Judgment at Nuremberg
Longacre Theater

It is always a gamble to stage a very popular classic film on Broadway, especially when the source material is so time specific. But director John Tillinger and his large cast have made the gamble pay off in this unexciting but refreshingly tasteful and understated adaptation of Abby Mann's Oscar-winning 1961 screenplay. If the production isn't exactly the last word in drama (as reflected by its very poor attendance), it is still an honorable one and nowhere as defeatist or dated as one might assume.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Good Thief, The
45 Bleecker

Generally absorbing, downbeat hostage story of an Irish hoodlum (a convincing Brian d'Arcy James) in over his head.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
Salle Richelieu, Comedie-Francaise

From the pit up pops a spiked-curled, tux and black-tied, shaking conductor who bounces to recorded music, as up spring formally attired "violinists" to surround him. It's a zany start to one of the funniest plays ever, witnessed throughout and catered to by two zany-like servants. When the pit is vacated, the stage fills with a curtain (one of many to come) suggesting the Parthenon on mountains, being put there by a painter on a scaffold on wheels.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
Royale Theater

One can visit this revival of Dale Wasserman's mental-institution drama about individuality vs. conformity and men vs. women without paying too much attention to those somewhat clumsily handled themes. It's enough to relish Gary Sinese taking a role utterly identified with another actor and giving it a compelling spin all his own. (By contrast, Amy Morton's Nurse Ratched is too reminiscent of Louise Fletcher's hushed control freak.)

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Producers, The
St. James Theater

Despite what you've heard, it's not as great as the film, nor is it the shining beacon of American musicals. The Producers is, however, an utter delight, from the unexpectedly winning songs to Nathan Lane's endlessly wonderful antics, from a new sequence that puts Leo (Matthew Broderick) quitting Whitehall & Marx in context to a hilarious song- and-dance number ("Keep It Gay") at the Debries residence.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Stones in His Pockets
John Golden Theater

The latest disappointment imported from overseas, Marie Jones's Stones in His Pockets is a play that dares to blast the opinion that smaller and more efficient is better, having two actors fill the roles of a cast of nearly fifteen. The set-up is: two extras, Jake (Sean Campion) and Charlie (Conleth Hill), find work on an Irish film set where a new picture is being shot, complete with order-barking director, a vain, accent-challenged ingenue; an overzealous production assistant and various others who pop in and out of the story.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Bells Are Ringing
Plymouth Theater

While not among the evergreens, Bells Are Ringing has enough pleasures to be a legitimate example of the "good old days" of Broadway musicals.  Tina Landau's proficient but bland revival simply has the bad luck to be up against a lively crop of spring shows and suffers by comparison. Taken on its own terms, however, this Bells certainly entertains.  Faith Prince and Marc Kudisch are individually good, though they lack romantic sizzle. The subway scene remains a can't-miss joy.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Bloomer Girl
City Center

A year after the success of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (the pioneering musical that dealt profoundly with box lunch socials), musical theater collaborators Harold Arlen (composer), E.Y. Harburg (lyricist) and Sig Herzig and Fred Saidy (book writers) would opt for more social significance with their 1944 tuner, Bloomer Girl. Bloomer Girl did not achieve the immortality of "Oklahoma," but its quaint charms, enlivened by adapter David Ives, were recently revived for the popular Encores! Series at the City Center.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Boy Gets Girl
Manhattan Theater Club - Stage I

Boy Gets Girl, the latest from up-and-coming playwright Rebecca Gilman, represents a 2-for-2 in terms of promise unfulfilled for this new voice in the theater. Critics have been singing her praises ever since the debut of her racially-charged drama, Spinning into Butter, at Lincoln Center last year, citing her willingness to hit on hot-button issues and bring forth topics relevant to modern society but are rarely explored in theater. Few, however, seems to mind that she starts with potentially explosive premises that completely deflate before your very eyes.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Breaker: An Aerial Fairie Tale
Dixon Place

One of the most beautiful, moving theater happenings in NYC is Breaker: An Aerial Fairie Tale, performed by five women trapeze artists and a four-piece jazz group. A circus rises into the air from the sea, and we fly with them.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Big Love
Long Wharf Theater

