz, the San Diego State University version, currently in the Experimental Theater, moves the action to rural Ozark Mountains and adds some excellent, story-telling guitar music.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
September 2008
Big Bang, The
Brick Theater

The Big Bang, a performance-art piece with colored lights and text, has two outstanding Mimes, Mitchel Evans and Jeff Robinson, the delightful clown Tara Strand, and a beautiful, sexy classic woman, Aryiel Hartman, in a mixture of literal and abstract. Written and directed by Evans, who is one of the best classic Mimes and a good soft shoe dancer, countered by Robinson, whose humor shines through, and abetted by the two women, it's a winning combo giving us an exciting encounter with talent, skills and innovation.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
September 2008
Dashiell Hamlet
Edgewater - Presbyterian Church

First, let's make one thing clear: this is not Elizabethan verse tarted up in storefront-circuit modern dress. No, this revival from the Golden Age of off-Loop Theater is a homage to the hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, as translated by Hollywood into the cinematic genre known as film noir. And if classics buffs detect in the plot a resemblance to a certain tragedy by William Shakespeare - well, everybody's entitled to their opinion.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2008
Bets and Blue Notes
Lyceum Space

It was like meeting an old friend.

On stage at the Lyceum Space, Kevin Armento's Bets & Blue Notes opened the Fritz Blitz 2008, which features the best plays presented in the festival over the last 15 years. Also, it was almost the same cast under the same director and choreographer (Don Loper and Hernando Gomez) as I had seen previously. It was not a tired redo, but an exciting, dynamic production.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2008
Coco and Gigi
Bath House Cultural Center

Echo Theater's Coco and Gigi by local playwright Isabella Russell-Ides could easily be subtitled Gogo and Didi. For thirty minutes, Gigi (Ellen Locy) and Cosmo (John Davies) sit on a park bench waiting, not for Godot, but for enlightenment. It never arrives.

This same scene is repeated on an adjacent park bench with virtually the same dialogue by two young, African-American actresses, Ashley Wilkerson as Gigi and Jeanette Scott as Cosima.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
August 2008
Anything Goes
Patio Playhouse

Every year for the fifth summer in a row, Patio Playhouse has brought a "big" show to Kit Carson Park Amphitheatre. With a cast of 26 and almost all on stage for major production numbers, Anything Goes certainly qualifies. Opening in 1934, it became the fourth longest running show of the thirties. Cole Porter's tuner, along with Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, is continually revived to run yet one more time on and off Broadway as well as throughout the land.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2008
Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged), The
New Village Arts Theater

After the show, I drove home in haste, went to my library, pulled out my beloved tome of the complete works of The Bard, and said a short prayer. I went to my collection of scripts and retrieved The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr. Just what had Adam Brick, Joshua Everett Johnson, and Tim Park have done to the master. They did exactly what playwright/performers Jess Borgeson, Adam Long, & Daniel Singer had written - with some hilarious embellishments.

Director Rob Salas and a great design team enhance the production, giving their audience a delightful evening.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2008
Color Purple, The
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

When The Color Purple opened its short run in Milwaukee, it had two strikes against it on opening night. One: Jeannette Bayardelle, who plays the main character, Celie, was replaced by her understudy. Two: Sound balancing problems made some of the lyrics and dialogue difficult to hear.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2008
Big Bang, The
Theater Three

Theater Three's revival of last season's hilarious hit musical, The Big Bang, by Boyd Graham and Jed Feuer, is every bit as riotous as it was last season. Two of Dallas's top talents, Gary Floyd and K. Doug Miller, reprise their roles as Boyd and Jed, respectively.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
August 2008
Doubt
Caldwell Theater Company - Count de Hoernle Theater

John Patrick Shanley packs a lot into this one-act play, and Caldwell Theater Company does well by Doubt, a Parable.

It's 1964 at a Catholic school in the Bronx, and the nuns who run the school and teach there struggle with emerging Vatican II changes as their parish priest preaches compassion. There's a fear of pedophilia within the structure of authority, the consequences of action and inaction, and of certainty and doubt.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
August 2008

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