Because I Could not Stop: An Encounter with Emily Dickinson
Pershing Square Signature Center - Romulus Linney Theater

Emily Dickinson was a woman ahead of her time. She didn’t feel the need to marry, to have kids, to be known as a Good Christian Woman who went to church every Sunday. Instead, she chose to inhabit her own world filled with joy, sorrow, passion, and poetry. Her own imagination was world enough.

This production features a very different interpretation of the writer, and one I find difficult to grasp.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
In the Heights
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse Theater

Although Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights is getting more attention these days thanks to the Seismic shift which occurred after he wrote Hamilton, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater proves that there is much to enjoy in this enchanting, salsa-inspired musical.

Set in the Spanish-speaking barrio of New York’s Washington Heights, Miranda and his artistic team bring characters vividly to life. The main character is Usnavi, which Miranda himself played at the Richard Rodgers Theater on Broadway.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Twenty-Six Pebbles

(see review(s) under 26 Pebbles)
http://www.totaltheater.com/?q=node/8067

26 Pebbles
Reuben Cordova Theater

The horror and heartbreak of the 2013 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School are dramatized skillfully and powerfully in 26 Pebbles. The play, written by Eric Ulloa and directed by Jules Aaron, has transferred to Theater 40 after premiering at The Human Race Theater Company. Ulloa based his play on the interviews and research that he conducted in Sandy Hook.

September 2018
Date Reviewed:
Willard Manus
Cake, The
Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater

The Geffen, under its new artistic director Matt Shakman, is one of the few major theaters in L.A. to pay attention to the excellent work being done in the smaller theatres in town. In a departure from its previous policy of presenting only plays which had been successful in New York or Chicago, the Geffen has invited the Echo Theater Company to remount its 2017 hit, The Cake, in its Skirball Kenis space.

The play, written by Bekah Brunstetter and directed by Jennifer Chambers (director of the Echo’s playwright’s lab), was inspired by the Masterpiece Cakeshop vs.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Goat, The, Or, Who is Sylvia
Rivendell Theater

However steadfastly we may support the right of all people to love, couple and marry as they choose, most communities still designate a few zones "no-fly" to winged Cupid—children below a certain age, for example. Likewise forbidden are erotic activities involving live animals. Furry or feathered consorts may sleep undisturbed at the foot of your bed, but if your Fido or Felix crawls beneath the covers, you risk the censure of cohabitants, peers and legal authorities.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Keep it Brassy 2
Music Box Theater

The talented cast on stage at Houston’s popular nightclub, The Music Box Theater, included most of “the usual suspects,” minus cast regular, Cay Taylor, who was out of town.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Pippin
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

Traces of the 1972 original pervade Pippin as presented by the Skylight Music Theater. The most visible of these traces involve original choreographer/director Bob Fosse, who brought a somewhat sinister sexuality to this otherwise innocent tale of a youth who struggles to find his place in the world. Fosse’s sensuous, signature touches dominate the choreography (adapted here by Christal Wagner) which appear in almost every scene.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
I was Most Alive with You
Playwrights Horizons - Mainstage Theater

The moral of this story is never say that things can’t get any worse; they definitely can. The bright spot in a world filled with tumult is that I was Most Alive with You is riveting theater. Craig Lucas’s writing, Tyne Rafaeli’s direction, and most notably the sheer brilliance of the cast combine to leave the audience spellbound. By the end of the play, we’ve been so drawn in we hold our breath awaiting the outcome.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Laura Benanti
Sarasota Opera House

Initiating what is to be a continuing program of Cabaret By the Bay, Laura Benanti proved an audience charmer at Sarasota Opera House. Fittingly, her often soaring soprano was the prevalent source of her charm. Her accompanying narrative mainly brought her life up to date as a Broadway star and as a happy wife and mother of a little girl beginning to toddle.

