Love Noel: The Songs and Letters of Noel Coward
Irish Repertory Theater

“There are probably greater painters than Noël. Greater novelists than Noël, greater librettists, greater composers of music, greater singers, greater dancers, greater comedians, greater tragedians, greater stage producers, greater film directors, greater cabaret artists, greater TV stars, and so on. If they are, they are fourteen different people. Only one man combines all fourteen different talents The Master, Noël Coward” — Lord Louis Mountbatten’s toast to Noël Coward on his 70th birthday.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
August 2019
Eurydice
City Garage Theater

In her 2003 play, Eurydice, Sarah Ruhl puts a feminist twist on the Orpheus myth. This time the protagonist is Orpheus’s bride (the sprightly Lindsay Plake), who descends into the underworld after her death and seeks out her father (Bo Roberts), who is upright and walking around but unfortunately has lost his memory, after having dipped his feet in the River of Forgetfulness. Much to her chagrin, he has no idea who she is, so she sets about trying to awaken him by teaching him to spell her name.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2019
Andy Warhol's Tomato
Pacific Resident Theater

Andy Warhol’s Tomato is a portrait of the artist as a young man. Warhol, who came to fame in the 1960s, is the subject of Vince Melocchi’s new play, a two-hander set in Pittsburgh, the playwright’s home town. It was there, Melocchi reports in a program note, that he was told that the teenaged Warhol had drawn pictures on napkins in a local bar in exchange for Coca-Colas.  Although that bit of urban folklore turned out to be untrue, it inspired Melocchi to write the piece.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2019
Unnecessary Farce
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

Milwaukee’s fall theater season officially begins with the annual August production by Milwaukee Chamber Theater, now entering its 45th year of operation. According to producing director C. Michael Wright, the recent sad news events across America and the world have inspired the company to do a pure comedy. Enter Unnecessary Farce by Paul Slade Smith.

In this door-slamming free-for-all, a pair of cops (played by Ben Yela and Rachael Zientek) have set up a sting operation in a pair of identical hotel rooms in Sheboygan, Wis.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2019
Recommendation, The
Windy City Playhouse

Don't be too quick to assign a genre to Jonathan Caren's play, lest its subsequent paradigm shifts give you whiplash, further exacerbated by the production's quirky staging (more about that later).

We begin with Ivy League-college roommates Iskinder "Izzy" Iodouku and Aaron Feldman. Izzy is a mixed-race first-generation freshie with a stellar grade point average, who aspires to be a public defender, but is not above peddling weed to augment his scholarship stipend. Aaron is a privileged WASP adept at bartering his extensive filial and social advantages.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2019
Harbor
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theatre

Like a typical family sitcom, Harbor doesn’t have a single star  character. It combines consequential drama with enough comic bits to pass for comedy until the second act turns serious indeed.  Part of the family being gay, however, always weighs heavily on the action.

A jalopy brings driver Donna (Summer Dawn Wallace, one-note trashy) and her teen age daughter Lottie (Jen Diaz, no mental slouch) to drop in on Donna’s estranged brother Kevin. He (Marc Bitler’s likable would-be novelist) shares an estate with his partner of 10 years, architect-owner Ted.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2019
Rolling Stone, The
Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

Chris Urch's The Rolling Stone, currently making its debut at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center Theater, has nothing to do with rock music or the magazine world. It is a poignant look at Uganda's attack on homosexuals that centers on its effects on a Christian, church-going community in Kampala. While the book emotionally accesses the mind, it is the actors who strike the soul with strong, searing and searching performances.

The attack on LGBTs was precipitated by the British and U.S. missionaries who influenced Uganda's houses of worship.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Rolling Stone, The
Lincoln Center - Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

While New York City recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising with much hoopla and an enormous traffic-stopping Gay Pride parade that went on well into the night, New York’s Lincoln Center Theater chose to feature the other side of the coin by mounting the American premiere of playwright Chris Urch’s The Rolling Stone. Sensitively directed by Saheem Ali the play, an import from London, is scheduled to run through Sunday, August 25th.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
August 2019
Cottage, The
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

The Cottage was inspired by Noel Coward’s type of comedy, but Sandy Rustin’s is particularly a farce set in a typical Coward atmosphere and time with bits and pieces imitating his practices.  And what a farce—borrowing from just about every one you ever loved from Oscar Wilde’s skewing of manners to the silliness of Noises Off!  No matter that the play confuses a lot of loves. Won’t you want them all figured out while you can’t resist laughing at how?

