Spin, The
online

In an unnamed American metropolis, the Public Works Director has been discovered to have a cache of pedophile images on his work computer, but even under house arrest awaiting trial, he threatens to reveal the identities of his fellow perpetrators, active and unwitting alike.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2020
Coastal Elites
online

A pre and post-COVID-19-slanted offering muchly peppered with condemnation of Trump and the current administration – it was presented one time only this past September--was HBO’s Coastal Elites. Originally written to be performed as a play at New York City’s Public Theater by playwright, and novelist Paul Rudnick, widely known for his humorous and satirical writings which regularly appear in the New Yorker, and directed by Matthew Jay Roach (“Meet the Fockers,” “Trumbo,” “Bombshell”), the closing of all theaters in the city nixed that idea.

Ed Rubin
Date Reviewed:
October 2020
Line, The
online

Ever since Covid19 shut down our theaters, movie houses, museums, concert halls, opera houses, jazz clubs, and stadiums – in short, our entire country’s entertainment industry – thus robbing thousands upon thousands of singers, actors, writers, producers, directors, musicians, athletes and countless others, of their livelihood, not to mention their raison d’etre, a marked increase in entertainment offerings on TV, cable, online, blogs, websites and streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Disney ensued.

Ed Rubin
Date Reviewed:
October 2020
Black Magic
online

Even if her late grandmother hadn't been a New Orleans spiritualist practicing under the agnomen of "Tituba" (after the Obeah sorceress referenced in the Salem Witch Trials), her death would still have left some big shoes for her granddaughter to fill. Eldest sibling Sasha's filial responsibilities include forsaking her roommates on the South Side of Chicago and moving into a two-bedroom apartment so that her college-bound brother can qualify for in-state tuition, even as she struggles to pay off her own student loans on a barista's wages.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2020
Quest for Solomon's Treasure, The
online

Family-friendly First Stage, one of the country’s leading theaters for young audiences, begins its full season of entirely virtual plays with The Quest for Solomon’s Treasure . This world premiere is an original weekly serial that debuted on October 4, with installments arriving each Sunday. There are seven installments in this series. Solomon’s Treasure was created by veteran playwright John Maclay, who has debuted a number of popular First Stage shows over the years.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2020
Weekend Comedy
online

Who would have thought that one of Milwaukee’s smallest theater companies would be the first to offer its audiences two tantalizing choices: to see an in-person performance, or stay home and watch a virtual production? Village Playhouse, located in a Milwaukee suburb, has done just that with Weekend Comedy. Prospective theatergoers can choose to see one of six live performances, with capacity restrictions of 20 people per show. (Social distancing will be provided in the audience seating.) Those with COVID concerns can opt to view a filmed version at home.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2020
Box and Cox
online

There's these two guys, you see, and they're roommates—they just don't know it yet. This is because Mr. Cox is a hatter who works days, while Mr. Box is a printer who works nights, and Mrs. Bouncer, their landlady, has discovered she can charge two rents for the same furnished apartment.  To be sure, Mr. Cox has detected a lingering odor of cigar smoke in his quarters, and Mr.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2020
Sylvia
Cort Theater

A Tony award-winner last season for You Can't Take It With You, Annaleigh Ashford is the prettiest, most cunning, cute, coquettish little flirt ever to be picked up in Central Park. She is no dog, but yes she is. . . actually a dog in A.R. Gurney's whimsical 1995 comedy Sylvia, a wonderful revival of which has opened at the Cort Theater.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
War of the Worlds, A
online

Nothing makes an imperialist nation more nervous than the prospect of payback, so the timeliness of H.G. Wells’s fictional musings on the projected conquest of his native England in 1897 is easy to dismiss nowadays. The United States is protected from large-scale aggression by its global surroundings, of course, but that didn't stop radio listeners in 1938 from reacting with alarm to a dramatic adaptation of this prototype for apocalyptic-invasion fiction.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2020
Give Me Your Hand
online streaming

