Lottery Day
Goodman Theater

You could stage all seven of the plays comprising Ike Holter's Rightlynd cycle over one day (with a dinner break). Theaters looking to make history should start planning to do that very thing, now that the concluding chapter in the saga of a Chicago neighborhood-in-transition has premiered.

And a handsome premiere it is, too.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
As You Like It
Florida State University - Selby Garden

Without any trace of a designed set, As You Like It in Sarasota’s Selby Gardens always seems like the Forest of Arden, never Duke Frederick Senior’s court.  This works better than the much-doubling and changed casting, amount of editing of the original text, and a rather strange directorial vision of the play’s being about all sorts of magic rather than predominately satire and love.

Shakespeare universalized much of what life in Elizabethan England was concerned with.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
FRANK: The Man. The Music.
Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion

They say that “seeing is believing,” but there are magical times when that old saying seems dramatically challenged. Such was the case last Saturday night when a unique concert titled “FRANK. The Man. The Music” was presented at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in The Woodlands, Texas.

Houston area fans of “Old Blue Eyes” were out in force, and although the beautiful venue was not at full capacity on that pleasantly warm spring evening, those fortunate enough to be in the audience would see and hear an event that few would soon forget.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
King and I, The
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

The King and I is no stranger to the Broadway stage. The original 1951 version and revivals in 1996 and 2015 all won Tony Awards and earned enviable box office receipts. Now, the national tour of the 2015 version comes to Milwaukee’s Marcus Center for the Performing Arts. One wishes that the Broadway actors had come with it.

As most everyone knows, this is the tale of an English widow, Anna Leonowens, who comes to Siam with her your son Louis to tutor the many wives and children of the progressive King.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Rep Lab
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stiemke Studio

Each year, the Milwaukee Rep’s Emerging Professional Resident ensemble creates a show to highlight the talents of its artists. However, for the 9th annual Rep Lab, as it is called, the 2018/19 EPRs chose something entirely different. Instead of offering a half dozen or so new short plays, the group chose to stage an entirely original production.

The change took the young artists into the worlds of dance, video art and individual performance.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
How to Write a New Book for the Bible
Next Act Theater

Bill Cain’s finely tuned How to Write a New Book for the Bible makes a strong statement about the power of family. The play probes some of the families mentioned in the Bible, during his own autobiographical quest to see his mother through the last six months of her life.

When the play opens on Rick Graham’s minimalist set, Bill Cain (the character, not the playwright) is realizing that his mother – who lives in another state – is no longer going to be able to care for herself.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Things We Do, The
Odyssey Theater

”What man’s head would do is always defeated by his scrotum.” Edward Dahlberg’s aphorism came back to me as I watched The Things We Do at the Odyssey Theater. Written by Grant Woods, who was Arizona’s attorney general in the 1990s, the play deals with the impact of an adulterous  love affair on two middle-aged Los Angeles couples.  Restaurateur Bill (Blake Boyd) has been married for a long time to Alice (Liesel Kopp). They are reasonably happy despite “having grown apart” over the years, owing mostly to her New Age interest in yoga and vegetarianism.  But they hang in

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations
Imperial Theater

There are few examples of jukebox musicals—a denigrating term if ever there was one—that have blown me away. In fact, without overtaxing my brain, Jersey Boys, which dramatizes the formation, success, and eventual break-up of the 1960s rock ‘n’roll group The Four Seasons, is the only jukebox musical of import that immediately comes to mind.

Directed by Des McAnuff and choreographed by Sergio Trujillo, Jersey Boys opened on Broadway to rave reviews, a Best Musical Tony, and a 4,642 performance run, followed by continued success off Broadway.

Ed Rubin
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Birdland Blue
Los Angeles Theater Center - Theater 4

Birdland Blue, the latest production of The Robey Theater Company, which is now in its silver anniversary season, must be counted as a major disappointment. On paper, the play sounded intriguing:  a portrait of jazz in its 1959 heyday, with Miles Davis (Marcus Clark Oliver) playing his horn at Birdland, the NYC nightclub named after the famed Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker. With a live band listed in the credits, the chance to hear some good music—and see a rare jazz play—was enticing.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Wednesday's Child
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz Theater

Wednesday’s Child centers on a couple who want a child but can’t conceive one. They hire a healthy university student to be a surrogate mother. Each of the couple nourish her, either with food or promises of a better path to life fulfillment.  But then the gal’s murdered, so a lawyer and police come into the picture to determine who’s responsible and why.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Herland
Redtwist Theater

"When people ask us if we want to do something, it will be a real question! We can say 'no' or 'yes,' and they'll listen to us when we answer!" Following a wave of playwrights wringing their hands over adult children struggling with the question of what to do about grandma, Grace McLeod thinks it's high time to bring the grandmas themselves into the discussion.

