Steel Magnolias
Lyceum Theater

Robert Harling's Steel Magnolias is not a play for jaded cynics. It's a lovely production, and all you have to do to enjoy it is to sit back and let yourself be a participant in the lives of these Southern women, well played by a fine ensemble cast: Delta Burke, Lily Rabe, Frances Sternhagen, Rebecca Gayheart, Christine Ebersole and Marsha Mason. The humor is folksy Americana, the characters have a reality to them and zing lots of amusing lines as they congregate to communicate in the local beauty shop.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Streetcar Named Desire, A
Studio 54

Uh, oh. We are at the mercy of strange and foreign directors who don't understand the delicate sensibilities and balance needed in a Tennessee Williams play. Edward Hall, from across the pond, helms the current A Streetcar named Desire, and he has misdirected the talented John C. Reilly so badly, the play's real currents are lost. Williams' love of depravity, sexual tension, deteriorated people, the holes in shattered lives, the survival of the primitive, expressed in poetic terms, is undercut as Reilly shows Stanley rather that being him.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Longacre Theater

Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is one of the most perfectly constructed plays in the contemporary canon. The foreshadowings, conflicts, rising and falling actions, final climax and denoument give us a classic example (along with the brilliance and wit in the dialogue) of how to write a play. But in order for the play to really work, you need equal adversaries fencing and clashing on the stage. Unfortunately, this is not the case in the current Broadway production.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Bat Boy
Don Powell Theater

The occasional sound of bats flying overhead is heard during the pre-show for the San Diego premiere of Bat Boy: The Musical. Billed as a musical comedy/horror show, it is truly a send-up of the 1950s horror films and much more. Dr. Rick Simas directs this Off Broadway hit of 2001 for San Diego State University's theater.

Bat Boy, sired by a bat and a human, lived in a cave until his teens. He is discovered by the three trailer-trash teens (Kevin Maldarelli, Kelsey Vener, and Omri Schein) of Mrs. Taylor (Jamie Kalama).

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
All Wear Bowlers
HERE Arts Center

What can a critic say about a show which includes in its program an essay by the performer/creators, informing us that "we seemed to strike the perfect balance between talk and play, philosophy and slapstick? And with a director who boasts a "PhD from Stanford in drama theory and criticism on top of that? all wear bowlers, lowercase letters and all, presents itself as a pre-deconstructed masterpiece that has been “in development 3 years.” Only problem is, it's not very good.

David Steinhardt
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Bindlestiff Family Cirkus: From the Gutter to the Glitter
Theater For The New City

The Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, now at the Theater for the New City, offer the real deal: unabashed, old fashioned vaudeville and sideshow, without embellishments, performed by an accomplished duo with great circus skills: Keith Nelson and Stephanie Monseu. Also on hand in From the Gutter to the Glitter are the fun musical duo, pianist Peter Bufano (who also juggles) and zippy violinist Kathe Hostetter.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Bach at Leipzig
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse Theater

Weaving historical fact with fiction is nothing new, but up-and-coming playwright Itamar Moses offers a few intriguing twists in Bach at Leipzig. The play is receiving its first major production on the Milwaukee Repertory Theater's stage.

With a rock-solid cast and accomplished director at the helm, Bach at Leipzig gradually wins over the audience. This is no small accomplishment, as the play's historical events are essentially non-dramatic. This much is known: when a prominent musician in Germany dies in 1722, a successor must quickly be named.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Boswell's Dreams
Off-Broadway Theater

The name "James Boswell" doesn't tend to ring a bell other than for historians, who may recall him as Samuel Johnson's biographer. Johnson wrote the first English dictionary and was considered a monumental figure of his time. Boswell, however, was an embarrassment to his family for generations after his death. Both men come vividly to life in this stellar production by local playwright Marie Kohler.

Like James Boswell, Kohler comes from a family of wealth and privilege.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Cats
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

The Apple's on a roll this season with truly golden dancing and delicious ensemble acting. In an intimate setting we get caught up in "Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats," the Names, the prospect of the Ball, "Moments of Happiness" and sometimes discord from the likes of "Macavity" and "Mistoffelees," and finally, which of the cats will get a once-a-year chance at a new life. I've always thought the clever costumes and make-up along with spectacular (and unusual, at its debut time) set accounted for most of the appeal that made Cats such a popular show.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Coriolanus
John Jay College

Responding to the comment that Shakespeare never blotted a line, Dr. Johnson quipped, "Would that he had blotted a thousand." Johnson might well have had in mind several rocky out-croppings in the stream of Coriolanus, a decidedly rhetorical play, to change my metaphor. Much of the text is reportage: something has happened elsewhere. Still more text consists in tales to be re-told, though these, blessedly, are planned for some off stage events (in Act One, scenes 1, 4, 7, 10; nearly as much in Act Two, and thereafter).