The Broadway League recently announced that the hiatus for all of its member theaters has been extended until June of 2021. That means at least seven more months of no live performances on New York stages. Fortunately, many Off-Broadway companies are filling the gap with Zoom and virtual performances. The Irish Repertory Theater has been cleverly adapting performances pieces to the new media with actors filming from separate locations or acting in a properly socially distanced space.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2020
No AIDS, No Maids: Stories I Can't F**ckin Hear No More
online

Dee Dee Batteast is a six-feet-tall, African-American, heterosexual female actor—traits making her the perfect candidate for stereotyping by clueless directors still mired down in outdated social tropes (but quick on the dialect humor). Her thin, white, gay male actor chum fares no better.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2020
Run the Beast Down

Tottenham was once a quiet semi-rural suburb north of London where Charlie's parents lived in a bungalow with a back-yard garden abutting forests teeming with wildlife. Their son now lives in a former government housing project undergoing gentrification, having landed a posh corporate job requiring him to dress expensively, commute daily to the city's financial district, drink with the lads after work and neglect his girl friend.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2020
Women Laughing Alone with Salad
online

The Constructivists, a fledgling Milwaukee theater company, is back this fall with Women Laughing Alone with Salad. It consists of a four-day virtual production that is a treat for theatergoers and social media watchers alike.

In the space of 100 minutes, the audience becomes deeply involved in the main character, a 29-year-old bachelor named Guy (Rob Schreiner), and three of the women in his life: his live-in girlfriend Tori (Paige Bourne); his mother Sandy (Sabra Michelle); and a mysterious woman he meets on a rooftop bar, Meredith (Liz Ehrler).

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2020
Rastus and Hattie

Since their inception in 1920, robots in fiction have typically looked like humans and talked like machines.

Nowadays, in our age of Westworld-style technology, "bots" can be heard discoursing in the soothing tones of nannies and yoga instructors, but trade practice among real-life manufacturers of mobile mannequins advises strenuously against precision accuracy in replicating androids and gynoids (even sex dolls are carefully crafted to evidence overt reminders of their artificial infrastructures).

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2020
Incidental Moments of the Day

Dr. Anthony Fauci recently predicted we may not be able to sit safely in theaters until the end of 2021. If that is the case, we’ll have to make do with the new hybrid form of theater, the Zoom play of which Richard Nelson has become the main practitioner. His latest piece, Incidental Moments of the Day: The Apple Family: Life on Zoom is his deepest and most profound of a Zoom trilogy, examining the impact of national social currents without descending into political propaganda or overt symbolism.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
September 2020
Insulted Belarus(sia)
online

Online readings are our theater's response to the Covid crisis. Arlekin Players Theater and Cherry Orchard Festival do a very fine job of it in their reading - presented on Zoom - of Insulted. Belarus(sia), a new play by Andrei Kureichik that examines the current political events in Belarus - namely, the demonstrations and arrests following the bogus re-election of Aleksandr Lukashenko. The playwright, Andrei Kureichik, sits on the coordinating council of the protest movement. The reading was screened twice, once in Russian and once in English.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
September 2020
We're Gonna Die
online

"To be, or not to be" may have once been a dilemma to beguile wealthy Danish princes, but the riddle baffling us today is why we continue to endure so many terrible things—pain, sorrow, injury, abandonment, imminent extinction. What can we do to halt these "thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to" and what solace can we offer to those undergoing them?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2020
Pride and Prejudice
online

For starters, what we've got are two wealthy young bachelors, two broke young bachelors, five genteel-poor young misses and one rich old battle-axe—but this is 1813 England, when only male heirs could legally inherit property, making the sole means of acquiring wherewithal (or "digging for gold" as we call it nowadays) sufficient to secure a comfortable future was to marry it.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2020
Pursuit of Happiness, The

The projected shuttering of theater facilities for the remainder of the year ruled out cozy big-crowds-in-tiny-spaces musical pageants, but that didn't stop BoHo Theater invoking their special talent for inviting every playgoer to share in an intimate conversation with its onstage personnel. Since you can't get much more intimate than a heart-to-heart conducted in your own home, online stream seemed a fitting venue for BoHo's first production following their five Jeffs awarded in June.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2020
State vs. Natasha Banina

State vs. Natasha Banina is a livestream monologue presented by The Arlekin Players Theater. The script is based on Natasha’s Dream by the Russian playwright Yaroslava Pulinovich. The monologue is directed by Igor Golyak and performed by Darya Denisova.