What do McLeod's empty nesters want?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Admissions
Theater Wit

Historically, the children of rich parents attended college, while those of poor parents were sent to trade schools. The mid-20th-century introduction of government-funded facilities offering a variety of curricula, however, has led to confusion over the differing purposes of these institutions, culminating in the popular myth of certification by the "right" school guaranteeing the recipient thereof a future blessed by both social and financial success.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Cake, The
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

The Cake is a problem play because of its central issue involving gay marriage and religious opposition. But one of Bekah Brunstetter's two major couples involved—especially the lead-role wife and baker—is humorous enough to heighten the comic. The play's basically what used to be called a matinee comedy and what today could be considered an onstage (rather than TV) serio-comic sitcom.

The titled pastry is ordered from Della, a proud baker with her own shop, by Jen, a lifelong friend and somewhat of a daughter substitute.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Love Sung in the Key of Aretha
Westcoast Black Theater Troupe

Scheduled before Aretha Franklin’s death, WBTT’s show nevertheless serves as a fitting memorial to her. It comprises songs she sang and played, some that she also composed, and others that were her favorites or also created by friends and those she admired. Four mature women deliver most of them in her style and less often with similar voices. Each grouping of songs gets an explanation of its relevance, sometimes shown projected.

There’s also a young woman singer (lovely Jai Shanae), one of the others’ friends.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Annie Jump and the Library of Heaven
Studio Theater

Annie Jump, a real-life, 19th century astronomer, appears as a 13-year-old girl in Annie Jump and the Library of Heaven. This world premiere closes out Renaissance Theaterworks’ “women in science” theme for this season. It is the first play Renaissance is producing as part of its Br!NK New Play Development Series.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Rotterdam
Kirk Douglas Theater

The second in CTG’s 2019 Block Party Series, Rotterdam  depicts the trials and tribulations of a gay couple, Fiona (Ashley Romans) and Alice (Miranda Wynne).  Brits, these spunky lesbians are living and working in Rotterdam. Though they squabble a lot, their relationship is pretty solid, until Fiona lets it drop that she is thinking of transitioning to male. That means taking hormone shots, lowering her voice, dressing as a man…and possibly having a gender-changing operation.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Faith Healer
Odyssey Theater

Ron Sossi, artistic director of Odyssey Theater Ensemble, celebrates the company’s 50th anniversary season by revisiting Faith Healer by Brian Friel, which was first seen at the Odyssey back in 1989.

This time around Paul Norwood takes on the role of Frank, the itinerant Irish faith healer who may or may not be a con man. Diana Cignoni plays Grace, his long-suffering upper-class wife; Ron Botitta is Teddy, his bibulous, bitching manager. All three turn in remarkable performances.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
True West
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Sam Shepard's 1980 True West begins in a slow simmer, the tale of two brothers, one educated and law-abiding, the other audaciously raw. Through them unfolds the deconstruction of family, American values, the nostalgic of the old West, and the landscape of a vast barren desert. By the end of the play, director James Macdonald has boosted the heat to a rolling boil of chaos and violence, and the brothers, we see, are not so different after all.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
February 2019
Nantucket Sleigh Ride
Lincoln Center - Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

John Guare takes us on a wild romp through personal ups and downs, toxic pop culture, murder-mystery tropes, literary and cinema allusions in his off-kilter new play, Nantucket Sleigh Ride at Lincoln Center’s Off-Broadway Mitzi Newhouse Theater. As in his best-known works, The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation, the veteran playwright mixes his unique take on our celebrity-saturated world with piercing insights on humanity’s infinite and equal capacity for cruelty and love, viewed through a farcical lens.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Be More Chill
Lyceum Theater