Is it pretentious or is it fun?  This is the question I must ask about provocative and puzzling Big Love, written by Charles Mee, which was the hit of the 2000 Humana Festival of New American Plays, now on the Main Stage of the Long Wharf Theater.  The playwright, also an historian, has used for the basis of his wildly inventive-Millennium piece, the classic Greek fable, The Suppliant Women; by Aeschylus.  In this drama, thought to be the world's oldest, fifty sisters murder 50 brothers, in actuality, their cousins, rather than marry these young men with whom t

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Birds, The
Yale Repertory Theater

The Yale School of Drama annually presents its Graduate Acting Class in a separate production from Yale Rep's regular schedule.  It is an event I've looked forward to and attended, with few exceptions, for more than 20 years, for it offers an opportunity to see potential stars of the future.  Many productions have been of Shakespeare plays, the most memorable one featuring Jane Kazmarek and Kate Burton.  This year, the choice is a free-wheeling adaptation of Aristophanes' classic, The Birds.  Written by Len Jenkin, playwright and teacher, and directed by Christopher B

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Blood Brothers
Downtown Cabaret Theater

Tell me it's not true. Say it's just a story, Something on the news. Tell me it's not true, Though it's here before me.

Those are the touching words that open Blood Brothers, the musical that the far-sighted Executive Producer Richard Hallinan brought 13 years ago on an incredible journey from England to the Downtown Cabaret in Bridgeport for its American Premiere. It was a courageous act. Here was a theater known best for its good solid revivals. Would its audience support an unknown work? The answer was a resounding YES!

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
bobrauschenbergamerica
Actors Theater of Louisville - Humana Festival

What a feast this play is! Like the art of Robert Rauschenberg himself it's a feast for the eye, the brain, the heart, and the funnybone but also a feast for the ear because of Charles L. Mee's gloriously clever and involving script.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Breaking the Code: A Hero Betrayed
Diversionary Theater

Prior to WWII, mathematician Alan Turing, age 24, distinguished himself at Cambridge with his published work, "On Computable Numbers..." During the war, he broke Germany's Enigma code, and his theories led to the invention of the computer. Winston Churchill presented him with the Officer of the British Empire, the empires highest civilian award. In the mid-fifties, after admitting to homosexuality, he died, allegedly at this own hand.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Class Act, A
Ambassador Theater

Linda Kline and Lonnie Price take a moving, hilarious, and three-dimensional look at the lovable lunatic that was Edward Kleban, lyricist for A Chorus Line. Beautifully crafted yet more "real" than most musicals, the show is filled with moments to savor (such as Kleban forced to present at Lehman Engel's BMI workshop, and the way he, Michael Bennett, and Marvin Hamlisch arrived at "one singular sensation").

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Closing Time
Arlene's Grocery

Short comic works by Irish playwright Flann O'Brien make for a thoroughly delightful piece of "Pub Theater," with live Irish music performed by one of the finest acting ensembles in town, directed vividly by Macdara Mac Uibh Aille. There is no better actor on stage anywhere than Sean Powell. 

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Chorus Line, A
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

In a glass case in the lobby are Michael Bennett's first tap shoes, bronzed, with other memorabilia.  In the audience at Press Night were Helen Bennett, Michael's mother who lent the artifacts, as well as his brother.  She's a strong supporter of her "son's show" as well as the Golden Apple, where A Chorus Line holds an all-time performance longevity record. In 1985-86, the Apple had to extend its first production, wedge repeats in between other shows, and replace another planned for the next season.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Description Beggared: Or, The Allegory of WHITENESS
Actors Theater of Louisville

Sitting through Mac Wellman's pedantically titled Description Beggared; or the Allegory of WHITENESS, (the caps and punctuation are his) commissioned by Actors Theatre of Louisville for this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays, is a trying experience. Trying to make sense of it, to figure out what is going on and why, yields slim results. Yet the play's visual and verbal effects are striking, even as they confound us.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Design For Living
American Airlines Theater

This attractive, nicely appointed revival of Noel Coward's 1933 gemstone seems designed not for living, but for loathing of critics who will sneer at its embellishments. Director Joe Mantello (The Vagina Monologues) heightens the homosexual current that was already run through it (including a more-than-friendly smooch between leads Alan Cumming and Dominic West) and Robert Brill's seductive, massive sets suggest a tour of Europe via Larger-Than-Life Land.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Design For Living
American Airlines Theater