Benanti’s introduction had her supplying context for three songs she sang in the lead role of Amalia Balash in She Loves Me, for which she was nominated for Tony and Drama Desk awards.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Phantom
Westchester Broadway Theater

What splendid voices! Matthew Billman as the Eric, the Phantom, and Kayleen Seidl as the luminous ingenue Christine Daee fill the theater with their glorious singing. It’s enough to just sit back and enjoy the sound. After all, even in this alternative version to the Broadway smash, Phantom of the Opera, we all know the basic story. The horribly disfigured Eric hides out beneath the Paris Opera House (If we miss the locale, there’s a huge sign hanging above the stage). Young, impressionable Christine captivates him with her stunning voice.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Savannah Sipping Society, The
Crighton Theater

It’s hard to believe that Stage Right Productions has just completed its first decade as the resident company in Montgomery County’s crown jewel, the historic and beautiful Crighton Theater. But if the current production opening the 11th season is any indication, the next ten years look to be a rollicking good time. The play in question is the uproarious comedy, The Savannah Sipping Society, by Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope, & Jamie Wooten.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
UK Underdog
Zephyr Theater

The world is not a pretty place in UK Underdog, Steve Spiro’s one-man show, now in a world premiere at the Zephyr Theater, admirably directed by Ann Bronston. Spiro grew up in a tough, working-class section of London, a sickly Jewish kid who was bullied in school not only by the students but the teachers. It didn’t get much better as he got older and had to deal with anti-Semitism and thuggery practically wherever he went. It wasn’t until he took up kung fu and learned how to defend himself that his enemies left off.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Hair
Geva Theater - Mainstage

I wondered how the old love-rock musical would play these days for an audience of younger folk unfamiliar with Hippie rebellion, flower children,‘60s rock music, and a more feminine long-hair style and slovenly tie-dyed clothes-styles. For that matter, I wasn’t so sure how the now-rather-old folks, mostly more establishment, would regard it. I saw its original New York Public Theater production and Broadway Premiere, and loved most of the many others I saw in many places; so I knew that all they had to do was start singing “Let the Sun Shine In,” and I’d be in tears.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Agnes
59E59 Theaters

Catya McMullen is a strange and interesting playwright. In the emotional storm that is Agnes, the men she has written are complex, usually appealing, and at times, difficult to understand. The women are, for the most part, mean spirited and driven by misplaced attachment, lust, and the need to dominate. They yell a lot. And everyone swears none stop; counting the f-bombs is an exercise in futility. Their sexual pronouncements are cold and totally devoid of sensuality.

Charlie has an excuse for his detachment; he’s on the autism spectrum.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
American Saga: Gunshot Medley: Part 1
Met Theater

The horrific history of slavery in the USA is laid bare in American Saga, Rogue Machine’s last production at the Met Theater (the company will move to the Electric Lodge in Venice this fall).

Set in a North Carolina graveyard (simple but effective set by Priti Donde), the play brings to poetic life the stories of three of the black folks buried there, circa 1850-1860. Author Dionna Michelle Daniel has those folks speaking to us (and each other) as if they were still alive, using language that is rich and powerful in expression and feeling.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Untranslatable Secrets of Nikki Corona, The
Gil Cates Theater

The Geffen takes a pratfall with The Untranslatable Secrets of Nikki Corona, the Jose Rivera play now in a world premiere production. Directed by Jo Bonney, the play owes its creation to a magazine article Rivera read ten years ago dealing with a Minneapolis company “whose service was to connect people who want to send a message to the other side. I instantly knew it was a play, but I didn’t have characters or a story for some time,” he explained in a program note.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Homos, or Everybody in America
Pride Arts Broadway

A now-somewhat shopworn literary device for introducing dramatic narrative is to propose a montage of ambiguous remarks whose significance would, presumably, be later revealed.

Playwright Jordon Seavey devotes a full three-quarters of his play to this text-in-a-blender approach, even as his protracted preamble name-checks a plethora of 2006-11 New York City trail-markers—dating apps, wine bars, fizzy bath products, the changing profile of Williamsburg—conferring names on peripheral personnel, while reducing its protagonists to collective stereotypes.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Oklahoma!
Hobby Center

There is bittersweet irony in the fact that the supremely joyful current Oklahoma! production from Theater Under the Stars began its run at Houston’s Hobby Center on this past week’s September 11th anniversary of one of the most tragic events in American history. With the musical being skillfully directed here by Kevin Moriarty, what better way to lift the spirits on such a somber occasion than to present this magnificent edition of the classic Rodgers & Hammerstein tuner, now celebrating its own 75th anniversary?