If the current Main Stem revival of Kiss Me, Kate celebrates the eternal glory of Broadway’s yesterday, Be More Chill, now at the Lyceum after a hit run Off-Broadway earlier this season, ushers in a promising tomorrow. The basic premises of both shows are silly fun and borrow heavily from other sources.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Kiss Me, Kate
Studio 54

The new Kiss Me, Kate from Roundabout Theater Company at Studio 54 tries a bit too hard to be au courant with feminist perspectives on the historically sexist plot derived from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, but it’s so damned entertaining, joyously staged, and performed that the minor politically correct tweaks to its book hardly matter. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Merrily We Roll Along
Steinberg Center - Laura Pels Theater

Merrily We Roll Along has a special place in the canon of Stephen Sondheim musicals. The original 1981 Broadway production followed what many considered to be the greatest of the legendary composer-lyricist’s collaborations with director Harold Prince, Sweeney Todd. Unlike its blood-and-guts predecessor, Merrily was a quick flop, running for 44 previews and only 16 regular performances. The misfire ended the Sondheim-Prince partnership and attained cult status as a “If-only” show.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Dance of Death, The
Classic Stage Company - Lynn F. Angelson Theater

Once again, following in the footstep of their megahit Carmen Jones, the Classic Stage Company is setting the New York Theater World on fire with two of August Strindberg’s most riveting plays, the sexually charged Mies Julie, adapted by Yael Farber, and Conor McPherson’s new and searing adaption of Strindberg’s highly autobiographical The Dance of Death, not coincidentally a precursor to Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962).

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
February 2019
Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnny Cash
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

Any top-notch tribute to Johnny Cash requires a few essential elements, all of which are evident in the Milwaukee Repertory Theater production of Ring of Fire. First, there needs to be a Man in Black with enough seriousness to sell Johnny Cash’s somber tunes like “Folsom Prison Blues,” and yet keep a twinkle in his eye for light-hearted numbers such as “Daddy Sang Base.” Kent M. Lewis fits the bill nicely as a more “mature” Cash, while Corbin Mayer does an equally exceptional job as the more youthful Cash.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Buyer & Cellar
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne's Lab

Barbra Streisand wrote a book about her work in design. It inspired Jonathan Tolins to write about that work of hers. As Remy Germinario tells Tolins’s story, he stresses it’s a fiction. But Barbra’s design is of her real Malibu estate, including a basement European-type mall in her copied-from-Connecticut barn. Remy’s Alex Moore, characters connected to him, and even Barbra fit into his intriguing, hilarious, surprising story.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Alice by Heart
Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space

Alice by Heart, the latest theatrical adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s children’s classic, similarly shortchanges characterization and depth for gimmicky effects. Featuring a rock-tinged score by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater of Spring Awakening and a book by Sater with director Jessie Nelson, this musical places the Wonderland world in London during the blitz of World War II.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Daddy
Pershing Square Signature Center

There’s a lot going on in ”Daddy,” (sic) the new play by Jeremy O. Harris who burst onto the New York theatrical scene earlier this season with Slave Play, a similarly dense and intense work, presented at New York Theater Workshop. Like that wild and funny piece, ”Daddy” explores racial and sexual issues employing outlandish satire and elements of fantasy. Also like Slave Play, this new piece goes way over the top but has a lot going for it.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Noises Off
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Farce traditionally is as its best when it’s presented seriously, which is why mainly the third act of Noises Off succeeds in making its entire audience laugh.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Mother, The
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

French playwright Florian Zeller managed a rare feat in 2016: he made dementia a compelling topic for a Broadway play. After hit runs in Paris and London (the latter in an English translation by Christopher Hampton), Zeller’s The Father provided a stunning New York vehicle for Frank Langella as an elderly man slipping into senility, and Doug Hughes’s staging sleekly provided the realization of Zeller’s vision of a world gone mad as seen from the title character’s point of view.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Choir Boy
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

The tension is quickly spotted along with the glorious harmonies in this touching, beautifully written, Choir Boy, a coming-of-age play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Academy Award winner for his screenplay, “Moonlight.” Presented by the Manhattan Theatre Club, Choir Boy is now a stunning production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater and McCraney is a welcome new playwright on Broadway.