Joe Mantello's revival of Noel Coward's most envelope-pushing work starts as strong drama, meanders into mildy amusing comedy, and ends as sour farce. Alan Cumming's adorable until he turns into a hammy transvestite freak; Jennifer Ehle's Gilda would be more at home in a Lillian Hellman potboiler than here. By the time Gilda ditches upright Ernest for her desperate friends, we're ready to take out the menage a trash.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Judgment At Nuremberg
Longacre Theater

From the portentious narration that accompanies the opening film clips to everyone's tendency to speechify, this is nothing if not earnest stuff. Thank heaven for George Grizzard's humor and restraint as a homespun judge. Maximilian Schell's just fine until he starts gobbling the scenery. Michael Mastro's mentally-challenged witness will likely cause debate, but it's a strong and fascinating acting choice. Nice work, too, from Robert Foxworth, Peter Francis James and a charming Marthe Keller.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Aida
Palace Theater

Nearly a year into its Broadway run, Aida remains an unqualified audience hit. Many critics have grumbled about this show, which had its Atlanta debut in 1998, but the musical is still packing `em in at the Palace Theater.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2001
Bobbi Boland
ArcLight Theater

Poor Bobbi Boland. Left behind in the wake of the tumultuous sixties, she just doesn't get it. She's caught in a time warp, and she can't get out. She clings desperately to her past, symbolized by the rhinestone tiara resting on a shelf in her living room etagere. It represents the high point of her life -- when she was crowned Miss Florida 20 years ago. As the play opens, we find Bobbi giving lessons on social graces to a young girl who lives down the street.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2001
Big River
Marriott's Lincolnshire Theater

At best, Big River bears the same relationship to Mark Twain as Oliver! to Charles Dickens, but Apple Tree's recent production emphasized the story -- as much out of despair at staging big song-and-dance numbers in a tiny mallfront space as out of literary reverence (though the density of both Roger Miller's score and William Hauptman's text tend to discourage extended spectacles that could stretch the running time to Wagnerian lengths.) Marriott's audiences want Musicals, however; so its staging is focused on showcasing vocal talent, often compromising plot, p

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2001
Broadway
Tomlinson Theater

This production is a rare revival of a melodrama co-written and originally directed by George Abbott. The play premiered in 1926 and was directed by Abbott in New York again the year he turned 100. Though Abbott was known for his touch with musicals, this is a straight play in three acts, one of Abbott's earliest successes as a director and playwright. The setting is backstage in a nightclub, so we see rehearsing of musical numbers and we hear the beginnings of songs when the performers exit through an upstage curtain to go onto the club stage.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
February 2001
Buddy's Gift
Coronet Studio Theater

Stand-up comic Jack Simmons turns serious in this monologue about the mystery of death, though he does try to lighten the subject with little sprinkles of humor. His approach is strictly personal: the Buddy in question is his late father, patriarch of a large Irish-Catholic family, who was diagnosed with incurable liver cancer in his late fifties.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2001
Connecticut Yankee, A
City Center

While much has been said and argued about on the merits of revising once and future musicals, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart did just that to their own 1927 hit, A Connecticut Yankee (adapted from "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain).

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
February 2001
Crumbs From The Table Of Joy
Old Globe Theaters

Sometimes good acting is not enough. Sometimes interesting directing is not enough. Not enough, that is, to mask slow, ponderous writing. Crumbs From The Table of Joy, on the Cassius Carter Centre Stage, depicts widower Godfrey Crump's (Bryan Hicks) move from Florida to Brooklyn with his two daughters Ernestine (Melany Bell) and Ermina (Audra Alise Polk). It is 1950, and blacks don't "belong" in white neighborhoods – a feeling strongly held in many large-city neighborhoods. This established, playwright Lynn Nottage burdens the tale with too many sub-plots.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2001
Fantasticks, The
Patio Playhouse

The Fantasticks seems to be staged somewhere every year. It is cute, has some "rememberable" songs, and has been the longest- running musical in Manhattan. At least three productions reached San Diego county in the last three years, each with its own uniqueness. Scripps Ranch Theater had one of the best El Gallos I've heard; Moonlight tended to be overly choreographed. At Patio Playhouse, The Fantasticks production is nicely balanced and fits the small venue, since the show requires no set but much ingenuity.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2001
High Dive
Manhattan Class Company

