Revenge Song
Geffen Playhouse - Gil Cates Theater

Revenge Song is a campy, bawdy musical about a real character, a bad-ass woman named Julie d’Aubigny, who lived in 17th century France and was openly bi-sexual.  Played by the fiery, multi-talented Margaret Odette, Julie had affairs with both men and women, loved to fight duels, beat a murder rap, and became a famous singer, star of the Paris Opera.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Into the Breeches
Florida Studio Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Set in a modest community theater in 1942, Into the Breeches involves women taking Shakespearean roles traditionally played by men. Why?  Like those characters, suitable townsmen are off fighting a real war.  The play is supposed to be funny—but it’s not funny-peculiar, only partly funny-ha-ha, and mostly funny-silly-stupid.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Grand Horizons
Helen Hayes Theater

With a wild dive into one family’s love and marriage, Beth Wohl’s promising new play, Grand Horizons, makes its Broadway debut at Second Stage’s Helen Hayes Theater. An accomplished cast explores a family relationship with poignancy and stabs of sit-com humor, unearthing staleness and random impulsiveness, wacky consequences and endurance.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Grand Horizons
Hayes Theater

Bess Wohl’s cheerful, vigorous new play, Grand Horizons has a lot on its mind. True, it trades in humor that would be at home in TV sitcom territory with its tale of a dysfunctional family in which everyone is a comedian. But also true, it says several pertinent things about marriage, parent-child relationships and, of course, love. The Second Stage production is also slickly acted and directed on an attractive, purposefully generic set.

It begins with a bang.

David A. Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Lion King, The
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

No musical has weathered the past two decades as well as The Lion King , which brings its 2020 North American Tour to Milwaukee. And no musical can rival Lion King in its grandeur, its creativity or its financial impact (see below).

The North American Tour alone has been seen by 20 million theatergoers. Globally, the show has been seen by more than 100 million people. The Broadway production is still going strong, and the show is also doing well in London’s West End, Hamburg, Tokyo and Madrid.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Light My Fire
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

A thorough journey through ‘60s and ‘70s music, Light My Fire indeed rekindles memories for the majority of Florida Studio Theater audiences and enlightens those younger. All seem to respond to a trio who act out lyrics while singing in the styles of major performers of the times and sometimes even kidding them.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Bug
Steppenwolf Theater

Sure, Steppenwolf now occupies an auditorium as big as an auto showroom, the play's seedy Oklahoma motel room now looks more like a Coachella Valley efficiency-condo, and playgoers who know Tracy Letts only as the Pulitzer-winning playwright of August: Osage County are seeing a considerably milder version of Bug, the 1996 drama noir that ensured its author was no one-hit wonder—but there’s nothing we can do about that, and David Cromer can still make a helluva mickey-finn lemonade out of big-budget lemons.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Small Fire, A
Next Act Theater

For better or worse, a debilitating illness can change a long-term marriage in myriad ways. That’s the focus of Obie Award-winning Adam Bock’s A Small Fire , in a production by Next Act Theatre. Emily Bridges, a hard-driving business owner in her 50s, must come to terms with “a new normal” after being inexplicably robbed of her senses in this thought-provoking and well-acted play.

A Small Fire was first produced in 2011 Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. Since then, it has been produced at several regional theaters across the country.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Soldier's Play, A
American Airlines Theater

“They still hate you” are the last words of drunken Army Sergeant Vernon C. Waters (David Alan Grier), fatally shot twice by people or peoples unknown. So begins Roundabout’s stirring revival of Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Soldier’s Tale, which takes place in 1944.

Whodunit? Was it the KKK? Was it one or more of the local rednecks who live near the segregated Louisiana base? Could it have been one of the sergeant’s own men, exacting revenge for all his bitter bullying and put-downs? It’s up to Capt.

David Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse

This isn’t the first time Milwaukee audiences have gotten a glimpse of the punk/rock musical, Hedwig and the Angry Inch. In the past few years, it has been performed by local companies both large and small. But this Hedwig is distinctive in more ways than one. For instance, the set designer (Scott Davis) has recreated the feel of an underground nightclub from the moment the audience steps into the lobby. And this version delivers a Hedwig who is more audacious and outrageously funny than one recalls from previous productions.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Tasters, The
Rivendell Theater

When we think about assassination—as who hasn't, in recent years?—we usually think of firearms, or edged blades, but history has evidenced repeatedly the efficacy of virtually undetectable toxins in the hands of those who prepare their masters' food. That's the premise of Meghan Brown’s The Tasters, a portrait of three female prisoners assigned to sample the epicurean meals destined for the Great Leaders of an unnamed country.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Jagged Little Pill
Broadhurst Theater

No one just walks in Jagged Little Pill, the fiery, busy new musical based on Alanis Morissette’s 1995 recording. Mostly angrily, they twist and turn, writhe on the floor, even walk backwards as hurriedly as they do forwards. The rag-tag ensemble’s frantic perambulations, as devised by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s movement and choreography, indelibly reflect the anxiety and rebelliousness of youth.

Morissette’s pinpoint lyrics, along with the infectious music she co-wrote with Glen Ballard, outweigh Diablo Cody’s barely connective musical.

David Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Until the Flood
Kirk Douglas Theater

Soon after the killing, in August 2014, of black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer, actor/playwright Dael Orlandersmith traveled to Ferguson, Missouri to interview townspeople about the tragic occurrence.  Now she has used this research to put together a one-person show, Until the Flood, which is on tap at the Kirk Douglas Theater and directed by Neel Keller.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
My Name is Lucy Barton
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

My Name is Lucy Barton written by Elizabeth Stout and published to a chorus of hosannas in 2016, is now a one-woman, two-character play, running through Saturday, February 29, 2020 at Manhattan Theater Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway. Adapted from the book by Rona Munro and directed by Richard Eyre, Lucy Barton stars Laura Linney, an actress whose every outing (be it film, stage, or TV) seems to elicit a cascade of unanimous raves. Tellingly so, her Playbill bio lists countless nominations and acting awards.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Stop Kiss
Pride Arts Buena

What could be more romantic than love at first sight, unless it's love poised on the verge of bloom, only to suffer calamity before its opportunity to blossom? Love that refuses to surrender, though! Love that stubbornly thrives, stunted but steadfast, to ultimately triumph over adversity—now that's romantic! It's no impediment, either, when the lovers are young, hip, relentlessly charming women whose affections reflect an indisputable social message.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Sunday Evening
The Greenhouse

This world premiere English-language presentation of a 2009 "Best Play" award-winner in its native Bulgaria opens on a modest beachfront house during a cold, rainy Southern California day in 2005 where Nick and Rose are drinking their fourth bottle of wine since noon. Nick is venting his anger and pain at having discovered a cache of chastely intimate correspondence between Rose and a former co-worker.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Killer's Head

(see listing under UNSEEN HAND / KILLER'S HEAD for 2020 Odyssey Theater production in Los Angeles, CA.

Unseen Hand, The / Killer's Head
Odyssey Theater

Two of Sam Shepard’s lesser-known plays, Killer’s Head and The Unseen Hand, are brilliantly performed by the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble as part of its ongoing “Circa ‘69” season of “significant and adventurous plays that premiered around the time of the company’s inception.”

Directed by Darrell Larson, produced by Ron Sossi and Bo Powell, the two plays have been brought to life in vigorous fashion, thanks to the expert acting by the members of the Ensemble, starting with Steve Hovey.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Grand Horizons
Helen Hayes Theater

Few performers can endow the simple culinary acts of making a sandwich or ladling gravy with as much meaning as Jane Alexander. The reserved, precise manner she pours out the brown sauce for mashed potatoes or the laser-beam side-eye she gives a non-communicative spouse as she spreads peanut butter speak of every slight and grievance in a 50-year marriage.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
My Name is Lucy Barton
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Lucy Barton is alone in her hospital room, a victim of complications from an appendectomy. She can look out the window at the New York skyline and, more particularly, at the Chrysler Building. And she can escape, if that’s the word, into her memory of her Illinois childhood as New York morphs into bucolic acres of corn and soybeans.

And so begins My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout’s loving one-woman memoir, adapted for the stage by Rona Munro and starring a radiant Laura Linney.

David Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Beauty of the Father
Manhattan Theater Club

Nilo Cruz's Beauty of the Father, now at Manhattan Theatre Club, is about a Spanish painter who converses with the ghost of Federico Garcia Lorca, the young man he is sexually involved with, his long-lost daughter whom he deserted as a child, and the woman friend with whom he shares his house.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
January 2006
American Son
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

A gripping drama of race relations, American Son exposes prejudices that spawn mortal problems of communication among black and white people in an important spectrum of society.  When an 18-year-old goes missing, there’s more at stake than finding him.

In a bleak waiting room of a Miami police station, with a huge curved window showing thunderous outside rain, Kendra Ellis-Connor  (handsome, tailored, African American Almeria Campbell)  anxiously attempts many times to get son Jamal on his cell phone.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Woman in Black, The
McKittrick Hotel

The Woman in Black, derived from Susan Hill’s suspense novel by Stephen Mallatratt, makes its long-delayed New York City debut. Set in the Hidden Club Car pub in the atmospheric McKittrick Hotel, where the immersive Sleep No More has been playing for the past several seasons, Woman is an intermittently entertaining ghost tale which takes quite a while to get to its goosebump-inducing chills.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Sunday Dinner
Reuben Cordova Theater

A family meal turns into a day of reckoning in Sunday Dinner, now in a world-premiere run at Theater 40.

Written and directed by Tony Blake, the play deals with the secrets of a working-class family in the Bronx, secrets which are revealed during the course of a sumptuous Italian luncheon (you can just about smell the lasagna).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Lifespan of a Fact
Florida Studio Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

A young boy has jumped from a Las Vegas Hotel observation deck to his death.  Emily, editor of a struggling quality magazine, gives recent Harvard grad Jim his first assignment. He’s to fact check the suicide story by top-flight author John. His by-line, Emily hopes, will attract more readers and advertisers. Jim dives into his job, notices scores of fishy details, and visits John to point out his factual deviations from truth. 

John always insists he’s written not an article (most often factual journalism) but an essay (that usually allows personal interpretations).

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
My Name is Lucy Barton
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Adapting a novel to the stage is a tricky business. A play needs to have a central action executed within a playing time of a few hours, while a novel can be a rumination on multiple themes over hundreds of pages. Even a short novel can dive into a character’s interior in a way a play can not.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
What the Constitution Means to Me
Mark Taper Forum

What the Constitution Means to Me is a hybrid theatrical construct.  Part performance piece, part drama, and part civics lesson, it somehow comes together as a whole, thanks to Heidi Schreck’s skill as a writer and Maria Dizzia’s prowess as an actress. The show, which earned two Tony Award nominations and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is now on tap at the Ahmanson as part of its national tour.  Schreck, who played the lead role in New York, has turned that chore over to Dizzia, a wonderful replacement who has no trouble carrying the show on her shoulders.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Water Tribe, The
VS Theater

What do you do if you are desperate to form a tribe, join a community, but nobody can stand to be around you? That’s the question that lies at the heart of The Water Tribe, Don Cummings’s exceedingly quirky drama, which is now running at VS Theater.

Hannah Prichard plays Claudia, a hungry-for-solidarity gal who ends up shunned by the people she loves most.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Lil & Louis
First Presbyterian Church of Sarasota Fellowship Hall

Giving Lil Hardin Armstrong long delayed recognition for her starring role in jazz and theater history, Lil & Louis puts a spotlight on her and her relationship with Louis Armstrong. He may be the more famous, but playwright Jo Morello shines a light on Lil’s many-faceted musical achievements and her influence on his career.  Theirs was also a short-lived marriage but a love story that lasted as long as their lives.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Tappin' Through Life

Review(s) listed under: MAURICE LINES: TAPPIN' THROUGH LIFE

Fiddler on the Roof
Broadway Theater

On the one hand, Fiddler on the Roof is undeniably a classic of the American musical theater. On the other hand, as Tevye might ask if he was a kvetching critic and not a pious papa, “How many sunrise, sunsets can one endure during a lifetime?” There is no answer to that except that traditionalists are likely going to be delighted with this latest incarnation.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
Nether, The
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne Lab