Pharus Young, bright, charismatic and the outstanding singer at Charles R Drew Prep School for Boys, is chosen to sing for the current senior graduation class, a prestigious honor.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Big River
Todd Wehr Theater

First Stage takes audiences down the Mississippi River for an engaging, family-friendly production of Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This is the world premiere of a co-production developed by Adventure Theater-MTC and the Lyric Theater of Oklahoma, in association with Rogers and Hammerstein Theatricals and First Stage.

Many of Mark Twain’s characters from his famous novel come vividly to life in this show, which is directed here by Marti Gobel.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Fifty Words
Lounge Theater

“The Eskimos have fifty words for snow. I wish there were fifty words to describe love,” says Jan, the distressed wife in Michael Weller’s two-hander, Fifty Words, now running at The Lounge Theater in Hollywood, directed by Shane Stevens.

It’s an apt remark, as Jan (Olga Konstantulakis) and her husband Adam (Eric Larson), experience just about every kind of emotion imaginable during a long night of confrontation in their Brooklyn brownstone, circa 2008.  The play could easily have been called “Long Night’s Journey Into Day.”

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Dutch Masters
The Armory

A playwright struggling to assemble one or more dissimilar personalities and keep them in contentious proximity can incarcerate his personae in a prison, a sanitarium, or a bunker under siege by hostile outsiders, but East Coast writers since the mid-20th century have displayed a fondness for the New York City subway system as the preferred metaphor for demographic diversity trapped within Stygian mystery.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
How to Live on Earth
Flatiron

Those travel advertisements asking us "Wouldn't you like to get away from it all?" inform MJ Kaufman's examination of the motives fueling the human propensity for venturing forth into unknown realms. While death still remains the defining "unknown realm" for most mortals, our author proposes an interplanetary fact-finding mission to Mars—a journey over a distance nullifying any prospect of a homecoming—as a literary construct likewise fraught with risk.

What kind of person chooses, literally, to reach for the stars?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Black Super Hero Magic Mama
Geffen Playhouse - Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater

Clever idea for a play . . . on paper.  Putting it up on its feet was another matter. That’s my verdict on Black Super Hero Magic Mama, Inda Craig-Galvan’s comic-strip-influenced dramedy which is now running at The Geffen, directed by Robert O’Hara.

Craig-Galvan, a TV writer (“The Rookie”), was motivated to write her play by the ongoing tragedy of police violence in the USA:  trigger-happy white cops shooting down unarmed and innocent black boys.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Lackawanna Blues
Mark Taper Forum

”What took this show so long to get here?” is the question that popped into mind while watching Lackawanna Blues, a play written, performed and directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson which is now running at the Mark Taper Forum.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Old Man and the Old Moon, The
Wallis Annenberg Center

The seven male members of the NY-based Pigpen Theater Company have been making shows together since meeting at the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama in 2007.  They are a multi-talented group:  they create plays together, act in them, write and sing songs, play instruments, do puppetry, and help design costumes, sets and lighting.  Their stage wizardry has won them slews of awards across the country, including best-play prizes two years in a row at the New York International Fringe Festival. 

In 2016, Sir Trevor Nunn invited Pigpen to join his first American acting company fo

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Man Who Was Thursday, The
Lifeline Theater

There's a lesson to be learned from G. K. Chesterton's Edwardian-era thriller, but if you spend too much time looking for it, you will likely bypass it completely and miss out on a lot of fun as well.

The year is 1908 and the London parks are teeming with self-styled social radicals proclaiming the virtues of shaking up the status quo.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Doubt
Steppenwolf Theater

The subtext of John Patrick Shanley's set-in-1964 written-in-2004 "parable" changes over the years—from suspicions of priestly sexual abuse, to the ecclesiastical subordination of women, to post-Vatican II teaching methods. Never before, however, has the underlying theme of power's intrinsically corruptive influence been more apparent than in this Gift Theater production, relocated from its remote storefront to the lakefront.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2019
Potting Shed, The
Concordia University - Todd Wehr Auditorium

Celebrated 20th-century novelist Graham Greene turned his talents to playwriting for a brief period. One of these plays, the little-known psychological drama The Potting Shed, has been revived in an Acacia Theater production that is directed by Therese Goode,.

The play has been called an “intellectual detective story.” It's set in 1955 England. James Callifer (Dennis Lewis) is called to his father’s deathbed by a telegram sent by his niece Anne (Paige Landrum). However, he is turned away from seeing the old man once he arrives.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2019

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