Half Time
Paper Mill Playhouse

How often have we heard someone over 60 years old say, “When you become a senior you become invisible?” That may be all too true in some circles, but the seniors who audition to dance in the center court in the new musical Half Time are determined to make themselves visible in a most exciting and inspiring way.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Skintight
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center: Laura Pels Theater

Joshua Harmon's Skintight is a mashup of quirky, bittersweet, sluggish, and hilarious, tangled in the Roundabout Theater Company's production at the Laura Pels Theater. Harmon, who recently wrote Admissions and Significant Other, presents a family with provocative characters looking for love but vexed with personal predicaments with beauty, loss, and loneliness.

Audrey Hepburn once said, “The beauty of a woman, with passing years only grows!” but these are not comforting words for Jodi Isaac. Sharply portrayed by Idina Menzel, Jodi feels old.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
American in Paris, An
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

The city of light is ablaze with graceful music, lively movement and romance, thanks to An American in Paris, which is making its Milwaukee debut in the current Broadway series. This tender, sophisticated tale of love and loss is set in the early days following France’s emancipation in World War II. An American GI, Jerry (McGee Maddox), appears onstage and glances at the still-gorgeous city he wants to capture in his sketchbook. He tears up his train ticket for home once he spies a mysterious girl (Allison Walsh) on a crowded Parisian street.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Lonesome Blues
York Theater at St. Peter's Church

Sounds of blues tradition, R&B, gospel, soul, doo-wop, and rap resonate back through the years, treasured on recordings beginning in the 1920's and tweaked through the decades, reflecting the passage of time.

In an evocative production, the York Theater Company's world musical salutes Blind Lemon Jefferson in Alan Govenar and Akin Babatundé's Lonesome Blues, with Babatundé portraying the bluesman. Known as the "Father of Texas Blues," Blind Lemon Jefferson was the first popular male recording solo singer/guitarist of folk/country blues.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
I'll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers
Kimpton Journeyman Hotel - Ballroom

One of Milwaukee’s most interesting theater companies, TheateRED, collaborates with first-time theater group Untitled Productions for a show guaranteed to keep audiences laughing throughout: I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers. The show, making its Milwaukee debut, also introduces local theatergoers to a new theater space: the second-story ballroom at the Third Ward’s Kimpton Journeyman Hotel.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Property, The
Clurman Theater

Ben Josephson’s play The Property, presented by New Light Theater Project at The Clurman Theatre at Theater Row, centers around a weak-willed woman, Irene, whose tenant—he’s renting the cottage—offers an enticing alternative to her nerdy husband, Eddie. Her self-absorbed high-school son, Todd, is no comfort to her, and her overbearing ex-husband, Vernon—he’s returned after 16 years—is a liability.

The play is essentially plotless.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Murder for Two
Florida Studio Theater - Keating

A tour de force for two actors, Murder for Two engages them in solving the mystery of who killed a famed author of murder mysteries. Tuned in to summertime audiences’ love of light plots and musicals, they deliver a tour de farce that pleases overall despite activity overkill.

Primarily as policeman Marcus Moscowicz, Paul Helm hopes for promotion to detective by uncovering “whodunit.” He comes to assume it’s someone who’d be revealed a villain in author Whitney’s new novel, as have others in his works.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Tarzan
Atlanta Lyric Theater

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fictional character Tarzan was a cultural sensation when it was first appeared on the scene in magazine form in 1912, and then as a popular novel in 1914, both titled “Tarzan of the Apes.” Becoming a big hit with the public, the Chicago-born Burroughs (1875-1950) went on to write an additional twenty-five Tarzan sequels over the next half century. On a frantically productive, life-long roll, Burroughs’ also penned some fifty Sci-Fi and Western novels.

Ed Rubin
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Our Very Own Carlin McCullough
Geffen Playhouse

Who should control the life of a young tennis prodigy is the question that lies at the heart of Our Very Own Carlin McCullough, Amanda Peet’s drama which is now in a world-premiere run at the Geffen Playhouse. The play, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, came out of the Geffen’s development program and is the rare (and welcome) example of a major L.A. theater taking a chance on a new work.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Long Day's Journey into Night
Stratford Festival of Canada - Avon Theater

The intensity of tortured love between the four Tyrones in Eugene O’Neill’s tenderly intimate and brutally heart-wrenching autobiographical tragedy, Long Day’s Journey into Night, would be repulsive if it were not so humane, bizarrely, and sometimes even comically self-aware, and so believably eloquent and poetic. It is a supreme challenge for actors and directors, and a modern masterpiece.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Golden Girls, The: The Lost Episodes: Volume 2
Mary's Attic

In the annals of North American comedy, the television series providing the source material for this camp-drag parody was conceptually daring in its own right—not only did The Golden Girls’s central characters consist exclusively of elderly single women living apart from their families in an era of economic prosperity that saw the rise of single-generation ghettos dubbed "retirement villages," but the cessation of childrearing duties also conferred on these matriarchs a license to speak their minds on issues of the day with a candor often shocking their sheltered offsp

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Log Cabin
Playwrights Horizons

Sunday, June 24 saw a massive parade celebrating gay rights, part of New York City’s Gay Pride Week 2018. It was the perfect time to cover Log Cabin. As usual, Playwrights Horizons presents us with a play that is original, thought provoking, and not always comfortable.