Nina daVinci Nichols
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Edge
Coconut Grove - Encore Room

At one point in the one-woman, multi-charactered play called Edge, Sylvia Plath, then a college student with vague aspirations to be an artist, describes her drawings as "elegant" and "precise." It's a description easily applied to the performance of actress Angelica Torn as Plath, who gave up visual art for a life of poetry, then eventually gave up life as well. Combined with playwright Paul Alexander -- who also directed and designed the evocative lighting -- Torn delivers a portrait of Plath that is aching, funny and enraging.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, The
Poway Performing Arts Company

PowPAC's production of The Effects Of Gamma Rays On Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds should not be missed. In it, epileptic Ruth (Blair Hollingsworth) is bipolar, catty, both nasty and nice, and extremely convincing when she has a fit. She's a brat, a supportive sister and is emotionally close to her mother. She is duplicitous and manipulative, with emotions that change in nanoseconds. Old mute Nanny (Beth Mercurio, aging herself a good 40 years) is being taken care of (read: taken advantage of) by Beatrice.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Julius Caesar
Belasco Theater

So Denzel Washington is playing Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and he's just fine. His charisma fills the theater, his acting is mostly good, and hey - that's Denzel up there lookin' good. It's okay if he speechifies in a couple of soliloquies, he's really good in conversation, and his star presence transcends his faults.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Blogging About Cat Stevens
Shetler Studio Theater

Monologues appeal to the voyeur in us. Details of someone else's life - we can't ever get enough of them - especially when they're presented in such a persuasive way as in this collection. A few themes run through the 12 lives on view. Blogging is one. Private thoughts made public; it's as if blogs were invented for exhibitionists. Just like these actors. Another theme is pain, but usually that's told to us only after the character gets us through the more mundane part.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Bad Date Theater
Adams Avenue of the Arts

Bad Date Theater!, a co-production of Misfit Productions and Korbett Kompany Productions showcases five examples of oddball relationships. Alan Ball's The M Word, directed by Bob Korbett, features Connie Terwilliger and Bob Korbett as two people contemplating that move into the realm of the M word. Both characters are anal about contemplating every aspect of a marriage, which includes household duties, child rearing, extra-marital affairs, marriage adjustments, and much more. Terwilliger and Korbett form a perfect team. She is prim and proper.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Burn This
Cygnet Theater

A roommate and his lover, Dominic, are killed in a freak boating accident in the bay off of Manhattan. His two roommates are in mourning. Anna (Jessica John), a choreographer, was his dance partner at times. Larry, a gay advertising designer, was a close friend. The latest Lanford Wilson play to hit San Diego, Burn This, graces the stage at Cygnet Theater. Set in a two-level loft in a Manhattan warehouse, the apartment is graced with unpainted drywall and a modest attempt at a kitchen.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Counsellor at Law
Theater at St. Clement's

John Rubinstein gives a powerful performance as the lawyer, the central figure in Elmer Rice's 1931 play, Counsellor at Law. He brings a dynamic vitality to a part that fills the theater. His acting has the depth, dimension, strength and charisma of a star, and that is just what this old, fascinating look into the life and office of an up-from-the-gutter achiever in the 1930s needs.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Clarence Darrow's Last Trial
New Theater

Shirley Lauro's Clarence Darrow's Last Trial is getting its world-premiere production in South Florida, and there's reasonable doubt that audiences at New Theater in Coral Gables will go away satisfied. The play is based on a 1930s murder trial notorious for its allegations and clash of cultures -- gang rape, murder, a well-connected family from America's Deep South, white U.S. sailors in a pre-statehood Hawaii. Into this steps Darrow, the legendary defender of otherwise lost causes, whose best days by this time are behind him.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Fallen Fruit
Martin Experimental Theater at Kentucky Center for the Arts

Fallen Fruit is the umbrella title Hadley V. Baxendale has bestowed on his theatrical adaptation of two landmark Victorian poems, an outwardly incongruous match-up of Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market and Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade."

