Boxing 2000
Present Company Theatorium

Leave it to the skewed sensibilities of downtown darling Richard Maxwell to fashion a play around amateur boxing—a sport that is equated with agility and speed and still bless it with his trademark deadpan dialogue. In his latest effort, Maxwell turns his attentions to two brothers, seemingly products of the street, Jo-Jo (Gary Wilmes) and Freddie (Robert Torres), who are prepping for a small-time fight.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
September 2000
Blast!
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

For those of us who could not attend the opening and closing ceremonies at the recent Olympics in Sydney, Blast! is a satisfying substitute. Its nonstop energy and innovative rhythms capture the exhilaration one would have expected to share as part of the festivities in Australia.

For no good reason other than to celebrate music and the full spectrum of the human spirit, the talents of Blast! put forth an electrifying spectacle.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2000
Blue Room, The
Broadway Studio Theater

Oh, how the sexual landscape has changed in the past 100 years, when Arthur Schnitzler penned the original La Ronde. What shocked 19th-century audiences barely causes a murmur in today's updated version, even with nudity thrown in for good measure. Although this production of The Blue Room lacks the star power that attracted Broadway audiences (to see Nicole Kidman in the nude), it is witty, powerful and completely entertaining. Renaissance Theaterworks is an up-and-coming Milwaukee theater company that excels in presenting plays from a woman's point of view.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2000
Death Of A Salesman
Ahmanson Theater

After successful runs in Chicago and New York, this production of the Arthur Miller classic comes to L.A. in taut, polished shape. The actors have invested themselves deeply in their roles and work with assurance, backed up by elaborate production values -- revolving stages, tricky lighting, cubistic set -- and a director working at full strength. Strength is probably the operative word in this contemporary interpretation of the play, with Brian Dennehy delivering a big, loud Willy and Elizabeth Franz a vigorous, angry Linda.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2000
Evening Of Tennessee Williams, An
Rudyard Kipling

Of the four one-act plays of Tennessee Williams that Coffee Cup Theater Company is presenting at the Rudyard Kipling, only The Dark Room has enough substance to be compelling. Natalie Reece is Mrs. Pocciotti, a care-laden Italian woman who, under persistent questioning by a social worker (Tracy Jones), gradually reveals the shocking truth about her teen-age daughter's six-month seclusion in a darkened room. Reece's accent and delivery go straight to the heart of her character.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
September 2000
Artaud Le Momo
Collective Unconscious

This was the world premiere for Alexander Panas's look at seminal theater theorist Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). Committed to an insane asylum in Rodez, France, Artaud spent dearly a decade there undergoing regular shock treatments that completely destroyed his health. Panas shows a man with violent mood swings and uncontrolled libido but one who is also a victim of overzealous therapy and nonstop predatory sexual taunting.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Bacchae, The
La Plaza Cultural

In The Bacchae, Euripides shows the disastrous consequences of challenging a superior power.  Young Pentheus (Kenneth Garson), governor of Thebes, is alarmed by the appearance of a new religion, which promotes orgiastic revelries in the woods and especially corrupts his city's women.  His entire family, including grandfather Cadmus (Glenn B.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Cuban Operator Please
Teatro 309, Charas/El Bohio

Adrian Rodriguez paints a very personal picture of the Cuban exile community, a very different one from what filled our TV screens earlier this year. Father (Jose Antonio) has lived in Union City, Cuba's "northernmost province" since leaving his country. Now married with two sons, he has worked long hours in an embroidery factory to support his family. The transition to life in the U.S. has left him taciturn and unable to show emotion except when playing baseball, his passion.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Darker Face Of The Earth, The
American Renegade Theater

Rita Dove, who won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1987, is a gutsy writer who is unafraid to tackle the Oedipus myth, slavery, miscegenation and folk song all in one fell swoop. Working on a big canvas -- an 1820s plantation replete with swamps, cotton fields and nineteen characters -- Dove struggles to bring her impassioned but flawed text under control.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Expecting Isabel
Mark Taper Forum

There's good news and bad news about Expecting Isabel. The good news is that Lisa Loomer, an ex-standup comic and sitcom writer, is a funny writer, someone who can find much humor in the trials and tribulations of a 40-something couple trying desperately for its first child. The bad news is she will stoop at nothing to get laughs: cartoon characters, cliche ethnic types, dubious one- liners. Loomer also stretches out her thin story to such inordinate length that it ends up wearing out its welcome.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Don Juan In Hell
Irish Repertory