The year at the beginning is 2012; we end up in 2017 through delineated projections, “A short year later.” During this time, two couples explore their friendship, beliefs, and attitudes about gay equality and the world around them.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Hello, Dolly!
Shubert Theater

Most people who know Hello, Dolly! may not realize that Dolly is an Irish woman who married a Jewish merchant. The show is based on a one-act farce originally written in 1835 and made into a full-length play in 1842. In 1938, Thornton Wilder adapted the 1842 version into an American comedy entitled The Merchant of Yonkers. It lasted 39 performances on Broadway. Fifteen years later, after Wilder had extensively rewritten the play and renamed it ”The Matchmaker,” a new production was mounted.

Scott Bennett
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Music Man, The
Stratford Festival of Canada - Festival Theater

Opening night at Canada’s great Stratford Festival was abruptly cancelled just as a glittering crowd had assembled for the gala premiere of a new production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, starring Martha Henry as Prospero. A phone call announcing a bomb threat could not be ignored. Fortunately, the next night’s opening performance of the feel-good musical The Music Man, lavishly re-staged and dazzlingly re-choreographed, restored the festive tone of the week of new productions.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Cyprus Avenue
Public Theater

The Public Theater has brought across the Atlantic Cyprus Avenue from The Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and The Royal Court Theatre, London. David Ireland has written a 100-minute piece that starts as a black comedy and morphs into serious tragedy.

In late middle age, poor Eric, a Protestant in Belfast, has been having trouble sleeping. The insomnia triggers a psychotic episode, and we watch as his delusion develops. He has a new granddaughter, Mary Mae, who looks like Gerry Adams, the Catholic political leader (and, some would say, terrorist sympathizer). No!

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Humans, The
Ahmanson Theater

The Humans came to L.A. with a slew of theatre medals on its chest: successful regional and Broadway productions, a 2016 Tony Award for best play. It also drew big laughs during its opening-night performance at the Ahmanson. So why in the world didn’t I love the play, the way just about everyone else around me did?

Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t hate or even dislike the play, just found it to be disappointing and somewhat underwhelming.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Request Stop
Venice Theater

Staged in the round (actually in a rectangle), Harold Pinter’s Request Stop provides an intimate “in the ring” experience of being at a side of a bus stop where diverse characters will await transportation. The wait is full of Pinteresque pauses, sudden actions, frustrations. The people waiting are of different sexes, ages, and probably social and economic statuses. They stay apart and get together, are cordial and the opposite, and—it is safe to say—have different personalities and desires.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Stone of Patience, The
Venice Theater

Basically a danced drama, The Stone of Patience is as enigmatic as its title. Dramatic movement, sometimes with clicking-like tap sounds but mostly thunderous music, suggests violence. Predominantly solemn black-haired women, costumes, and curtains suggest action to be mourned. So a white dress on a woman character has her stand out in marriage (seemingly forced, thus rape) and, when the dress is rolled up on her belly, a pregnancy. Almost unbelievably, this activity may be the lightest part of the presentation.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Othello
Delacorte Theater

What a strange set of inexplicable choices director Ruben Santiago-Hudson has made in The Public Theater’s production of Othello at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park! He has, first of all, cast a black actor in the role of Roderigo. There’s no point in Othello’s being a black man if he’s not the only black man in the story. The entire subtext of racism that runs through the play is lost, and Brabantio’s outrage at his daughter’s marriage is ill-explained. The beating of the play’s heart has been stopped. This is Shakespeare victimized by political correctness.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Monochrome
Venice Theater

Monochrome deals with belonging, striving to belong, bullying, rejecting, and being rejected. There is an unaccepted person in each scene along with the people who reject. The usual reject has a Chaplinesque quality. That’s the rare distinguishing characteristic of any in the group of players. Music does convey changing moods, however.

Costumes seem to be a bit ragged but are fully bland in color and design. They could be the dressing choice of any people who do not have distinct personalities or, even more important, true character.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Pichanga

Cristian Lopez appears as a young South American Football (that is, Soccer) player who gives many observations and personal perspectives on his life and activities in a poorer neighborhood on the periphery of Santiago. Marking off various areas of the intimate stage, Lopez makes lines in salt on the floor to represent a connection between the games of football/soccer and of life in his area of Chile.

