Bye Bye Birdie
Coronado Playhouse

Bye Bye Birdie never really grows old. There are always ardent fans, young of age, that idolize their favorite talent. The plot is simple. Rock idol Conrad Birdie is drafted into the Army. His PR flak/manager creates a media moment in Sweet Apple, Ohio. And, of course, we get love requited and unrequited, the balloon-sized ego of the idol, swoons by the thousands from adoring teens, preteens, and pre-preteens; and frustrated parents.

Bye Bye Birdie is just plain fun, replete with many of director Leigh Scarritt's students of all ages.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Capitol Steps: When Bush Comes to Shove
John Houseman Theater

n December, 1981, a group of White House staffers planned a Christmas Party with song parodies and skits about current political headlines. Several administrations later, now known as "Capitol Steps," the group has made several albums and tours the country making fun of the very people who employ them. New York is lucky to have them for a few weeks.

Jeannie Lieberman
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Carnival
F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater

At the end of last season, The New Jersey Shakespeare Festival made a diverting digression from classic plays with The Fantasticks, the famously whimsical and long-running musical by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones. The oddly delicate 1960 show that opened inconspicuously Off-Broadway and without the benefit of great reviews, delighted audiences and became a hit that ran 40 years. It also proved a resounding hit with the Shakespeare Festival audiences. Perhaps that show's success inspired artistic director Bonnie J.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Carnival
F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater

Carnival, which opens the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival's  "Grand Magic" 40th anniversary season, is definitely fun for the children and pre-teen crowd, but as adult fare, this production is predictable and lacks imagination. Maybe it's post-September 11th cynicism that makes this show seem incredibly dated.

Kathryn Wylie-Marques
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Cooper Savage
West End Theater

There's so much to admire about Bash Halow's Cooper Savage, it takes a slight trepidation to report that the play never quite works. Halow is obviously going for a hailstorm of themes: Southern family dysfunction, budding sexuality, self-image issues, the appeal of a possibly dangerous drifter. But all these tantalizing ideas never coalesce into one solid production. Only in the fragments can an audience see the possibility of what could have been.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Company
John F. Kennedy Center For The Performing Arts

For the second instalment in the big "Sondheim Celebration," the Kennedy Center has gone back to the engaging 1970 Company, which received 15 Tony nominations and came through with seven wins, catapulting Sondheim into the pantheon of musical theater. Whereas the Broadway original had a set (by Boris Aronson) that emphasized the vertical and featured two elevators, Derek McLane here has devised an enveloping metallic set that emphasizes the horizontal: it presents an aerial view of several New York skyscrapers, with shifting projections on a large upstage screen.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Endpapers
Variety Arts Theater

What could be more reassuring and satisfying to a playwright than to have his first full-length play turn out to be quite good? That playwright Thomas McCormack happens to be 70 years old may, at first, sound astonishing but not when you discover that his play is drawn from a world he knows intimately. Isn't that what everyone tells us to write about?

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Morning's At Seven
Belasco Theater

Paul Osborn's lovely play, Morning's at Seven, has just been extended for another month on Broadway. Run -- do not walk! The play is a peek into a rural past, in 1938, with ordinary Americans and their family interactions. It's almost like an anthropological study of customs, beliefs, taboos of a time long gone as four elderly sisters deal with the consequences of their marriages, lives, and affairs. The entire acting ensemble is super, though Piper Laurie, Julie Hagerty, and Elizabeth Franz really knocked me out with the breadth of their performances.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Annie Get Your Gun
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

Whoopee for the Golden Apple's respecting the great Irving Berlin by doing all the music and words that he wrote for Annie Get Your Gun. Recent p.c. "revisalizers" would have us deprived of the very funny "I'm an Indian Too" and the "Indian Ceremonial" Dance that's a choreographic high point in Golden Apple's production. Luckily, we even get the clever "Old Fashioned Wedding" that Berlin wrote for a 1966 revival.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Bonnie Parker
Trinity River Arts Center

Diminutive actress Dixie Lee Sedgwick performed her one-woman show, Bonnie Parker, on May 1, 2002 at the Trinity River Arts Center in its next-to-last workshop production before opening May 21 for a two-week run at Blue Heron Arts Center in New York. Sedgwick, who also wrote the show, has been refining it since spring 1999 at numerous Dallas area venues. She has done extensive research on the distaff half of the outlaw duo Bonnie and Clyde (presented on celluloid in 1967 with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty).