The video monologue was streamed twice this month on Zoom, once in Russian with subtitles and once in English. I watched the Russian—having the great advantage of not understanding Russian; thus, the event was enhanced by language as intonation.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
August 2020
Love Noel: The Songs and Letters of Noel Coward
online streaming

The intimate environs of cabaret will probably be the last aspect of the entertainment industry to return to normal in this COVID world. Patrons squeezed shoulder to shoulder at tiny tables, mere inches away from performers projecting potentially infectious air particles is a scary atmosphere these days. Until a reliable vaccine becomes available, we will probably not be enjoying this unique, direct art form.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
August 2020
Bette Davis ain't for Sissies

Never mind Baby Jane!

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2020
Tempest, The
online

Shakespeare's Tempest features four disparate plot lines introduced by one of the longest expository speeches in western literature. Despite its many encumbrances, however—did I mention the dream sequences and the elaborate musical-fantasy pageant?—its tone must emerge as lighter-than-air at all times, lest the sparkling veil of illusion rendering its events possible is revealed to be mere tawdry tinsel.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2020
Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey, The
Westside Theater (Downstairs)

The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey should be on your short list of Off-Broadway plays to be seen this summer. It is an absorbing, poignant, and cleverly conceived one-man/multi-character play written and performed by James Lecesne. Not knowing what to expect, as I hadn't seen or read any reviews that accompanied its short run at Dixon Place, I can urge even to those who avoid one-person shows not to miss this heart-breaking story about the need for acceptance, the presence of intolerance, and the challenge to be all you can be.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
July 2015
Line, The
online (youtube)

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the closures of theaters and reinforced the feeling of being in suspended animation. With no live dramatic reaction to this national crisis which has brought all of our lives to a near screeching halt, it feels as if there has been scant considered reflection or introspection—just talking heads endlessly pontificating on cable news shows and a disconnected chief executive engaging in magical thinking.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2020
Weir, The
online streaming

Five lonely people swap ghost stories in a secluded Irish country pub in Connor McPherson’s touching play, The Weir. This woes of this disheartened quintet are strikingly relevant for the COVID-19 era. They are attempting to make human connection despite the psychological barriers that separate them.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2020
Groups of Ten or More People
online (youtube)

How's this for a story premise: On March 12, 2020, four young Chicago artists decide that since entertainment in the city has been shut down temporarily because of the "pandemic" (whatever that is), they will swear an "accountability pact" to abstain from social media, recreational substances, hookups, and other frivolous distractions to instead focus on creative projects too long postponed, and by doing so, emerge improved when the social whirl resumes in....oh, three weeks, maybe.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2020
Les Blancs
National Theatre - Olivier Theater

During the pandemic, NT Live at Home is providing a means of diversion with archival recorded performances from the National Theater. The latest production, a reworked version of Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs from 2016, is especially relevant as the Black Lives Matter movement dominates the news. Hansberry achieved fame in 1959 with her brilliant A Raisin in the Sun, the first play by an African-American woman on Broadway.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2020
And So We Come Forth
online (youtube)

As the hiatus from live theater continues with no respite in sight until at least 2021, we draw what sustenance we can from Zoom plays, archival broadcasts, benefit readings, and Hamilton on Disney Plus. Richard Nelson’s fictional Apple family is experiencing a similar sense of depravation and loss.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2020
The Golden Girls: The Lost Episodes
online (vimeo)

As the long intermission drags on into its fifth month, home movies and backstage chat are no longer enough for theatergoers craving brand-new written-from-scratch plays to remind them of better days when we really were all in this together—a theme epitomized in “The Golden” Girls, the long-running television comedy from the 1980s celebrating AARP-eligible women living independently and speaking their minds with uncensored candor.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2020
Quarantunes Live
Music Box Theater