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2019
Michael Buble
Madison Square Garden

As the full-house crowd at Madison Square Garden eagerly awaited the arrival of the star, the American flag hung proudly from the ceiling right beside the banner of Michael Bublé’s Canadian homeland. During the non-stop, two-plus hours that would follow, Mr. Bublé would abundantly prove why his astonishing talent has made him every inch a citizen of the world. The superb orchestra surrounds the star.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Swingaroos' Hollywood Serenade, The
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

The Swingeroos describe themselves as a swing-era territory band.  For their third and best yet summer stint at Florida Studio Theater, exploration of Hollywood tunes begins with a tribute to the Big Bands who starred during the 1930s. It lasts for two decades of singers and instrumentalists fully into the swing mode. An even earlier tune ends the program with a Swingaroos modern number and a 1913 musical message to the Cabaret audience with appropriate updated 1937 lyrics.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
My Favorite Broadway
Off the Wall Theater

In a nutshell, My Favorite Broadway is a loosely knit collection of Broadway show tunes, interspersed with bits of dialogue from Off the Wall founder and artistic director Dale Gutzman, who serves as the evening’s host. Most of his remarks referenced the times when his theater company staged this or that musical (such as Cinderella, Grand Hotel, etc.). Songs from these shows and dozens of others entertained the delighted audience for almost two hours.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Rolling Stone, The
Lincoln Center - Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

“The Rolling Stone” does not refer to the iconic American rock music journal, but to a very different publication of the same name. In 2010, the newspaper, based in Kampala, Uganda, began a series of sensational articles printing pictures, names, and addresses of individuals known to be or accused of being gay. The African country’s repressive laws against homosexuality and intense public homophobia led to acts of violence and harassment against those depicted.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
King Lear
Redtwist Theater

What comes to mind first when we hear "Shakespeare's King Lear” is grandeur: scenery-chewing by a celebrated thespian of lengthy reputation and years, Wagner-opera scenic effects—the entire Balkan Wars, for example, in Robert Falls's 2006 production at the Goodman—a running time exceeding three hours and don't even guess the admission price.

Well, thank the muses for storefront theater!

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Strange Heart Beating
Frontier

There's potential for a nifty TV-movie in Kristin Idaszak's play—two movies, in fact. Whether they are capable of sharing the same performance space/time is up to the individual viewer, though.

The first plot revolves around the investigation conducted by lifelong BFFs Teeny and Lena—the former now sheriff of their Minnesota lake-district town—into the disappearance of the latter's teenage daughter.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Pomona
Steep Theater

In the course of our 85-minute play, an enthusiastic gamer will instruct a cool-cookie tyro in the protocol of Role-Playing Games (aka RPGs)—specifically, the game called "Cthulhu Awakens," based on the stories of science-fiction author H.P. Lovecraft.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Wonder of Our Stage
The Players Center for Performing Arts

A science fiction presented as if historical drama, Wonder of Our Stage has received a full production as The Players 2018 New Play Festival winner. The plot’s divided in two: how Tudor scientist-necromancer Dr. Dee created an Automaton for Queen Elizabeth to accept as a perfect husband and how Automaton turned into a human William Shakespeare.

Director Candace Artim adroitly manages more detailed staging than for most Players’ Backstage, or even typical Elizabethan sets.  Dr.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow
Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space

The bored and whiny denizens of Halley Feiffer’s Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow are unabashedly depicted as exaggerations of recognizable reality. This lampoon of Chekhov’s Three Sisters was commissioned for the Williamstown Theater Festival and is now playing MCC’s new Off-Broadway Robert W. Wilson theater. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Anastasia
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

A young woman’s search for her identity comes full circle in Anastasia, the musical based on a 1997 animated film starring Meg Ryan as the voice of Anastasia. The musical leads us to believe that the famed Grand Duchess may not have been murdered along with other members of the imperial family by the Bolsheviks. Instead, could a plucky, amnesiac teenager named Anya become an heir to the imperial fortune?

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Friends!
Kirk Douglas Theater

Although I’m one of the few Americans who didn’t watch “Friends” during its ten-year run on network TV, I still enjoyed Friends! The Musical Parody now running as a guest production at the Kirk Douglas. Complete familiarity with the sitcom didn’t prove necessary, especially not when the characters in the revue---Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe, and Joey---are lampooned time and time again in repetitive fashion.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Fun Home
American Stage

A memory play with music, based on a graphic autobiography, Fun Home has a title with a double meaning.  A gay woman remembers her family’s funeral home and the places she and they lived in as well as the home where she found her place and love in life. Her father becomes her major focus along with importantly finding her identity in college with her first love.

