Amy's View
Shipping Dock Theater in Visual Studies Workshop Auditorium

David Hare writes such good dialogue that he virtually dares his detractors not to appreciate his mostly disappointingly crafted plays. Amy's View is a case in point: annoyingly obvious in the point of view of its supposedly two-sided debates and typically depressing in its story of decline -- decline of the theater, decline of the economy, decline of the arts and appreciation of art, decline of the family, and, of course, decline of the British Empire. But it plays well and, despite having four acts, never tires.

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2006
Big Bang, The
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

You're invited to a borrowed Manhattan apartment to a prospective backers' preview of the world's most expensive musical: a history of the universe. So get there early and up-front for the cheese and crackers. Soon all the food -- as well as utensils, lampshades, drapes, clock, dishes, plants, pillows, ottoman, chairs -- will become props and costumes for frantic Gary Marachek and smooth Wayne LeGette to act and sing out scenes from "The Big Bang" (in darkness) to a not too enlightened "Twentieth Century."

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2006
Chairs, The
New World Stage

Ion Theater's new space, World Stage, on 9th, puts them almost back-to-back with 10th Avenue Theater. A new downtown theater district? World Stage is a very welcoming facility complete with a roomy lobby and a modest-sized theater space with tiered seating providing great sight lines. Their opening offerings are definitely for the serious theater patron. A Tuesday-through- Sunday performance schedule alternates between two Samuel Beckett plays and one Ionesco play. There are a variety of curtain times, varying from 2:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2006
Evita
Historic Orpheum Theater

Remember when one of the joys of being an actor was the opportunity to play characters of all kinds of social and ethnic backgrounds? In these politically-correct times, thanks in part to the brouhaha over Jonathan Pryce and Miss Saigon, that sort of opportunity is temporarily in abeyance. Thus we have this Class A staging of Evita, perhaps the most powerful and most likely to last of the Lloyd Webber musicals, in which the three principal characters are played by Latino actors.

Michael Sander
Date Reviewed:
June 1999
Field, The
Irish Repertory

In John B. Keane's The Field, strongly directed by Ciaran O'Reilly at the Irish Rep, an elemental battle in rural Ireland in 1964 pits a brutal cattle farmer, who needs the field for grazing and access to water, against and another man who needs the field so he can put in a quarry business (so that his sick wife can return to Ireland). It's the irresistible force meeting the immovable object; neither can compromise.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
June 2006
Big: The Musical
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

If you think this is a resurrection of the perhaps too "Big" musical that failed on Broadway in 1996, you're in for a pleasant surprise. You'll find this a satisfactorily simplified theatrical version of the movie that should bring out the fun-loving child in you.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2006
Blue/Orange
Nova Southeastern University's Mailman Hollywood Center Auditorium

All elements are in top form and work together in The Promethean Theater production of Blue/Orange: worthwhile play, direction with a vision, performances that deliver, and sound and light designs that set the stage, then get out of the way.

TPT knows how to make an entrance: This is its first production as resident professional theater company at Nova Southeastern University.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
May 2006
Cirque du Soleil: Corteo
Cirque du Soleil at Grand Chapiteau on Randall's Island

Through the years, Cirque De Soleil's shows have grown in sophistication as they explore new themes in entertainment in which the human body goes beyond ordinary circus skills into unbelievable, thrilling dimensions full of surprises.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2006
Crowns
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

We know how to make some noise!" says one of the Southern church ladies who celebrate their traditional black women's "hattitude." Wearing these "crowns" takes them back in history to when their enslaved ancestors could congregate only in church. There, they honored the Lord by covering their heads with dignity and pride, a tradition that led to hats as signs of status. Stories connecting family histories to hats get told in scenes of gatherings for fellowships to funerals, mostly augmented by gospel music but also departures such as hip-hop. All noisy, indeed.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2006
Diary Of Anne Frank, The
Patio Playhouse

Patio Playhouse's production of The Diary of Anne Frank, under Jay Mower's direction, is given an appropriately stark design by Judy Conlon. The plainly painted four rooms and hall are on several levels, with suggestions of some walls, allowing for a variety of playing areas. This, along with Kat Perhach and George Daye's lighting design, provide for the many intimate scenes. This is the prison for two years of the Franks, Mr. Frank's business partner's family, the Van Daams, and Mr. Dussel, a dentist and friend of the family.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2006
Hot Feet
Hilton Theater