The title word “pichanga” has various meanings of which three seem to apply here.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Spirit and Sworded Treks
Venice Theater

Maria Cheng refers to her one-woman show as “an ongoing spiritual journey.” It combines her explorations of life with her talents of teaching, dancing, tai chi, speaking, choreographing, authoring/storytelling, and arts administration. She makes it all look easy in Spirit & Sworded Treks during which she also artistically wields the titled weapon.

Backed by a projected circular religious symbol, Maria Cheng takes off on about five phases out of eight of her full presentation.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
One of a Kind
Venice Theater

A twist on a coming-of-age play, One of a Kind has Eden Bar anticipating writing in her dull diary about the 16th birthday she is about to celebrate. It comes, and with it, her trip to the government Personality Office. There she’ll receive her Personality Definition with which to leave childhood and become an adult.

On the big day, Eden meets discouraging judges who act like bouncy office workers ready to be clowns. Made-up faces—and for some huge dark rimmed glasses—give them definitiveness.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Michelangelo da Caravaggio
Venice Theater

Like Caravaggio’s paintings come to life, the staging of Michelangelo da Caravaggio comes off as a series of tenebrous tableaux beginning and ending the master’s typical actions. Most are so graphic that, although all the dialogue is in Italian and in no way translated into English, much can be understood via visuals. All are either colorful or the result of interplay between light and darkness.

The play’s beginning assumes that a woman stabbed Caravaggio fatally. Then he’s shown at the start of a play-long flashback wielding his paintbrush.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Antigone
Venice Theater - Pinkerton

The play Antigone by Sophocles and its story are classic. In a modern Slovanian language adaptation, it is contemporary in its concern with young women’s status and development as well as governmental politics. In its presentation, it is up to date, as well, in use of projections and cell phones for messaging and picture taking.

Jakob Podjavorsek cold-bloodedly dominates as Creon, the absolutist ruler who’s decreed the corpse of his defeated foe Polynices must ignominiously lie unburied.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Bump
Venice Theater - Pinkerton

Apparently much of Bump, this mostly intriguing and fun piece, is the result of improvisation, probably by the two stars. And star they do as they mime and play the cute heart out of a not-so-cute meet followed by a cuter one. Also a few different kinds of partings that might have happened anywhere on earth that has a Walmart.

Eliana begins by sitting and waiting and wondering that will eventually come full circle and have her end similarly but not identically. A buzzing insect and butterfly in a book get her out of her chair.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Madwoman of Chaillot, The
Off the Wall Theater

Playwright, novelist and diplomat Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944) was one of the most important men of his generation. Part of his legacy is the satiric The Madwoman of Chaillot, which is being staged by Off the Wall Theater. While set in the crazed, madcap world of Paris’s artistic Chaillot district, the play also makes important points about government corruption, greed and corporate mishandling.

In this version by director Dale Gutzman, the play is (on the surface) as crisp and refreshing as a glass of iced tea on a sizzling summer day.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
But I Can Move
Venice Theater

The program blurb for But I Can Move states: “Two artists share their own cultural boundaries, specialties, changes and pleasure through text and movement performance.” The cultural differences do not come through easily, but the movement and some text both spoken and projected in English help explain what the artists were trying to accomplish.

Movement is the highlight of the presentation, much aided by lighting and shadowy pastel projections in which what appear to be trees predominate.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Addams Family, The
Venice Theater

I’ve heard that Tacoma Musical Playhouse won first place in the last American Association of Community Theater’s competition among musical and play presentations. It’s The Addams Family -- first production at the ACCT Worldfest 2018 at Florida’s Venice Theater Stage--shows why the group has been and is going to be hard to beat any time. It’s community theater perfection. In my opinion, it would be very competitive with professionals.

Although there’s not a miscasting in the screwy bunch of characters, Rafe Wadleigh is a superlative competitor for best actor.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Carole's Kings
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

Carole King, with her voice or her pop songs or both, dominated the airwaves as well as everywhere musical theater appeared in the last part of the last century. Carole’s Kings now dominates an intimate stage at Florida Studio Theater to strike up its summer cabaret series. And striking it is, presenting a variety of vocals and their relationship to Carole King’s entire career achievements.

It may seem a different kind of treat to hear a woman’s career explained and her songs sung by men only.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Crossing Delancey
The Players

As a motion picture, “Crossing Delancey” was a standard pop comedy with simple romance. An unexpected hit in the contemporary film world of action blockbusters, its animation is of the human kind. It’s heavy only on Jewish urban life, characters, conversation, and comic references. They come together with universal sentiments in the stage version and make for enjoyable light summertime theater.