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Capitol Steps: When Bush Comes to Shove
450 West 42nd Street

Why is this comedy revue, "When Bush Comes to Shove," different from all other comedy revue? One, it's a troupe of grownups whose insights and satires show mature writing with depth and intelligence as well as humor. Two, they are all Broadway-level singers. From Bush's malapropisms to Arafat and Sharon to baseball to the environment to cloning, they are right on target as they take familiar melodies and skewer something. It's full of mind-ticklers like the exceptionally brilliant word backward (or bird wackward) trip that Mike Tilford takes us on.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Damn Yankees
Walnut Street Theater

Damn Yankees is a 1955 musical with a great premise and two spectacular roles, but, let's face it, the show has flaws. It is slow-moving, and the minor players are stick figures with corny dialogue. The most interesting character, Lola, appears to have been an afterthought. This quintessential Bad Girl doesn't show up until the latter half of Act One, at which time Gwen Verdon, in the original production, stole the show.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, The
John Golden Theater

It's as if producer Max Bialystock is back in business, trying to mount a comedy about a subject so gross, the play will have to close after one performance. Credit Edward Albee for choosing an inconceivable plot, writing about a man who has sex with a goat and making us care about him. Not only that; Albee has written perhaps the wittiest of all his plays. Bill Pullman and Mercedes Ruehl are an apparently-happy married couple with a relatively normal gay son. Pullman is a world-famous architect, on top of the world at age 50.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Few Stout Individuals, A
Signature Theater Company at Peter Norton Space

A good way to describe John Guare's newest play, A Few Stout Individuals, would be, well, stout. Literally busting at the seams with characters, historical events and information, this extravagant re-imagining of the process by which one Samuel Clemens (William Sadler) attempted to draft the memoirs of President Ulysses S. Grant (Donald Moffat) is overstuffed. But nobody can make that quite as endurable as Guare, as for every scene in the play feels trite or mundane, twice as many are healthy reminders of what an accomplished storyteller the man can be.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Few Stout Individuals, A
Signature Theater Company at Peter Norton Space

I generally love John Guare's writing for both stage and film, but you can't win `em all. A Few Stout Individuals, his new take on a dying, debt-ridden Ulysses S. Grant and the question of who will write his memoirs, starts with a stiff opening with nothing happening and then dives into repetitious banter and haranguing, much by an acerbic Mark Twain, which is painful to watch.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Into the Woods
Broadhurst Theater

Any Sondheim musical with as much to offer as Into the Woods must be approached with a certain degree of gratitude and reverence, even when the full experience falls short of our high expectations. In Woods, Sondheim and librettist James Lapine are working on a level, musically and intellectually, higher than most of us can grasp, and when they hit the mark - either thematically with the piece's meditations on loss and the bonds between two people, or musically with such songs as "No One is Alone" and the delightful "Agony" -- the results are transporting.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Into The Woods
Broadhurst Theater

Stephen Sondheim's deconstruction of fairy tales in Into the Woods is both an intellectual and a theatrical experience. He's a unique wordsmith, and a quirky, zany, subtle, tunesmith. The fun in Act One is his cleverness in retelling the familiar tales. The fun in Act Two is his dark but theatrical take of the aftermath of "Lived happily ever after." With the flawless casting of John McMartin, Laura Benanti, Kerry O'Malley, Molly Ephraim, Gregg Edelman, and the entire rest of the ensemble, playing in Douglas W.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Godfadda Workout, The
American Place Theater

The Godfadda Workout brings a new star performer to New York. Okay, he's 43 and has been a performer for many years, but he's new to us. Seth Isler is an actor, comedian and impressionist, flexible in body and character, with great charm and athleticism.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Man Who Had All The Luck, The
American Airlines Theater

In his very first play, Arthur Miller gave himself a problem he couldn't quite write his way out of: can you make heavy drama out of something that doesn't happen, near tragedy out of the mere fear of tragedy? He gave it a game try, though, creating a character who, blessed with constant good luck, develops a neurotic dread of the misfortune that has to be just around the corner. It's a workable conceit, but David Beeves' reactions are so extreme, the piece stops being a universal drama and turns into a less convincing, less interesting look at aberrant pathology.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Man Who Had All The Luck, The
American Airlines Theater

Arthur Miller's first play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, written when he was twenty-five, truly shows the promise of the great writer he became. We see the seeds of his marvelous Death of a Salesman in a failing father who has false ambitions for one of his two sons. The conflicts are more blatant, but the power was there in this play, full of drama, anguish, even some humor and melodrama. And what an interesting problem: what goes on inside a man who is lucky in all of his endeavors? How does that affect him and those around him?