At the start, Allison (likable Andrianne Hick) in her studio above the main stage area removes from a box objects that recall her father bringing them home from an auction.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Renovations for Six
Reuben Cordova Theater

Renovations for Six is the fifth play by Norman Foster that Theater 40 has produced in recent years.  One of Canada’s most prolific and most-produced playwrights, Foster has found an American home at Theater 40, a company that is particularly skilled at drawing-room comedy.

That skill is much in evidence with Renovations for six, a play that takes place in one set, a living room which is shared by three different couples. The primary couple, Shayna and Grant Perkins (Rebecca Driscoll and Lane Compton, respectively), has just moved into a fixer-upper.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
True West
Steppenwolf Theater

It's the play that put Steppenwolf on the international map, coined the term "Chicago-Style"acting and made John Malkovich into Hollywood's most Fabulous Monster. After over three decades of seeing its most thrilling moments (the ones that still give us chills as we recall them) re-enacted in countless studios, storefronts and classrooms, littered with kitchen shrapnel and reeking of testosterone fumes—well, a production that doesn’t try to replicate the legend comes as a relief.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Strange Loop, A
Playwrights Horizons

In the past year or five there have been a healthy number of beautifully crafted, wonderfully acted, and solidly produced black-centric plays both on Broadway and Off that have examined, from every conceivable angle—historically, sociologically, and psychologically, what it means to be black in the United Sates, both past and present.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Pippin
freeFall Theater

Charlemagne’s first son’s search for a meaningful life, leaving a legacy of glory, propels the drama of Pippin.  As a musical, it’s a child of the 1970s trying for a modern spin on the medieval morality play, specifically Everyman though actually it’s more like Mankind in freeFall Theatre’s production.  It uses only seven actors (and a dog), makes some direct appeals to the audience, and contains pop musical and farcical diversions.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
SRQ Improv Festival 2019 - 11th Annual
Florida Studio Theater

Having reviewed all but one previous SRQ Improv Festivals, I knew the work of more than half the 20 troupes participating in this year’s 11th. Most perform in their best routines so that mainly how they’re filled in, usually based at least partly on audience suggestion or a topic drawn out of a container, differs each year.  This time I chose to review a new-to-SRQ international group, three popular domestic ones, and the culminating long performance of all the improvisors, chosen by lot and given new challenges.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Theophilus North
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts

Theophilus North takes up an adventure by the titular 30-year-old New England Yale graduate and prep school teacher who quits his job and sets out to travel the world. He wants to discover himself and a new life. Though he gets only as far as affluent Newport, his unexpected sojourn there absorbs him in much the same way he influences certain local inhabitants.

Laura Braza attunes her direction of the play to her admiration for Thornton Wilder’s imagination and autobiographical elements that author Matthew Burnett has embellished.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Toni Stone
Laura Pels Theatre

April Matthis, as Toni Stone (1921-1996), the first women to play professional baseball as part of the Negro League, is knocking it out of the ballpark every night at the Laura Pels Theatre through August 11, 2019. The play, lightly based on Martha Ackmann’s book, Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, is overwhelmingly inspirational, deeply humane, and totally moving.

Here the bases are loaded with the crème de la crème of the theatrical world. From Lydia R.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Music Man, The
Goodman Theater

In Chicago, the top theater award is for ensemble work, Mary Zimmerman is renowned for her big-cast interactive spectacle, and Meredith Willson wrote a story about a band, facryinoutloud, complete with a score orchestrated for brasses, reeds, percussion, and a single lonely violin—so is it any wonder that the two star players at the Goodman Theater look like refugees from some other production (and in a nation where virtually every town, down to the smallest village, boasts a marching band, that's a lot of “others")?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Scraps
Matrix Theater

The first half of the play is realistic;  the second, surrealistic.  The protagonist in each half—make that in each scene—differs from the last.

That’s just two instances of Geraldine Inoa’s unique, far-out approach to writing a play—in this case Scraps, now in a West Coast premiere at the Matrix Theater, which has become a kind of showcase for black plays which were successful in New York (such as The Mountaintop).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Prophet$
Factory Theater

Protestant Christianity's individualistic approach to its source material acknowledges a variety of interpretations, enabling virtually anybody to make a career of spreading the gospel in all its enigmatic diversity. Human nature being what it is, however, the number of self-styled proselytizers motivated by greed and hypocrisy should come as no surprise.