Hot Feet, ultimately a rather good dance show conceived, directed and choreographed by Maurice Hines, throws us off by an over-zealous opening of dancers wigglin', jigglin', jumpin' and humpin' like really good cheerleaders with colorful Arabian Nights costumes (by Paul Tazewell). But a lot of it can be seen every weekend for free at Broadway and 50th Street. It takes a while for us to realize that they are doing a version of The Red Shoes and that there is a coherent show here.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2006
Lestat
Palace Theater

I found the new vampire musical, Lestat, book by Linda Woolverton, music by Elton John, lyrics by Bernie Taupin, to be visually interesting (set by Derek McKean, lighting by Kenneth Posner, costumes by Susan Hilferty) but not engaging. They didn't know whether to be campy or serious, so they went serious, and the few laughs show that it might have worked if it took a different tack.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2006
Tarzan
Richard Rodgers Theater

Could there be a more apt representation of the heights Tarzan reaches -- and the depths to which it swoops -- than the rope from which its titular teen swings? No sooner does Bob Crowley, the Disney musical's set designer, costume designer AND director, make a butterfly flutter through the air with the greatest of ease, than he nooses himself with poor blocking, hyper-stimulation and silly mistakes.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 2006
Shining City
Biltmore Theater

Domestic angst in Dublin. In Shining City by Conor McPherson, directed by Robert Falls, the actors (Brian F. O'Byrne, Oliver Platt, Martha Plimpton, Peter Scanavino) are all excellent, the set by Santo Loquasto, Christopher Akerlind's lighting, costumes by Kaye Voyce and the choice of music are all quite good, and they do properly fulfill the piece. But the play didn't engage me because of the ordinariness of its lengthy expositional passages. It's basically a long psychotherapy for Platt's character, in which he goes on and on in not-fascinating stories.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2006
Three Days of Rain
Bernard B. Jacobs

Richard Greenberg's Three Days of Rain, now on Broadway, is two plays. Act 1 in 1995 shows us the consequences of events in the early lives of three people, and Act 2 is 1960 and gives us the parents of the characters in Act 1. That's where we understand the references and what the title means.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2006
Wedding Singer, The
Al Hirschfeld Theater

The Wedding Singer, book by Chad Beguelin and Tim Herlihy, music by Matthew Sklar, lyrics by Chad Beguelin, starts us off with a big grin and the lively energy of a wedding party with jukes and joops and doodoops. It's all lots of fun -- a new Grease that works because all the elements come together with a great sense of humor and endless creativity. The magical quickly-transforming set by Scott Pask, lighting by Brian MacDevitt and super costumes by Gregory Gale fulfill the vision.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2006
Awake and Sing
Belasco

Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing, written in the depths of the depression in 1935, is full of stylized poetic phrases in the dialogue that are ripped from the gut and express the anguish of love, of poverty, of aspiration unfulfilled. The themes are as powerful (and sometimes funny) now as they were when Odets wrote them. However, this production, for me, is miscast and misdirected (by Bartlett Sher) with a lot of energy and lots of missteps including the wrong dog (what's a black poodle doing in the arms of these poor working-class people?

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2006
Always...Patsy Cline
Welk Resort Theater

The proscenium of the Welk Theater is a huge barn entrance. The center offers a raised stage framed by another barn-like background, representing many of Patsy Cline's singing venues. To the right of the stage is a bar interior and to the left is Louise Seger's kitchen. We are entering into the land and history of Miss Cline and about to hear a retrospective of her best songs in Always...Patsy Cline.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2006
Anything Goes
Booker High School Visual & Performing Arts Theater

Just as New York has its famed Performing Arts High School, so has Sarasota. Both have sent graduates on to careers in each's locale. This year, Sarasota's VPA Program at Booker High School has some "4s" who are likely candidates for success in college and/or arts venues.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2006
Around The World in Eighty Days
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

If ever there were a perfect match between a production and its audience, it's FST's whirl Around the World in 80 Days. Against a backdrop mapping out the globe's two spheres, marvelously stiff-upper-lipped Phileas Fogg (Dan Matisa) races to win his bet with fellow 1872 Reform Club members to accomplish the play's titular feat. What complicates the journey further is a bank robbery that Detective Fix (Eric Hissom, a combined pseudo-Sherlock and bumbling Clouseau) aims to pin on Fogg.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2006
Beauty and the Beast
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

