School for Wives, The
City Garage Theater

Moliere’s venerable comedy, The School for Wives, which was first produced in 1662, gets a makeover in City Garage’s version of the play. Freshly translated by Frederique Michel and Charles Duncombe and performed in modern dress, this School doesn’t seem creaky at all; in fact its satirical attack on male chauvinism and arrogance has a special relevance these me-too days.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Southern Gothic
Windy City Playhouse

In some circles, this literary genre would be called "immersive" theater, in others, "fly-on-the-wall" drama. The important thing to remember is that flies don't always remain in the same spot on the same wall.

As in Alan Aykbourn's House & Garden, Leslie Liautaud's play progresses in simultaneous real time over several locales, and as in "mosh pit" staging, audience members are free to roam the performance space at will.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Brothers Size, The
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Thetaer

For most Milwaukee theater audiences, The Brothers Size will be an introduction to the work of talented newcomer Tarell Alvin McCraney. Although hailed as among America’s brightest new playwrights, McCraney has had only one other play, In the Red and Brown Water, produced here in conjunction with a local university several years ago.

Given this fact, one cannot assume that local audiences will be well-versed in Yoruba culture, which is the source for McCraney’s trio of plays.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Memphis
Hobby Center

Every so often a great musical comes along with an opening number that is so spell-binding it seems like it should be a grand finale. That is the case currently with the extraordinary Theater Under the Stars production of the Tony Award-winning show, Memphis: The Musical, now playing at Sarofim Hall in Houston’s Hobby Center.

Led by sensational vocalist, Warren G. Nolan Jr.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Constellations
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne's Lab

After a traditional cute meet, a man and woman begin, through stops and starts, to relate to each other nontraditionally in parallel worlds in a universe that accommodates different times, places, motivations, actions and reactions. A dark blue background holds stars. Lights flicker or flash to sounds, designating each variation of the same humans’ relationship. According to string theory, an infinite number of these could take place.

Chris Tipp’s usually nice-guy Roland is a beekeeper. Alexis Hyatt works at Cambridge U. in the astrophysics department.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, The
Annenberg Center - Bram Goldsmith Theater

Romance is in the air at the Wallis, both literally and figuratively. Kneehigh, the British company known for its imaginative and crowd-pleasing productions of such works as The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips and Rapunzel, has revived its 1992 version of The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk and brought it to the United States. In its stop at the Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills, Marc Antolin and Daisy Maywood take on the roles of Marc and Bella Chagall, one of the most loving couples in history.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Disco Pigs
Irish Repertory Theater

Every once in a blue moon, my mind is kidnapped by a play in which a great deal of what is being said by the actors—be it an accent, a foreign phrase, or a made-up language—no matter how hard I try to decipher what I am hearing, has words being delivered from the stage that are largely unintelligible.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Fusiform Gyrus
Talking Band

The pre-show of Fusiform Gyrus consists of a grey-haired man at a desk, with his head lowered. There’s a black back wall, which turns out to be a scrim, with scientific names for beasts written on it: thamnophis sirtalis, phengaris arion….

Fusiform Gyrus, the program tells us, is “a region in the brain that lights up with activity during brain imaging when people describe, and give names to living things.” At the show’s start, a second grey-haired man enters, and the two men, equally tall, laugh for no reason.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Rehearsal, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

At Florida State University/Asolo Conservatory, The Rehearsal is a double delight. It is a play within a play (much of Pierre Marivaux’s 18th Century The Double Inconstancy inside Jean Anouilh’s drama set in 1950s France), uniting the past and the modern. It is also one of the best acted plays I’ve seen by the Conservatory for Actor Training’s second year students.

It’s no accident that in French “repetition” has the same meaning of repetition or repeating, as in English, but relating to theater, it means rehearsal.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Fear and Misery in the Third Reich
The Den

After fleeing Germany in 1933, Bertolt Brecht made it his mission to warn us that a political faction therein led by a charismatic upstart named Adolf Hitler was up to no good. This he accomplished in a series of dramatic sketches illustrating the suffering of innocent people under the manipulative coercion of corrupt authorities—a theme explored in his earlier plays, but now attributed to a particular group of oppressors.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Breach: A manifesto on race in America
Biograph Theater

An unwritten rule observed by playwrights from antiquity to the present day is the wholesale denial of sex education as a factor in the psychological development of their characters—an omission making for plot progressions in which the plans of educated adults are upset by accidental pregnancies, babies are born on unwashed floors in public buildings, infants are diapered on cemetery grasslands, fatherhood is presented as an after-the-fact responsibility and motherhood, a before-the-fact vocation.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Hello, Dolly!
Crighton Theater