Is there musical theater after COVID-19? You betcha! And Houston’s Music Box Theater is prepared to prove it to you. It is my high honor to announce the winner of this year’s award for Cleverest Title of a New Musical. May I have the envelope please? ... [Drum roll]… And the winner is… The Music Box Theater for Quarantunes Live. Better still, the show itself is very clever.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
June 2020
Christmas Bingo: Summer Edition
Royal George Theater

In the southern hemisphere, Christmas arrives in sunny summer, and Saint Nicholas brings children gifts in a boat rather than a sleigh. We learn this and many other holiday factoids—the history of candy canes, say, or how the annunciation would sound if the angel Gabriel were a Hamilton-style rapper—in the course of this irreverent,  but never blasphemous, comedy from the writers of Late Nite Catechism (still running without a break nearly thirty years after its premiere).

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2020
Candida
Online

The Gingold Theatrical Group (GTG), New York, has for years been producing monthly readings of Shaw's plays on stage. In this time of the plague, they're one of the innovative companies adapting to the lock-down by going digital. Starting on May 20th and available online for five days, they presented a reading of Shaw's Candida.

Candida was the fifth of Shaw's plays, written in 1894 and published in 1898 as one of the “Plays Pleasant.” Its first success was in new York in 1903, and a second success followed in London the next year.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
May 2020
Macbeth
online video

While stages are closed nationwide, we will have to settle for filmed past performances from mostly British and Canadian companies such as the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Stratford Festival. The latter two are streaming previous incarnations of wildly different  Macbeths. The Stratford Festival’s unedited version is competent and more conventional, but less viscerally exciting. Visual excitement is caused whenever Ian Lake as Macbeth frequently removes his shirt to expose a brawny torso, but it doesn’t make up for a lack of dramatic tension.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2020
Macbeth
online streaming

While stages are closed nationwide, we will have to settle for filmed past performances from mostly British and Canadian companies such as the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Stratford Festival. The latter two are streaming previous incarnations of wildly different  Macbeths. Shakespeare’s Globe’s version of the Scottish Play is a pared-down 90-minute edition for high-school students.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2020
In-Zoom
online streaming

“We’re heads now. We talk in windows,” cries one of two nameless characters in Bill Irwin’s touching, ten-minute play In-Zoom, presented by the Old Globe Theater of San Diego. The cry of frustration sums up our current lockdown status. This short two-hander addresses our lack of connection and the attempt to reach each other, literally breaking the barrier of cyberspace.

The premise is simplicity itself and like a Samuel Beckett playlet, In-Zoom captures the comic and tragic conundrum of daily life. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2020
Mad Forest
online streaming

While NT Live and other venues have offered archival productions to watch during COVID, a scattering of plays have been adapted to the new normal of digital presentations. Most companies have given readings for benefit fundraisers, but Bard College’s theater department attempted something different with its Zoom-based staging of Caryl Churchill’s 1990, “play from Romania,” Mad Forest. Director Ashley Tata and her student cast had begun rehearsals when the pandemic struck.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2020
Streetcar Named Desire, A
National Theatre -

There is one upside to all the theaters being closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Through streaming, YouTube, Zoom, and other digital platforms, we get a chance to catch up with intriguing productions we may have missed. One such is the Young Vic’s innovative 2014 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, which was shown in cinemas through HD Live and played a limited engagement at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2016 following an extended run in London. NT Live at Home will play the production for free on YouTube through May 28.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2020
To Master the Art
Broadway Playhouse

The spunky six-foot-two, "fluty"-voiced daughter of a staunch Republican from Pasadena, California, may not seem the stuff of heroism—isn't she famous, not for her work with the secret service during WW II, but for her COOKING?—so why is Julia McWilliams Child remembered today even by feminists too young to have seen her anywhere but on television?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2020
Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration

A plethora of Broadway performers came together online to celebrate the 90th birthday of the most influence musical-theater songwriter of his era, Stephen Sondheim. The event, titled Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration, presented by Broadway.com as a fundraiser for ASTEP (Artists Striving to End Poverty), had some technical issues when in premiered on April 26, but it’s now available on YouTube, and it is gorgeous and spectacular yet intimate and casual at the same time.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2020

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