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
School Girls, Or, The African Mean Girl's Play
Kirk Douglas Theater

A girls’ boarding school in the hills of central Ghana, circa 1986, is the unusual setting for School Girls, Jocelyn Bioh’s plucky comedy, now in a West Coast premiere at the Kirk Douglas. The play, which ran off-Broadway last year and was originally developed at The New Black Fest at the Lark, 2016, pokes fun at the way young African females are obsessed with notions of beauty, skin color, and self-worth. School Girls also delves into the struggle for power between two of the students at the school (which is supported by white missionaries).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Heartbreak House
Lion Theater

A snappy cast under David Staller's direction presents George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House as a delightful comedic romp but enough slashes of black and gray to be as pungent as Shaw himself. An anti-war/anti-political greed polemic in the form of a farce, Shaw wrote the play before World War I and re-re-wrote it for its first staging in 1920 when the horror of the war was no longer fresh in the public eye.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Feathers of Fire: A Persian Epic
Kaye Playhouse

Shadow puppetry holds flat, almost two-dimensional puppets behind a screen. A lamp behind them projects their moving shadows on to the screen, and we, the happy audience, see the shadows form the other side. “The Cambridge Guide to Theatre” tells us that shadow puppetry in the Middle East was used to avoid the censors:

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
R.R.R.E.D.
DR2 Theater

There’s real talent on the stage. The performers in R.R.R.E.D. all have great voices, and they do their best to entertain. Matt Loer, late of The Book of Mormon, brings an endearing Jack McBrayer quality to GJ, who’s just happy to serve his disagreeable leader, super belter Victoria (Katie Thompson). Even wearing a ridiculous wig, Marissa Rosen brings joy to her big number, explaining herself in a wince worthy message, “I’m not pregnant, just fat.” Kevin Zak cheerfully soldiers through a laudable, but wildly off topic, endorsement of gay rights.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Days to Come
Beckett Theater

The Mint production of Lillian Hellman's Days to Come is a smart, relevant play burdened with plotlines that are its undoing. Hellman focuses on two major problems, a family-run labor strike threatening a brush factory, which is the major industry in the small town of Callom, Ohio. At the same time, it zeroes in on the personal problems of the family that owns the factory. The complexity blurs the focus of each side. Resolution is slow coming and hard to nail down.

While relevant in the Depression days of 1936, Days to Come was a box office disaster.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
songs for nobodies
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

The title of Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s season opener, songs for nobodies, , reminds one of the famous poem by the late Emily Dickinson. “I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too?” If there’s a lesson to be learned, this musical revue teaches us that “nobodies” deserve our attention as much as celebrities do.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Private Peaceful
TBG Mainstage

The eyes, blue, innocent and frightened, stare out from under a World-War I helmet, impossibly young, a contradictory message of youth threatened by destruction. Adapted and directed by Simon Reade, who staged Broadway’s Journey's End, from the award-winning young adult novel by Michael Morpurgo (War Horse), Private Peaceful comes to New York's TGM Mainstage in this centennial year of the end of World War I.

You get everything you need when you enter the theater: a small cot, a man lying on it and your imagination.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Next Act Theater

As a poster child for the disenfranchised, one can’t imagine a better representative than the unloved and unwanted Hedwig, who stars in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Milwaukee’s All In Productions has staged a raunchy, funny and heartbreaking version of this rock musical. Or, as Broadway’s Alexander Hamilton might have surmised, here’s a guy who “never got his shot.”

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Sweat
Mark Taper Forum

Sweat is a strong, socially conscious play about the impact ruthless 21st-century capitalism has on the working class. Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play is set in Reading, PA., a once-thriving city packed with textile and auto-parts plants which gave tens of thousands of unionized employees well-paying jobs with benefits.

Sweat looks at what happened to those workers when their bosses decided to quit manufacturing in the USA and set up shop in cheap-labor, “right-to-work” countries like Mexico.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Sixties Trilogy, A

see review under 60'S TRILOGY, A

60's Trilogy, A
New American Theater

A 60’s Trilogy digs deep into two of the ugly blemishes on our country’s history: racism and violence. Written by Tommy Carter, the three short plays artfully show the connection between race relations and the love of violence in the 60s: the bombings of black churches, the attacks on civil-rights marchers, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the brothers Kennedy. Oh, and let’s not forget the bloody war in Viet Nam, too.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations
Ahmanson Theater

A loud, slick, but enjoyable jukebox musical, Ain’t Too Proud tells the sprawling story of The Temptations, the male r&b group that went from the Detroit hood to the top of the soul charts in the Motown heyday. Led by Otis Williams (the charismatic Derrick Baskin), the group was one of the first black acts of its kind to ultimately cross over and find acceptance and success with white folks.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Motherfucker with the Hat, The
Gloria Gifford Conservatory