Belle means beautiful. The name so aptly describes not only the heroine of Beauty and the Beast but also Heather Beirne, who portrays her and sings so beautifully in Golden Apple's enchanting production. Because the story's so well known, suspense lies in how it will unfold. Director Ben Turoff produces pleasure with every "pleat" -- from the posturing of Belle's unwanted suitor, conceited Gaston (boisterously bragging Stephen John Day), to the Beast learning to be a gentleman toward her and his servants.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2006
Burn This
Studio Theater

Renaissance Theaterworks has staged the hit of Milwaukee's spring theater season with a powerful production of Lanford Wilson's Burn This. Four terrific actors portray the full range of dramatic intensity in this incendiary play. Loss and love are strong emotions, after all. When they are intertwined, as Wilson artfully demonstrates, they can be as powerful as any force in nature.

The play's action is fueled by a wrenching tragedy -- the accidental death of a young dancer named Robbie. Robbie is never seen (since the play opens just after his funeral).

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2006
Defiance
Manhattan Theater Club - Stage I

John Patrick Shanley is one of America's greatest playwrights. He is so sparkling bright with words, uses language with such inspiration as he digs deep into the souls of his characters, that he is hard to match in dramatic depth and ironic humor. Seemingly, his play Defiance, now at The Manhattan Theater Club, is a profound look at discrimination in the US Marines in 1971. Main characters are a white Marine Colonel, his wife, a black Captain and a white minister from Alabama.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2006
Faith Healer
Booth Theater

The Irish playwright Brian Friel's Faith Healer is now on Broadway with an all-star cast: Ralph Fiennes, Cherry Jones and Ian McDiarmid (from "Star Wars"). It's four half-hour monologues about the career of a con man (Fiennes) whose powers occasionally work, first from his own viewpoint, a moderately interesting but not very theatrical, account of his story including a bitter insight into who comes to a Faith Healer. Fiennes is an excellent performer, but I'd rather he just simply say the words rather than act them.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2006
Festen
Music Box Theater

Festen is a dangerous title for a play. Does it fester? Is it a Feast? Is it a fiesta? It turns out to be closer to a Fiasco.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2006
History Boys, The
Broadhurst Theater

What a pleasure to be in the presence of the product of a sparklingly brilliant mind. Alan Bennett's The History Boys is full of wit and wisdom in his construct of an English boy's school presented as an intellectual swordfight with musical interludes and film clips. It is so smart, it is thrilling.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2006
Grey Gardens
Playwrights Horizons

Based on the brilliant documentary film about two decayed Bouvier cousins of Jackie Kennedy, Grey Gardens (book by Doug Wright) gives us a vocal glimpse into a South-Shore Long Island past in 1941 and the life of a wealthy mother (Christine Ebersole) and her daughter (Sara Gettlefinger) who is courted by Joe Kennedy. The voices are excellent, and the lyrics by Michael Korie and music by Scott Frankel give us the real flavor of the forties while being clever and pleasurable.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2006
Stuff Happens
Public Theater

America doesn't lack for pundit reactions to the Iraq War, be they "What a mess the government's lies got us into," or, conversely, "Better a messy war than an evil dictator holding sway in a post-9/11 Middle East." Nor do we lack citizens who call President Bush either an idiot beholden to special interests, oil companies and the religious right, or a plain-speaking, God-fearing Texan who cares more about maintaining a secure America than soft-soaping our allies.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2006
Threepenny Opera, The
Studio 54

In the current Roundabout Theater Company production of The Threepenny Opera, directed by Scott Elliott, the main character, the one who is the most fun, who keeps us enchanted, is not Macheath, played grimly, without spark, humor or charm by Alan Cumming. It's Mr. Peachum, played with dash, flash, splash and panache by a dancing, singing, wriggling, wraggling Jim Dale. And Ana Gasteyer's strong performance is close behind.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2006
Well
Longacre Theater

A lot of things break in Lisa Kron's play, Well: the fourth wall, the scenery, theatrical conventions, hearts. Pirandello rides again; then the show breaks with him into forms that even he never saw as it breaks the patterns set up with the audience by Kron, who has structured a good show as she breaks structure.

Kron, a strong performer playing herself, gives us her relationship with her mother expressed through the question: "Why do some sick people get well and others don't?"