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Twelve Angry Men
American Airlines Theater

Twelve Angry Men is such a good play - especially when it's done by a professional cast like the one now on Broadway -- that it's needless to be picky picky picky. Reginald Rose's play, set in a jury room in a time when women and minorities were not on juries, wherein the twelve men vote eleven to one to convict, and gradually shift to the opposite, remains captivating. So director Scott Ellis doesn't have to create conflict through volume -- the content does it. And each man at a jury table doesn't have to stand for his comments.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Good Vibrations
Eugene O'Neill Theater

A quick view of Act One of Good Vibrations, the Beach Boys musical on Broadway: shallow, inane book by Richard Dresser; great set by Heidi Ettinger; some good singing voices; boring, unengaging. Director/choreographer John Carrafa's work had no dynamic in it. We escaped at intermission.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Belfast Blues
45 Bleecker

Geraldine Hughes was brought up in poverty in Northern Ireland during the time of "The Troubles" and is now performing her one-woman show based on her experiences at The Culture Project in The Village.

Besides herself, the lively Ms. Hughes plays a dozen or so characters of all ages, each with its own physicality, manner of speech and attitude.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Book of Days
OnStage Playhouse

San Diego is currently blessed with two plays by the Pulitzer-winning Lanford Wilson: Book of Days is at OnStage in Chula Vista, and Burn This is at Cygnet in East San Diego. The former chronicles events in the small Missouri town of Dublin, population just over 4,000. (Wilson, incidentally, was born in Lebanon, Missouri in 1934.)

Dublin has one industry — Walt Bates' cheese factory - thus making Walt (Tim Carr), at 60, the patriarch and his wife, Sharon (Kaly McKenna), the matriarch of the town.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Boston Marriage
Cook Theater at Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts

Elaborate Victorian language and modern slang. Semi-circular backdrop of 20th century abstract frolicking nudes (on -- could it be -- burlap?) cut out between one nude's legs as an entrance to a boudoir with old fashioned chaise. Contemporary glitzy black pants suit for Anna and sequin-topped pink evening gown on Claire, waited on by maid Catherine, with a lace-curtain apron over black swaddling cloths. Everything's mixed up with a parcel of artsy, once-innovative techniques that now simply make a mess.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Democracy
Brooks Atkinson Theater

Michael Frayn's theater accomplishments are truly amazing. With his two previous signature works, Noises Off and Copenhagen, the playwright ranged from backstage farce to nuclear fission and uncertainty theory. Now with Democracy, he has veered off into high-stakes Cold War politics, spiced with the machinations of party infighting and the deviousness of embedded spies. Yet there isn't a full act of honest-to-God stage dialogue in the three works put together!

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Dinner With Friends
Poway Performing Arts Company

Divorces affect many more people than the couple untying the knot. Dinner With Friends, playwright Donald Margulies' testament to breakups, is an extremely strong look at dissolution. Director Jay Mower, who also designed the set, brings to the stage, Cheryl and Sam Warner as Karen and Gabe -- the "perfect" couple, and Rob Tyler and Susan Lawson as the "imperfect" couple.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Einstein Comes Through
North Coast Repertory Theater

David Ellenstein is the very capable artistic director of North Coast Rep, and Marc Silver is an accomplished actor. The two are responsible, alas, for Einstein Comes Through.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Doubt
Manhattan Theater Club

Cherry Jones is Sister Aloysius and Brian O'Byrne is Father Flynn in a classic struggle at a Catholic school between the Sister's dogmatic conviction and the Father's progressive compassion. Or is that compassion a smokescreen for child molestation? With priestly hanky-panky so much in the headlines these days, we're apt to jump on board the bandwagon with the Sister's suspicions even before there are solid facts powering it forward.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Hairspray
Broward Center for the Performing Arts' Au-Rene Theater

The year is 1962, the last calendar year before the assassination of JFK. The place is Baltimore, a city long of both the north and south. In this time and place, the bouffant hairdos of teenage girls aren't the only things that need help standing up to the winds of change. Welcome to Hairspray. The national tour of the 2003 Tony-Award winner based on the 1988 movie by John Waters plays to sellout crowds in Fort Lauderdale at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts' 2,700-seat main theater.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Gem of the Ocean
Walter Kerr Theater

August Wilson's mighty ambition, stretching across a decade-by-decade, ten-play cycle of compassionate, poetically engaged playwriting, doesn't really stop at showing us the black experience in the 20th Century. No, Wilson is concerned with the full cargo of the African Diaspora, the history of suffering, the heritage of achievement, and the demons hatched in steerage and slavery that bedevil the race from within.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
La Cage aux Folles
Marquis Theater