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Metamorphoses
Circle in the Square

It's been apparent since her highly-stylized and acrobatic work in Chicago that director Mary Zimmerman has a unique and captivating theatrical sense. What she's now refined, judging from her current Metamorphoses, is a sense of cohesion and purpose to her storytelling. Not only do we get pretty and witty stage pictures to look at, but this retelling of Ovid's myths has a children's-theater simplicity, and the evening, using interconnected themes and stories, builds to not one but two touching finales.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Morning's at Seven
Belasco Theater

Tired of the relentlessly pointless plays littering the season and yearning for the deep contentment one gets from a gentle and satisfying human comedy? Look no further than Paul Osborne's 1939 charmer, Morning's at Seven, which was rediscovered two decades ago and, thankfully, re-rediscovered again, courtesy of director Daniel Sullivan and a nifty cast of old pros, most notably William Biff McGuire, Elizabeth Franz, Estelle Parsons and Buck Henry.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Mystery of Charles Dickens, The
Belasco Theater

IIn the Broadway one-man show, The Mystery of Charles Dickens, starring Simon Callow, we see a 19th-Century man portrayed in 19th-Century grand-ham performance style, when there was no amplification in theaters, and one must above all be heard, mustn't one. The show, for the most part poorly written by Peter Ackroyd, begins with rather boring exposition about Dickens' early life. As it continues, Callow, at least in this show, proves to be basically a voice actor with unused physical capability.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Private Lives
Richard Rodgers Theater

At times, Howard Davies' staging of Noel Coward's classic comedy feels like it's going to be the Private Lives. Lindsay Duncan, with her effortless glamour, smashing smile and insouciant delivery, could not be bettered as Amanda; while, apart from a couple of unnecessary winks to the audience, Alan Rickman casually underplays ex-husband Elyot. (He's so laid back, in fact, that he occasionally fails to project.) Adam Godley convinces as Amanda's stuffed-shirt new hubby; Emma Fielding makes a lively, wacky Sibyl.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Private Lives
Richard Rodgers Theater

Good theater doesn't get much better than Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan in Noel Coward's Private Lives. As directed by Howard Davies, the actors emphasize and embellish the human side of the brisk brittle characters we usually see in this play. Flip dialogue is not enough for these masters of comic timing; they also dig into the underlying conflicts of these smart, wealthy wastrels as their relationship survives through conflict. Act One is one of the funniest ever written.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
And Then They Came For Me
Dallas Children's Theater

When playwright James Still read Eva Geiringer Schloss' book, "Eva's Story: A Survivor's Tale," about her experiences during the Holocaust, he was moved to construct a play from its contents.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Blue Surge
Public Theater

I'm not one of the several theater critics quick to hail Rebecca Gilman as the playwright du jour and savior for the social-consciousness play. Her previous efforts, which include Spinning Into Butter and the male-stalker effort, Boy Gets Girl, intrigue with their initial tautness and tease of entering darker territory, but Gilman always makes the plays safer and more accommodating than they should be. It's almost as if a committee dictated their end results, because what begins as jolting drama ends up as flat tract.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Blue Surge
Public Theater

Blue Surge is a rare bird: a first-rate, working-class drama. It's a hot, very funny, contemporary comedy, perfectly cast: Rachel Miner, Joe Murphy, Colleen Werthmann, Steve Key, Amy Landecker are directed with energy and great timing by Robert Falls. The show's well designed by Walt Spangler, costumed by Birgit Rattenborg Wise and lit by Michael Philippi. The people are proletarians: cops, hookers, the uneducated working class (except for a middle-class girlfriend of one of the cops as a contrast in aspirations).

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Cloud Nine
Diversionary Theater

Cloud 9: Act I: 1880, Plantation in Africa. The height of British imperialism.  Act II: 1980, London. While taking place 100 years later, three continuing characters age a mere 25 years. While technology has taken quantum leaps, human social progress has barely moved. Confused yet?

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Cocktail Party, The
Patio Playhouse

Patio Playhouse's current production, T. S. Eliot's Tony-winning play, The Cocktail Party, staged by Richard Gant, opens closes with a cocktail party.  In between, the play ponderously explores relationships, morality, and bad cooking. Why is the hostess missing? What is her husband's relationship with one of the guests? Who is the stranger at the party? Who is deceiving whom?