If there is a problem, it’s that Susan Sandler’s theatrical script is still mainly a cinematic one. Theatrical blackouts separate the multitude of scenes, slowing activity.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Skeleton Crew
Geffen Playhouse - Gil Cates Theater

Skeleton Crew is aptly titled. The social drama by talented newcomer Dominique Morisseau deals with the death of a Detroit auto factory whose workers are about to be dumped on a scrap heap. The play, now in a West Coast premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, is set in 2008, the year of the big economic crash in the USA. The human consequence of capitalism’s catastrophic failure falls on the four African-American workers, all of whom are brilliantly acted by the play’s cast.

June 2018
Royal Family of Broadway, The
Barrington Stage Company - Boyd-Quinson Mainstage

The Royal Family of Broadway at Barrington Stage is the first smash hit of the 2018 Berkshire Season. When word gets out, this is sure to be the hottest ticket in town. Be warned: this world-premiere musical will be around only through July 7, 2018. After that, as the title states, if all goes well, it’s Broadway bound.

This show has everything and then some. For this all-in production, Barrington Stage Company has bet the house. They have done it before and may well do it again. What’s not to like in an old chestnut, theater about theater, by George S.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Long Day's Journey into Night
Bram Goldsmith Theater

Just a little over a year ago, the Geffen mounted a local production of Long Day’s Journey into Night (with Alfred Molina and Jane Kaczmarek) , but that hasn’t stopped The Wallis from importing a British production of the same play, this one starring Jeremy Irons and Lesley (“Phantom Thread”) Manville. It comes to us from the Bristol Old Vic via the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Can it be that Eugene O’Neill is suddenly a hot playwright?

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Dan Cody's Yacht
City Center - Stage I

Privilege, wealth, education, the tensions of haves and have-nots, all provide rich fodder for dramatic theater. Dan Cody's Yacht, Anthony Giardina's latest Manhattan Theater Club production at City Center Stage 1, is set in two towns just outside Boston, working-class Patchett and upscale Stillwell.

Giardina's inspiration came from “The Great Gatsby” where F. Scott Fitzgerald's wealthy image of Dan Cody's yacht motivated the social climb of wannabe millionaire, Jay Gatz. For Giardina, however, the lure is not a yacht but top-level and costly education.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Lysistrata Unbound
Odyssey Theater

The war of the sexes is fought on all fronts in Lysistrata Unbound, Eduardo Machado’s rewrite of Aristophanes’s two-thousand-year-old Lysistrata. Working with John Farmanesh-Bocca, artistic director of Not Man Apart Physical Theatre Company, Machado strips away the farcical aspects of  wives withholding sex from their warrior husbands and turns the story into a full-blown tragedy.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Opportunities of Extinction, The
The Den

The Mojave Desert, located in the southeast corner of California, encloses within its boundaries the lowest elevations and highest heat indices in North America. These conditions endow the landscape with preservative qualities rendering it a site of natural phenomena dating to prehistoric times. Among these are the Joshua Trees, wind-twisted xerophytic shrubs deriving their label from the sun-dazzled hallucinations of evangelical migrants, for whom the eerie cactus shapes resembled prophets beckoning them to the promised land.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Bat-Hamlet
The Cornservatory

"Sometimes a man has to dress a certain way to do what he must do" declares our hero as he reluctantly acknowledges a universe where corruption is so widespread that only by embracing its stratagems can its defeat be ensured. Whether uttered by Shakespeare's melancholy prince or DC Comics's masked crusader, the myth of the lone man forced into disguise to wage war against deception crippling the social fabric of his homeland is so culturally ubiquitous that Jordan Pulliam's conflation of Elizabethan tragedy with Depression-era graphic-noir thriller is but a short step.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Blanket of Dust, A
The Flea

In Richard Squires’s play A Blanket of Dust, presented at The Flea Theater by Delphi Film in association with Alfonso Ramos and Eve Pomerance, a woman, Diane, loses her husband in the 9/11 disaster. She’s convinced that the government is responsible for the catastrophe and campaigns to uncover the conspiracy. She’s a Senator’s daughter, so the issue becomes a family affair.

Years later, she becomes involved with Andrew, a book-store owner active in the dissident movement.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Manufacturing Mischief
The Tank

Manufacturing Mischief is “a puppet play by Pedro Reyes, written by Paul Hufker.” It’s not clear what those credits mean, but Mr. Reyes is apparently the progenitor. The show presents us with a discussion of artificial intelligence and other topics, and it’s really smart. We meet Steve Jobs, Noam Chomsky, Elon Musk, Ayn Rand and other luminaries. They’re woven together in a plot that’s just as complex and silly as it should be. It has something to do with a machine that materializes the author of whatever book is put into it—thus Marx, Rand, and some of the others.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2018

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