I don't know about you, but to my mind, George Bernard Shaw's plays always seem like a philosophical dissertation in search of a drama. Characters talk and talk and talk, but the outcome always seems the same, no matter where the play would end during its run. That said, the Irish Rep's revival of Shaw's Don Juan In Hell seems more than ideal. Staged as a reading and starring four old-time pros, this is a sit-down production that truly lets you experience the words in every sense.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Godspell
Theater at St. Peter's - Citicorp Center

I think it might be safe to say that never in my life before have I encountered two tasteless, punishing religious rock musicals in one theatergoing year.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Man Who Came To Dinner, The
American Airlines Theater

The inaugural production in the Roundabout Theater's new Broadway home, the unfortunately- titled American Airlines Theater (formerly the Selwyn Theater), is The Man Who Came To Dinner, a revival of the 1939 Moss Hart-George S. Kaufman comedy about a pompous, enraging critic who wreaks havoc on a decent, upstanding family when he takes a tumble on their property. The great news is that the critic is played by Nathan Lane, a treasure of the Broadway stage.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Habitos Oscuros
Teatro Armando Perez, Charas/El Bohio

Appearances can be deceiving. What goes on inside the Convent of the Humiliated Redeemers may be shocking to anyone who doesn't know their Almodovar. Coke-snorting nuns that pen porn on the side are just the tip of the iceberg. When divine providence leads an egregious sinner in the guise of pop singer Yolanda (Lorena Arriagada) to the sisters, a massive show of hospitality ensues. The only problem is that Jolanda wants to go straight, an impossible goal among these perverted religionists.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Die Ungarische Medea
Teatro Armando Perez, Charas/El Bohio

What if your husband were about to leave you for a young blonde? What if your son turned against you? What if a few moments later he died in a car crash? Like her mythological antecedent, this "Hungarian Medea" picks an extreme solution. Playwright Arpad Goncz (former President of Hungary) sees Medea's predicament as a spiritual quest: when Mada concludes life has no more meaning, her decisive nature allows only suicide as a response. Goncz's reference to the Medea is ironic, because modern times don't permit triumphant revenge.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Habladores
Present Company Theatorium

My high school Spanish teacher always suspected that the English verb "to blabber " came from "hablaba," Spanish for "he was speaking." She must have been thinking about Habladores, by Golden Age Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616). Most noted as the author of "Don Quixote de la Mancha," Cervantes also wrote over a dozen intermedios, brief plays to fill the space between acts of a tragedy or other more serious stage work.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Brothers And Sisters - Part I: Meetings and Partings
John Jay College Theater

This is the first time New York audiences have seen Lev Dodin's well-traveled production of Brothers and Sisters, which dates from the precise beginning of perestroika in 1985. Russians would be in a better position to grasp the irony in this adaptation of Fyodor Abramov's trilogy of novels about village life in Russia's Far North at the close of WWII.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
July 2000
Brothers And Sisters - Part II: Roads And Crossroads
John Jay College Theater

Part of Lincoln Center Festival 2000, this stage adaptation of Fyodor Abramov's trilogy of life in Russia's Far North continues over a second evening to show the same village five years after the end of WWII.

In this more somber Part II, the villagers' mood is temporarily lifted by a film clip of smiling peasants harvesting wheat -- until it is announced that the state grain requirement will be doubled. This effectively condemns them to another year of near famine; forced "loans" to the Party district committee further bled them.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
July 2000
Big: The Musical
Ritz Theater

This is a smaller Big and a delightful one.  It's a new production, using a script that's been adapted by director Art McKenzie.  The story of a kid whose wish to be grown-up is granted, for a while, was a wonderful film with Tom Hanks in 1988.  Then a lavish and costly musical version ran six months on Broadway in 1996.  FAO Schwartz put big bucks into the show, and director Mike Ockrent made it into a virtual commercial for the toy store.  After Big, The Musical closed, author John Weidman, songwriters David Shire and Richard Maltby, Jr.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
July 2000
Dance Like a Man
Tribeca Performing Arts Theater 2

A long-overdue Festival of Indian Theater brought U.S. premieres for works by two of India's most popular playwrights to the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. The one reviewed here, Mahesh Dattani's Dance Like a Man, asks whether a performer should have special rights within an upper-middle-class, traditional family.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
July 2000
Filao
Damrosch Park Tent

Inspired by Italo Calvino's magical-realist novel "The Baron in the Trees," this "new circus" event is called Filao, a clever contraction of the French word for high wire. Now, after having toured Europe and America since 1997, Filao comes to Lincoln Center Festival 2000, its second-to-last venue.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
July 2000
Annie
Iroquois Amphitheater

Crusty old Harold Gray, who wrote and drew the Little Orphan Annie comic strip from 1924 until his death in 1968, once famously defended the strip's emphasis on violence with this retort: "Sweetness and light -- who the hell wants it? What's news in the newspapers? Murder, rape, and arson. That's what stories are made of."