Life in New York’s lower depths is the subject of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherfucker with the Hat, which is now enjoying a successful run at the Gloria Gifford Conservatory in Hollywood. The play, which was first done in 2011 at NYC’s Public Theatre, looks at five friends locked into bizarrely dysfunctional relationships with each other. They’re a colorful, profane, blighted bunch, battling mightily to find a way to survive in their world, which is shot through with drugs, booze, and violence.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Tres Bandidos
Heartland Studio

You've got these three guys planning to rob a bank, see, but their plan is temporarily derailed by heavy rain and a dead battery in the getaway car, forcing them to take refuge in the kind of dingy Texas motor court where the rooms are so spartan as to resemble those in a monastery (with a crucifix on the wall by way of decor). In the absence of TV or radio to pass the time while avoiding the scrutiny of fellow lodgers, the would-be desperadoes are left to their own resources.

My Life on a Diet
St. Clement's Theater

Most famous people long in the tooth, if they are not dead, quietly retired, or resting on their well-earned laurels, tend keep a very low profile. You rarely even hear about them. But not the indefatigable, 85-year-old Renee Taylor, an Energizer bunny whose funny and bittersweet autobiographical one-woman-show, My Life on a Diet, is currently playing to full houses at St Clement’s Theater here in New York City.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Days to Come
Beckett Theater

The scene opens on a nice, comfortable, upper-middle-class living room. The walls are covered in patterned gray wallpaper, the furniture is well-used but not shabby, and the ceiling-high window with the to-the-floor drapes reveals a lovely autumn day. How could anything go wrong in such a cozy environment?

But then, things start to get out of whack. The two maids, both Irish, are tidying up and talking. The older one, who is Hannah (Kim Martin-Cotton), the family cook, demands that young Lucy (Betsy Hogg) hand over her money.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
August 26, 2018
This Prison Where I Live
Tenth Street Theater

Milwaukee’s Theater RED continues to surprise and delight local audiences with its eclectic play selection. Its current production takes on Angela Iannone’s play, This Prison Where I Live. Her title is taken from Shakespeare’s Richard II, , which Edwin Booth is rehearsing as the play begins. The setting is the late 1800s. Booth, in addition to being the most famous actor of his day, is also the brother of John Wilkes Booth.

Sadly, it is Edwin’s brother who left a greater mark on the world by assassinating President Abraham Lincoln.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Gilbert & Sullivan Unplugged
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

The artists begin by promising “Gilbert and Sullivan as you have never seen and heard them before.” By this, they seem to mean renderings by singing multi-instrumentalists. They use banjos, guitars, tambourine, violin, viola, trumpet, flute, a saw, and more, including something in a little blue case that may contain computer-output or a kind of xylophone.

“Unplugged” apparently means the arrangements aren’t traditional, though the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas highlighted are the most popular: Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado, and H. M. S.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Pretty Woman
Nederlander Theater

Samantha Barks is every bit the Pretty Woman of any guy’s dreams. No wonder the buttoned-down, super rich Edward Lewis (Andy Karl) falls for her. She could be Keri Russell’s kid sister; beautiful, of course, but also wildly talented and with plenty of soul. Comparisons with the movie original Vivian, Julia Roberts, are inevitable. But while much of the dialogue remains the same, here Vivian is softer, more the eternal optimist who still believes her Prince Charming is out there.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Famous
11:11

Working out of its new and gaudily-refurbished home, the former Macha Theater, An 11:11 Experience has mounted an ambitious and elaborate production of Famous, the latest work by Michael Leoni, whose 2017 comedy Elevator was a smash hit in L.A. Leoni, who is partnered with Michelle Kaufer in An 11:11 Experience, also directed Famous.

The play portrays the last night of Jason Mast (Christopher Dietrick), a handsome young Hollywood actor who, in 1994, has just been nominated for an Oscar.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Paradise: A Divine Bluegrass Musical Comedy
Ruskin Group Theater

Paradise: A Divine Bluegrass Musical Comedy is a toe-tapping, laugh-a-minute, vest-pocket bluegrass musical about the Appalachian town of Paradise where, owing to the shutdown of the local coal mine, the population has shrunk down to 47 inhabitants, five of whom congregate daily at the seedy general store run by Louanne Knight (the sensational Kelsey Joyce) . The store’s been in Louanne’s family for generations, but even she sees no hope for the future and wants out.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2018

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