Leslie Ayvazian's autobio solo is thinly conceived but lively. The gimmick of having audience members cue her with dialogue (instead of using pre-recorded voices) keeps things percolating.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
February 2001
Rocky Horror Show, The
Circle in the Square

For those of us in the mid-curve of the Baby Boom generation, this show needs no introduction. The Rocky Horror Show is an indelible image in our past. Rocky, viewed two decades ago by high school and college students in movie theaters across the country, was our first taste of the erotically absurd. Although few of us would admit it, most of us could identify with Brad Majors, the nerdy hero, and his squeaky clean fiance, Janet Weiss. We hadn't met -- much less become -- the bizarre creatures they encounter on one cold and stormy night.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2001
Beowulf
Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts

When Benjamin Bagby is on stage, he tells a story nearly everyone knows, in a language no one understands - and the audience is mesmerized. His performance of Beowulf, in Old English, is creative, disciplined, entertaining, inspiring... in short, theater of the first magnitude. Bagby exploits the entire range of vocal sound, form, and technique: he growls, yells, sings, whispers, chants, as required. Through a thorough education to the oral tradition and a meticulous analysis of the text, he animates each phrase with commitment to his specific aesthetic decision.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
January 2001
Cabaret
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

From the opening strains of the knockout opening number, which bids the audience "Wilkommen" in several languages, Cabaret is marvelously successful in transporting audiences to a different world. It is 1929, and the world is that of Weimar Germany, in the days when the Third Reich was coming to power. John Kander and Fred Ebb's magical score allows us to effortlessly slip into the past, when good times were as close as the neighborhood nightclub.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2001
Captain's Tiger, The
Off Broadway Theater

The following statement may be taken as a criticism, although it's not meant that way. Athol Fugard's most recent play, The Captain's Tiger, is not an emotional blockbuster. It is a finely crafted piece of work that casts a hypnotic spell over the audience.  A cascade of words falls soothingly over the ears, much like the sounds of gently lapping waves. Captain's Tiger is a nautical tale that tells of the author's early days on a steamship. The author is only 20 and very unsure of himself.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2001
Constant Star
Actors Theater of Louisville

I was put on this earth to agitate, writer/director Tazewell Thompson has Ida B. Wells proclaiming in Constant Star, his absorbing play about the fiery, uncompromising journalist, lecturer, teacher and anti-lynching crusader for civil rights and women's suffrage. áUntil recent years, the life and work of this Mississippi-born daughter of slaves was largely missing from history books. One reason may have been because Wells irritated members of her own race who believed men, not women, should lead the civil rights battles.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
January 2001
Death By Chocolate
Derby Dinner Playhouse

Death By Chocolate, Derby Dinner Playhouse's dumbed-down current offering, recalls those simple-minded corny senior plays that small town and rural high schools used to do. Surely they are choosing better things these days. This comedy/mystery, set on the eve of the reopening of a posh health resort in Pennsylvania's Poconos Mountains following the supposed suicide of its previous owner, is loud, frantic, and agonizingly unfunny as it hammers home every cliche of the genre.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
January 2001
Dream Of Doors, The: A Musical Celebration!
Players of Sarasota

The titled portals of The Dream Of Doors are metaphorical. They represent entrances to jobs, restaurants, neighborhoods in which to live, schools, even means of transportation, doors that were closed, mainly to African Americans, before and during their struggle for Civil Rights. Representative black people advance arguments for breaking the doors down violently vs. accepting limited entry or access vs. demanding forcefully but nonviolently that the doors open. The dream refers to community elder Ms.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2001
Art
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Patty & Jay Baker Theater Complex

When it comes to fashion, food trends or theater, Milwaukeeans have learned to be patient.  It can take months - even years - before the latest hit migrates to the Midwest.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
December 2000
Belle Of Amherst, The
Playhouse Theater

The Belle Of Amherst is worth seeing under any circumstance, and especially so when we attended on the 75th birthday of its star, Julie Harris.  Miss Harris won a Tony Award for this portrayal 24 years ago -- her unprecedented fifth Tony as Best Actress -- and she told us yesterday that this tour will be the last times she'll do the role.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
December 2000

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