Critics gave this glitzy revival a lukewarm reception when it opened in early December, saying that Gary Beach's Albin/ZaZa was bland and that the Harvey Fierstein/Jerry Herman 1983 musical had devolved into a crossdressing tribute to family values. Hardly two weeks later, Beach was breathing fire into his Act 1 closer, "I Am What I Am," transforming the entire evening into a fervid affirmation of individualism. Quite frankly, I was trembling at intermission after what I'd just seen.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Little Women
Virginia Theater

You'd have to be really jaded not to enjoy the new musical, Little Women (book by Allan Knee, music by Jason Howland, lyrics by Mindi Dickstein). The tall but elfin Sutton Foster as the leader of the sisters is lively, endearing, and a spunky 19th-Century example of a woman with a will, a way, and universal good looks and charm. She has great comic timing, intonation and physicality. All of the cast are really good singers (as is apropos on Broadway), and then there is Maureen McGovern as the mother.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Pacific Overtures
Studio 54

East meets West in Sondheim's quaint, oddly proportioned musical ceremony with book by John Weidman. The culture clash is multifold. Sondheim's characteristic Sunday in the Park manner is wedded to delicate, percussion-filled orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Seven Hundred Sundays
Broadhurst Theater

To say that Billy Crystal has become this season's Hugh Jackman is something of an understatement. Crystal is likely to follow in the screen Wolverine's paw steps and devour a Tony Award in his Broadway debut -- while succeeding Jackman at the podium hosting the ceremonies in June. But Mr. Mahvelous' one-man show, chronicling his Long Island childhood with a heartfelt personal tribute to his dad, is currently bringing in more cash per performance than Boy from Oz did a year ago.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
After the Ball
Irish Repertory Theater

After the Ball, Noel Coward's musical based on Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, now at the Irish Repertory Theater, is a perfect holiday entertainment. It starts as a Frimlesque operetta, develops into a musical, and the drama and comedy flows into a lovely show with beautiful period costumes, fine stage design and elegant, lively direction by Tony Walton. While Coward's songs are witty and appropriate, the most fun are still Wilde's quips and his thrusts at the British.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
December 2004
Belle Epoque
Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

Martha Clarke's Belle Epoque is an impression of an Impressionist, Toulouse-Lautrec, and the costumes, dances, atmosphere of late 19th-Century French Cafe culture. Clarke creates living paintings with four-foot-tall Mark Povinelli as Lautrec. Stories about Lautrec range from the sentimental to the bizarre.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
December 2004
Best Sex of the XX Century Sale, The
Theater For The New City

Experimental Theater doyen Lissa Moira's latest version of her creation, The Best Sex of the XX Century Sale, now at the Theater for the New City, is an amusing, absurdist history of sex in the 20th Century, with a lively cast of singers and dancers doing songs, decade by decade, of the progressing century -- movies, pop music and culture. Included are a "Boop-boopy-do" by Betty Boop and writer/director Moira herself as Mae West.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
December 2004
Bug
Barrow Street Theater

Agnes White's options are slim and grim from the moment we encounter her in Tracy Letts's apocalyptic thriller, Bug

Just released from prison, there's her hulking ex-husband Jerry Goss, who terrorizes her with silent phone calls before he arrives and punches her out. That's the banal side of Agnes's life, and the brutality she suffers from Goss is a mere preamble to some of the most convincing fighting -- and bloodletting -- you'll ever see onstage. Peter Evans is a more exotic and mysterious proposition.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
December 2004
Broadway Bound
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Broadway Bound is more than Neil Simon's autobiographically inspired account of Eugene Jerome and his older brother Stanley's entry into show biz from pedestrian jobs and lower-middle-class home in Brighton Beach. It's Eugene's story of the final stages of an entire family breakup.

Already somewhat estranged is Aunt Blanche (Melissa Teitel, riveting in just one impressive appearance), who fails to persuade her father, Ben, to rejoin his wife and move to Florida.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2004
Dame Edna: Back With A Vengeance
Music Box Theater

In Dame Edna: Back with a Vengeance!, creator/performer Barry Humphries, the world- class lively transvestite and master comedian pours out brilliant quips. He's a great actor in a great role, and it's all laugh after laugh with amazing timing. His audience interaction, which is a good part of the show, is as good as it gets, and far superior to most comedians I have seen - and and I've only seen 2026 of them. It's insightful, good natured, and hilarious.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
December 2004

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