In The Nether, a futuristic net-based place so titled, virtual reality  accessed via technology leads into a “Highway” open to self-identified users. The entrance under control of questionable Sims, whose clients he draws into a tech world of pornography and pedophilia. Detective Morris is convinced that their enjoyment might encourage such violence and even murder in the real world. She keeps interrogating Sims and even sends an investigator, Woodnut, to report on how it works.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Is This a Room
Vineyard Theater

I cannot remember any play that unnerved me to such a degree as the Vineyard Theater’s production of Tina Satter’s brilliantly conceived Is this a Room. Not only did this one hour and ten-minute play keep me glued to my seat, it set me on tenterhooks, and scared the bejesus out of me. Slowly at that!

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Legend of Georgia McBride, The
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse

A straight Elvis impersonator gets in touch with his inner feminine side after his Elvis act is dumped at Cleo’s, a seedy bar in Panama City in the Florida panhandle. Once Casey (played with a great deal of charm by the talented Kevin Kantor) is told that his act is being replaced with a drag show by owner Eddie (a deft turn by veteran Rep actor James Pickering), he goes home to find that the bad news is about to get even worse: his wife Jo (an earthy Shavanna Calder) announces that she’s pregnant.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Earthquakes in London
The Electric Lodge

It’s an environmental epic, an ecological extravaganza. British playwright Mike Bartlett’s Earthquakes in London, now in a West Coast premiere at Rogue Machine, has a cast of seventeen actors playing nearly one hundred characters (vividly costumed by Halei Parker). The production, which also features video projection, countless lighting and sound cues, several song and dance routines, runs close to three hours.  All this in a small theater seating some 75 people!

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Caroline, or Change
WestCoast Black Theater Troupe - Mainstage

There’s one major reason to enjoy Caroline, or Change at Westcoast Black Theater Troupe. It’s the performance by Jannie Jones of the title character, both emotionally and musically. As Jeanine Tesori’s music is so varied in type and carries the best of Tony Kushner’s book along, the show comes off as a pop opera.  Its theme is where Change comes in, and ironically it applies more to others than to the heroine.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Rock of Ages
Bourbon Room

Some musicals never die, a case in point being Rock of Ages.  It began its theatrical life in a 30-minute version at an L.A. nightclub in 2005. Then it moved to another L.A. nightclub, where a full production was unveiled. Next stop was Vegas, followed by off-Broadway and Broadway, where it proceeded to run for 2000 performances and cop numerous prizes.  Productions were then seen in Canada, England, Australia and South Africa. The capper was a 2012 movie starring Tom Cruise.

Now the cultural phenomenon has returned to L.A.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
London Assurance
Irish Repertory Theater

First things first! Before I delve into the Irish Repertory Theater’s marvelous production of London Assurance by Dublin-born playwright Dion Boucicault (1820-1890), which runs through February 9, 2020, I must say that the award-winning Irish Rep is a gift from heaven. Their choices, consistently so, of what to produce, along with the actors they choose to cast, is simply wonderful. And this wonderfulness goes for their use of top-of-the-line set, costume, lighting, sound, and hair and wig designers for each play. Each and every production is a joyous event.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Murder on the Orient Express
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

You won’t see a more elaborate, multi-faceted, multi-media period staged design with breathtaking technical effects than in Asolo Rep’s production of Murder on the Orient Express. No, not even on Broadway. Luckily, everything—even costumes and hair styles—services a well directed and acted dramatic comedy, here rising above a passing adaptation of the celebrated mystery novel.

As uncannily astute mystery solver Hercule Poirot, James DeVita scores. He also gives you a narrative framework for murder and pursuit of the murderer.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Band's Visit, The
Academy of Music

The Band’s Visit is a delicate, intimate show about the power of music, told with an exceptional musical score. The story about an Egyptian band has mostly-Arabic music composed by the half-Lebanese David Yazbek.

It’s the first time this ethnic genre has been heard on Broadway, and I’m happy to see the show on its national tour. The catchy songs are played by the on-stage band which adds an energetic instrumental encore. These melodies make this a must-see event.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
January 2020

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