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
June 2000
Rosemary Clooney
Regency Hotel

Rosie's back with a new beat, a Bossa Nova beat. It's not that the incomparable Rosemary Clooney was ever afraid of taking on a challenge during her amazing 55-year career as a professional "girl singer." Opening a two-week engagement at Feinstein's At The Regency to launch the release of "Brazil," her new Concord album, Clooney demonstrated on opening night that her heart, if not her soul, was on the beat that has proved daunting to many a popular American singer.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
June 2000
Current Events
Manhattan Theater Club - Stage II

Politics is always a tricky subject for a playwright to tackle; either you're preaching to the converted or talking to a brick wall. People don't come to the theater to be lectured; they want to be entertained. I'm happy to report that David Marshall Grant's Current Events emerges victorious on both fronts.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
June 2000
Glass Menagerie, The
Cap 21

Set in St. Louis on the eve of World War II, The Glass Menagerie is a family tale of hope, despair and deception. Mississippi transplant Amanda lives with her two adult children in a modest apartment with shabby furnishings -- a far cry from how she hoped to end up. Her husband abandoned them years before to turn Amanda into a single mother, a status that commanded none of the respect but all of the drawbacks that we have with us sixty years later. Son Tom, who doubles as narrator in the play, works in a warehouse for a piddling salary.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
June 2000
Hotel Suite
Gramercy Theater

Neil Simon's new pastiche of his one-act, hotel-based plays of old, now newly dressed up and called Hotel Suite, is truly the first theatrical experience that I can recall that is both remarkable and stunningly awful. The four tales represented are all by Mr. Simon and have varying degrees of success as plays.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
June 2000
Blind Alley
Puerto Rican Traveling Theater

This is a trio of one-acts, each with realistic female characters in a contemporary urban setting. Hopscotch shows teenagers Haydee (Monica Read) and Dee (Mariana Carreno) dickering over how to spend Christmas. With a mother doing time, Haydee has "graduated" from school dropout population to petty crime, so Dee's more stable situation of separated, inimical parents makes her seem a bastion of stability. Add to that Dee's vestigial moral schema, and she is on her way to escape from the squalid life depicted. Maybe.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
May 2000
Bruce Vilanch: Almost Famous
Westbeth Theater Center

The moppet-haired guy who usually sits to the left of center square Whoopi Goldberg on "Hollywood Squares" is the latest Hollywood denizen to get his own one-man gig.

While amusing at times, Bruce Vilanch's humorous diatribe exploring his long life as a gag writer, celebrity emergency jokester and sometime actor is seriously under-imagined and never as funny as the awards shows he has made a lucrative career writing for, it's almost like watching the outtakes of material that wasn't quite gut-busting enough to make it into Billy Crystal's oeuvre.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
May 2000
Broadway
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Hard to believe Broadway debuted as a fresh backstage story of a song and dance man hoping to become a star along with gaining a partner for his act and in marriage. She's the fresh young thing, so familiar in gangster movies, who has also attracted mobster boss Steve Crandal. They've since been seen in dozens of Prohibition-era backstage and gangster plays and movies, featuring more or less important music and comedy.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2000
Copenhagen
Royale Theater

In Michael Frayn's intense, thoughtful play Copenhagen, two physicists, Niels Bohr (Philip Bosco), a Danish Jew and father of quantum mechanics, and Werner Heisenberg (Michael Cumpsty), Bohr's young German protegee and author of "The Uncertainty Principle," meet in some sort of afterlife to debate the meaning of their lives, their collaboration, and their ideological conflicts.  Most specifically, they re-live a mysterious meeting that took place in Denmark in 1941, when Heisenberg was chief of the Nazi A-bomb project.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
May 2000
Collected Stories
FSU/Asolo Conservatory in Cook Theater