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Compleat Female Stage Beauty
Globe Theater

It's the 1660s, and Charles II (Tom Hewitt) has opened the theaters after two decades of Puritanism. Further, he's decreed that women shall play the female roles, and males may no longer do so. Edward Kynaston (Robert Petkoff), the leading man in the field, revolts, now out of work and out of favor.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Cooking With Gus
Theater Works

Do you like TV comedies a la Lucille Ball? If so, and you don't mind one transposed to the stage (but dealing with a TV show), you're going to toast this marshmallow. Successful published cook Gussie loves and lives with Walter yet puts off marriage while her dream of having a televised cooking show keeps eluding her. When the big opportunity arrives, she faints from camera fright.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Dazzle, The
Gramercy Theater

A few years before R. Crumb's siblings and the Lidz uncles, the Collyer Brothers, real-life "Hermits of Harlem," slowly declined from high society into ostracized seclusion. They were ultimately found, long-dead, by police who discovered the two bodies walled in by eccentric inventions and bundles of newspapers. Richard Greenberg, who is becoming a formidable dramatist, didn't let himself be bound by the truth when turning the Collyer story into The Dazzle, which gives one brother some traits of the other and disregards chunks of real biography.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Everybody Loves Opal
Coronado Playhouse

The Coronado Playhouse is currently running John Patrick's Everybody Loves Opal under the direction of Keith A. Anderson. Opal Kronkie lives on the edge of a dump in a Midwestern city. She is a third-generation owner and a third-generation collector of miscellaneous refuse of others. Set designer Rosemary King utilizes Coronado Playhouse's large deep stage to the maximum. The set includes stairs and ramp to an upstairs and a hidden exit to the basement, as well as the house entrance.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Elephant Man, The
Royale Theater

The elements are all there for a touching, provocative evening of theater as the sad life of grotesquely deformed John Merrick, "The Elephant Man," is recounted in Bernard Pomerance's famous play. What unfolds at the Royale Theater, however, is a clunky, remote affair, with five Brechtian touches for every two that actually work.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Fortune's Fool
Music Box Theater

In the case of drunks, most people prefer to keep a safe distance. But the one on marvelous display in Mike Poulton's adaptation of Ivan Turgenev's 150-year-old, 19th-century play is a drunk of the highest order. Playing a rumpled, shabby Russian hanger-on named Vassily Semyonitch, Alan Bates gives a towering portrayal of a man whose world has crumbled on him, and in Fortune's Fool's penultimate scene, Bates performs an extended drunk bit that impresses by how un-technical Bates plays it.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Fortune's Fool
Music Box Theater

A play the way they used to make `em, albeit 150 years ago in Russia. In classic theatrical fashion, nothing actually happens -- nothing, that is, except secrets revealed, emotions roiled, foundations shaken and compromises made. Alan Bates, as an impoverished member of the household who pays his rent by occasionally allowing himself to be humiliated, bumbles and apologizes, abases himself and then rises to dignity, and, in a memorable turn, fashions a drunken remembrance into a comedic aria.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Fortune's Fool
Music Box Theater

Fortune's Fool, Turgenev's mid-nineteenth-century play is more of a valid drama for today than most plays written in the last decade. Its people have deep feelings and deep inner pain and find themselves in a moral dilemma. And how brilliant are two of today's finest actors: the great farceur Frank Langella and the amazing Alan Bates, who gives us long monologues without a moment that isn't fascinating. What a privilege to see a master like Bates play a character who declaims while getting progressively drunker -- it's one of the all-time great drunk scenes.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Graduate, The
Plymouth Theater

Okay, regarding what all you've heard about The Graduate: it's only half-true. Yes, Kathleen Turner bares all. Yes, the show often bastardizes Mike Nichols' benchmark counterculture motion picture. And yes, the cast is wildly uneven and, in one case, downright awful. But it seems to me the shuddering cold response by critics operates on a decidedly pro-American bias, almost as if to say, "How on earth could this be a hit in (gasp!) London!" (Let's also not forget that many American productions are now heading there, not vice versa lately).

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Graduate, The
Plymouth Theater

Though not the disaster most critics have tagged it, this is still a curious production, one that retains some of the classic film's humor but feels utterly divorced from context or meaning, despite the between-scene snippets of `60s pop.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002

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