After a historically sad and troubling week for Americans aware of the tragic events in Florida, the abundant joy that is now being offered by the Stage Right Players production of Hello, Dolly! at Conroe’s gorgeous Crighton Theater, could not have come at a better time. It was a half-century ago when I first saw the show’s hit 1967 Broadway revival with its all-black cast, memorably headlined by Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Finding Neverland
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

Not nearly as bad as some of its Broadway reviews suggest, the mildly pleasant Finding Neverland filled the hearts of both children and adults at Milwaukee’s Marcus Center for the Performing Arts. Although the main characters/actors lack subtlety and nuance, both in reciting their lines and chirping through the uplifting lyrics, the show itself is an excellent touring vehicle. Credit for this goes to a truly magical director, Diane Paulus, and a talented team of creators.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Prelude to the Apocalypse
La MaMa

Prelude to the Apocalypse is an hour-long solo show written and performed by Blake Sugarman and presented by La MaMa.

Mr. Sugarman talks to us about the environmental crisis, and for the first half-hour or so, he remains seated behind a desk, speaking—and this is ill-advised—into a microphone. An hourglass sits on the desk, and its live image is projected on the back wall. There’s a large, handsome pile of trash bags upstage as well.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Isaac Babel and the Black Sea
Lab Theater

Acting schools are one of the last places in L.A. where one can see large-scale original productions. Basic economics and recent Actors Equity contract requirements dictate that state of affairs, resulting in a profusion of one- and two-person shows being mounted here (except in those small theaters which have gone non-union).

Thus it was good to see thirteen actors listed in the program of Isaac Babel and the Black Sea, which is now in a world-premiere run at Stella Adler Lab Theater. Sometimes one yearns to see full-blown paintings, not just intimate portraits.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Glass Menagerie, The
freeFall Theater - Mainstage

How can a production present a classic play in a new light? The Glass Menagerie at freeFall Theater may show how. Here, Tom Wingfield recalls the action of the plot via his memory but by performing magic. Director Eric Davis seems to think that because author Tennessee Williams was gay, Tom is too. So he wanted to escape his repressive mother and environment but also to seek lovers at sea. Shall we test?

Williams ordered a picture of the missing Wingfield father who “fell in love with long distance” always to look down on the family room.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Two-Fisted Love
Odyssey Theater

“To see what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”

Dorothy Parker’s telling line came back to me as I sat through Two Fisted Love, David Sessions’s dark drama, now in a world-premiere run at the Odyssey and directed by Jules Aaron.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Cyrano
Jarvis Square

What you need to know about Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac is that there are these two guys—one is a smart, talented, sensitive, athletic rock star, but ugly (or thinks he is), and the other is a hunky airhead—who are both in love with the same girl. Since the brainy guy wants the girl to be happy, he helps the dummy woo her (not being too bright, herself, she falls for it).

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Skeleton Crew
North Shore Center for the Performing Arts

This grubby industrial break room, with its cold fluorescent-tubing lights and peeling walls, is beginning to look disturbingly familiar to Chicago playgoers, given the recent proliferation of plays depicting gritty low-level working conditions. If this is unsettling, maybe it's because, as union steward Faye reminds us, "Any moment, any one of us can become The Other"—transformed from the person handing panhandlers spare change out the car window on the exit ramp to the one holding the sign.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Water by the Spoonful
Mark Taper Forum

There are enough demons in Water by the Spoonful to fill the realms of Pluto.

In Quiara Alegria Hudes’s 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, now running at the Taper, just about everyone in the seven-person cast is battling a severe psychological problem, beginning with the more-or-less main character Elliot (Sean Carvajal), an Iraq war vet with PTSD and a gimpy leg. Then there are Fountainhead, Chutes & Ladders, and Orangutan (Josh Braaten, Bernard K.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Shakespeare's Greatest Hits
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

A projection for a long run is a good thing, because in its first week, an already revised Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits does not seem to be in final form yet. Its title may be misleading: There are only three lyrics written by William Shakespeare. And they are superior to enough of the others in later music presented here to make one wish Shakespearean plays had been culled for more.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Rhinoceros
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

I've long wanted to see Ionesco’s Rhinoceros produced in English. After attending Asolo Rep’s production directed by Frank Galati, I’m still waiting. I should have been warned. Galati had said in a local interview that he, with permission of Ionesco’s estate, was turning three acts into two. That’s changed more than one French play since the ‘50s.