Asolo's Producing Artistic Director has saved his company's best-of-season for its end, a play with poetic ambiguity in a crystalline, compelling production. A relationship grows between a writer/teacher who begins as a tough, almost unwilling mentor and a student who mirrors her own talent when younger but is otherwise rapturously enthusiastic and pushy. The two become colleagues and, in mother-to-daughter fashion, share their feelings and experiences. Then, near her professional and physical end, Ruth feels her life and talent usurped by Lisa with a first novel.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2000
Hypatia
Soho Rep

All right, I'm going to confess something. I'm not one of those critics who feels it necessary to go into long, windy plot synopses just to prove how crafty I am at understanding narrative. I happen to find that it robs readers of their sense of discovery, and I like to leave them with a little something to feel out for themselves. Well, in the case of Mac Wellman's new play Hypatia, you're totally on your own folks.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
May 2000
I Do, I Undo, I Redo
La MaMa ETC - Annex Theater

Now pushing ninety, prominent modern sculptor Louise Bourgeois has consistently shocked the public with barely-disguised, larger-than-life representations of male genitalia. When questioned, though, she has always played the innocent. Where all this comes from, Brazilian performance artist Denise Stoklos never quite broaches in I Do, I Undo, I Redo. Stoklos has pieced together excerpts from the French sculptor's writings to create this lively sketch combining biographical detail with trenchant personal observations.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
May 2000
I Wanna Be Adored
Red Line Theater

Early on in Marc Spitz's I Wanna Be Adored, a darkly comic take on the life of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, your heart sinks when you think you've pegged the play as a routine, earnest "why did he do it?" parable about someone you could care less about. Thankfully, you're proven very wrong in this playful, often hilarious take on celebrity, the afterlife and bizarre strip clubs.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
May 2000
Aida
Palace Theater

One of the tunes in the latest Broadway production by Disney, Aida, sings that "we lead such elaborate lives" ("Elaborate Lives," by the way, was once this show's moniker). Well, looking at what's presented onstage, you would absolutely have to concur. Apparently no expense was spared for this baby, from Bob Crowley's positively jaw-dropping costume designs and sets to Natasha Katz's inventive, rich lighting to the three credited writers of the book (Linda Woolverton, director Robert Falls and Tony-winning playwright David Henry Hwang).

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2000
American Buffalo
Atlantic Theater

I have a theory that on the set of Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia," everyone in the cast made a vow to do a New York play when it wrapped, because it seems that everyone from that film is illuminating Gotham these days, with Sam Shepard's True West on Broadway (starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly) and now an electric update of David Mamet's American Buffalo, featuring Anderson secret-weapons Philip Baker Hall and William H. Macy.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2000
Balladeer, The
KGB

Conceived and directed by Caden Manson (of Big Art Group), The Balladeer is a worthy candidate for cult status, unfolding like a downtown theater version of a midnight movie. An ambitious look at the tribulations of a confused group of high schoolers, the piece blends vulgarity, puppetry, ballads and nifty choreography into one brazen stew. For an alarmingly brief 45 minutes, the play manages to cover a lot of ground, but oddly, despite the obvious cleverness on stage, it still seems to come up short.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2000
Big Love
Actors Theater of Louisville

During a critics weekend at the Humana Festival of New American Plays,Big Love was a clear favorite among the offerings.  It's a cleverly designed twist on an ancient Greek tragedy, in which 50 brides conspire to murder their fiances on their wedding night.  In this updated version, playwright Charles Mee uses the framework to wage a modern-day battle of the sexes.  Traces of "Men Are From Mars, Women are from Venus," are evident in the banter between the brides, led by Lydia (Carolyn Baeumler), and the grooms, including Constantine (Mark Zeisler), who is pledged to o

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2000
Big Love
Actors Theater of Louisville

Seven brides for seven brothers, as in the old MGM musical, is an idea one has little trouble handling.  Raise the number to 50 brides (all sisters!) for 50 brothers, as Charles L.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
April 2000
Copenhagen
Royale Theater

How's this for a pitch for a Broadway show?:

Anxious Producer: Okay folks, there's this Michael Frayn play that did really well in London...now, it's about a fateful meeting between a Danish physicist named Neils Bohr (Philip Bosco) and his impulsive but brilliant pupil Werner Heisenberg (Michael Cumpsty), all while Neils' wife Margrethe (Blair Brown) plays mediator and part-time narrator.
Unthrilled Backer: Why is she there at all if it is a meeting between two men?

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2000

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