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2006
Act a Lady
Actors Theater of Louisville

Two years ago Actors Theatre of Louisville opened its prestigious Humana Festival of New American Plays with young Jordan Harrison's Kid-Simple, a radio play in the flesh, a feverish adolescent concoction (my words) that bored me silly. ATL has now chosen Harrison's Act a Lady to open its 2006 Humana Festival, and it comes across as a very good choice under Anne Kauffman's admirable direction. This wild and witty take on gender bending overlays a campy French play-within-a-play.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
March 2006
Annie
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

For family-friendly musicals, it's hard to beat Annie. Let us count the ways: cute kids, a dog, a billionaire's digs, fancy costumes, easily recognizable good guys and bad guys, a girl searching for her lost parents, etc. No wonder the show, based on the Depression-era comic strip "Little Orphan Annie," has endured. Now more than 25 years old, Annie continues to charm with its upbeat message, best expressed in the classic tune, "Tomorrow." Sure, the formula fairly creaks with familiarity.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2006
Assassins
Yamawaki Art & Cultural Center

In a world seemingly forever given to violence, it is not surprising that the theater has repeatedly undertaken to explore this fact of life...and death. One result was the musical Assassins, first mounted on stage in a small off-Broadway venue late in 1990. The work focuses on U.S. Presidents. Of those who have to date held the office, fifteen have been the object of assassination attempts, four of which have proven successful. This musical deals with nine of the malefactors, extending from Abraham Lincoln in 1865 to Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
March 2006
Bold Girls
Fort Lauderdale Children's Theater - Studio

Set in Belfast, Northern Ireland, U.K., in 1991, Bold Girls can be seen as a treatment of the Troubles in England's last colonial outpost. More profitably, it can be taken as a look at the yearnings of four women in constricting surroundings. That's the tack taken in Fort Lauderdale by the Women's Theater Project in the play's southeastern premiere.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
March 2006
Boy Gets Girl
Poway Performing Arts Company

They really made an attractive couple on their blind date. However, by the second date, it was obvious to her there were definitely no sparks. Yet he was persistent, and at some point he went over the line in Rebecca Gilman's demanding drama, Boy Gets Girl. Tony's determination started with phone calls, then flowers, and, finally, a way over-the-line threat, as Boy Gets Girl moves from bad date to stalking. For example, Theresa Bedell (Kelly Lapczynski) took the usual precautions, but slick-talking Tony (Christopher T.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
March 2006
Dancing at Lughnasa
OnStage Playhouse

Last night I was fortunate to observe the Mundy sisters and their older missionary brother Jack, recently returned from 25 years in Uganda. Their small house and garden in Northern Ireland is a typical example of homes I've visited in that country. This magic of transforming OnStage's stage into a wee bit of the ole sod is the result of the deft hand and eye of designer Brenda Leake. It is so authentic; I knew it would take a tremendous cast to shine as brightly.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
March 2006
Pajama Game, The
American Airlines Theater

How often in a modern musical do we get song after unforgettable song, production numbers that tickle all of our sensibilities, and from which we walk out humming memorable tunes that make us smile? I'd say just about never.

The Pajama Game, from out of Musical Theater's past, concerns a management-labor dispute over a raise of seven and a half cents. The show has it all in terms of material, and with its splendid cast of terrific singer-dancers, it is one of the most enjoyable times you can spend on Broadway.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2006
Ring of Fire
Ethel Barrymore Theater

Ring of Fire: The Johnny Cash Musical Show is a well-produced, well-sung depiction of country life through song. It's a good Country Music concert performed by first-rate Broadway singers who all have the range, emotion and proper twang for their roles. It's not a biography, and without a story through-line, its duration, like any concert, is arbitrary.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2006
Bridge & Tunnel
Helen Hayes Theater

Bridge & Tunnel is a stunning achievement. I saw it off Broadway, and wrote a glowing review. Now on Broadway, enhanced by David Korins' set and Howell Binkley's lighting, it's even better.  It is an extraordinary one woman show written and performed by Sarah Jones. She gives us a succession of immigrant characters, mostly living in Queens, whose lives and personae are explored with amazing sensitivity and skill as she, with minimal costume changes, switches from male to female, old to young, and to accents from all over the world.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2006
Bad Date Theater III
North Park Vaudeville

Now in its third iteration, Bad Date Theater 3, offers up Bob Korbett's twisted sense of humor in selecting six short pieces for a Valentine's Day celebration. Korbett Kompany Productions brings these strange bits of humor to North Park Vaudeville and Candy Shop stage for a three-weekend run.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2006

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