The 1980s, in particular, stand out in the history of our nation as the benchmark for a virulent epidemic of Tartuffian humbuggery.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Ada and the Engine
The Artistic Home

"If we wanted melodrama, we would have gone to the opera!" snaps the only character without an axe to grind in Lauren Gunderson's historically deconstructive origin story of the modern computer. Since this remark is made early in the play, its irony is unlikely to register on audiences until too late for us to retrace our steps and meander down alternative paths.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Howard Street Theater

We are accustomed to musicals staged in football field-sized stadiums cluttered with wedding-cake decor, but Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell wrote their musical manifesto for intimate rooms like Theo Ubique's new home on the Evanston-Chicago border, and once you experience this 1998 cult classic in its natural environment, you'll wonder why anybody would want to see it anyplace else.

Here's the set-up: we playgoers are in a scruffy Chicago club (think Reggie's Music Joint in the South Loop) where Hedwig and her band, the Angry Inch, are appearing.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Transference
Broadwater Black Box

Hypnotherapy, past lives, and metaphysical repartee are at the heart of Transference, Jim Blanchette’s dark comedy which just closed at the 2019 Hollywood Fringe Festival.  The unexpected mixture makes for a unique theatre experience, one with a surprise popping up every few minutes.

Esther Mira plays Dr. Herbert, a psychiatrist doing her best to keep her cool and deal professionally with Mrs. Clark (Lisa K. Wyatt), an uptight, stressed-out woman who keeps accusing the shrink of failing to help her.  Against her better judgment, Dr.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Rory and the Devil
Thymele Arts Center - California Room

The 2019 Hollywood Fringe Festival went out with a bang, thanks to the closing-day production of Rory and the Devil, the playwriting and directing debut of David McElwee  The New York-based McElwee has dipped deep into his Irish heritage to bring to life the denizens of a rural pub in Donegal, circa 1972.  The timing is key, because that was when the “troubles” between north and south Ireland were at a fever pitch, with gun battles, bombings and fisticuffs creating a war-like atmosphere.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Ethel Waters: His Eye is on the Sparrow
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Theater

Jannie Jones returns to a role she created in a triumphant emotional and musical expansion of her acclaimed early  performance as Ethel Waters at Florida Studio Theater. Happily, Larry Parr’s biographical monologue still uses just the right songs to illuminate Waters’s life. Jannie does them more than justice, showing why she’s so frequently invited to perform at FST, but this time she displays exceptional acting chops as well.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Happy Talk
Pershing Square Signature Center

Jesse Eisenberg really needs to stop writing the same play. His Happy Talk explores the simmering rages just beneath the surface of an apparently placid household, but the Oscar-nominated actor-playwright has previously written and starred in three works—Asuncion, The Revisionist, and The Spoils—all of which deal with condescending Americans ruining the lives of good-natured non-Americans with smug presumptions of superior perceptions and intelligence.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Stonewall
Lincoln Center - Rose Theater

Asserting identity is a theme in two recent musical offerings, Dave Malloy’s a cappella piece Octet and composer Iain Bell and librettist Mark Campbell’s world-premiere  Stonewall  presented by City Opera. The latter celebrates the 50th anniversary of the history-making uprising in Greenwich Village which marked the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. Like Octet, Stonewall features a diverse and engaging score and employs multiple, single-trait characters whose lives intersect.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Octet
Pershing Square Signature Center

Asserting identity is a theme in two recent musical offerings, the operatic Stonewall and Dave Malloy’s a cappella piece Octet. Malloy’s work at the Signature Center focuses on a group of technology addicts at a twelve-step meeting and, like Stonewall, features a diverse and engaging score and employs multiple, single-trait characters whose lives intersect. Though the characterizations are a bit thin, a fascinating, believable world is created.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Toni Stone
Steinberg Center - Laura Pels Theater

Toni Stone is probably the most famous athlete you never heard of. From 1949 to 1954, she played baseball in the Negro Leagues and was the first woman of any race to play professionally in the sport. She was hired for the San Francisco Sea Lions as a publicity stunt and had her longest stint with the Indianapolis Clowns, the diamond equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters who incorporated comedic antics into their very serious field work. Based on Martha Ackman’s biography, “Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone,” Lydia R.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019

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