Galati also “tried to prune the text so that it would have efficiency and momentum, not...returning and reflecting and repeating, but moving on and on.” Sometimes a motif gets lost in the process.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Ironbound
Gil Cates Theater

The drama sizzles and crackles in Ironbound, Martyna Majok’s powerful play now on tap at the Geffen, directed by Tyna Rafaeli. Majok, daughter of a Polish-born working-class woman, grew up in an industrial corner of New Jersey whose factories and mills once supported large numbers of immigrants. Now, in this post-industrial age, the factories and mills have been abandoned— the people who worked in them as well. Against that bleak, grim backdrop—symbolized by Tim Mackabee’s looming factory wall—Ironbound tells its pungent, black-humored tale.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue
Kirk Douglas Theater

Center Theater Group has mounted Quiara Alegria Hudes’s 2007 play Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, at the Kirk Douglas as a way of introducing L.A. to her trilogy of related plays, one of which, Water by the Spoonful, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. (Spoonful will open in a week’s time at Mark Taper Forum, followed by The Happiest Song Plays Last at Los Angeles Theater Center).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Nice Girl
Raven Theater

A woman 38 years old in 1984—when this play purports to be set—would have been born in 1946 and graduated from high school circa 1964. Since we are told that she was her family's second child, her now-"nearly 70" mother would likely have married during the mid-1940s. This hypothetical timeline is important because Melissa Ross has a penchant for infusing her rom-com sensibilities with a hazy ambience suggesting narratives of far earlier vintage.

The target of the title sobriquet, Nice Girl, is Miss Josephine Rosen.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Blind Date
Goodman Theater

For as long as historical dramas have been written, their authors have struggled with the task of conveying the context of the events depicted to audiences who may be too young to remember them, too old to remember them accurately, or weren't paying attention while they transpired—all within the increasingly abbreviated performance time dictated by the fashion of the day.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Equivocation
Next Act Theater

Milwaukee’s Next Act Theater reveals the many sides of William Shakespeare in Equivocation by playwright Bill Cain. The play is set in 1606 London, where Shakespeare has been summoned to write a commission for the king. Then things get complicated – far too complicated, if Shakespeare is to be believed.

Bill Cain is a graduate of Northwestern University, and a man of many talents: he is a Jesuit priest (according to the program notes), and the founder of a Shakespeare company in Boston.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Gruesome Playground Injuries
Underground Collaborative

Milwaukee’s newest theater company, The Constructivists, chose to open its doors with a play by one of the nation’s newer playwrights, Rajiv Joseph. Although better-known for his Bengal Tiger at the Bagdad Zoo, which played on Broadway, Joseph also wrote Gruesome Playground Injuries. It is this play that The Constructivists selected to perform in the intimate, black box theater called the Underground Collective.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Delta in the Sky with Diamonds or Maybe Not
Theater 54 - Shetler Studios

A play by June Daniel White called Delta in the Sky with Diamonds or Maybe Not is playing at Theater 54 at Shetler Studios, produced Off-off-Broadway by Boogla Nights Productions. It concerns a woman, Delta, recently deceased, who meets God and finds that for some inexplicable reason he has a plan to use her to save the world. It seems that she must get Lyle, a living former rock star, and Hollywood, a living waitress, together as partners. The future of the world depends on it. It’s not clear why this should be the case.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Hinter
Steep Theater Company

Calamity West's Hinter begins with the last of five murders, walks us through the police investigation and then flashes back to acquaint us with the events leading up to the crime itself.

Audiences may cry "foul" at the playwright's refusal to reveal whodunit by the end of the thriller, but those listening closely will have gathered enough information to speculate on the identity of the villain(s) whose motives may lie in individual perversion, opportunistic deception or spectral miasma, but whose culpability leaves everyone with, literally, blood on their hands.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Or Current Resident
Theater for the New City

Naturalism isn’t my favorite style, but with theaters trying to outdo each other to be avant-garde, it’s refreshing to find a conventional, naturalistic production of a new script. I speak of Squeaky Bicycle Productions’ production of Or Current Resident, by Joan Bigwood, presented at The Theater for the New City. It’s squarely in the tradition of the American drama’s theme of family. From Eugene O’Neill through Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, to Sam Shepard, American playwrights have been obsessed with family.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Black Pearl Sings!
Stackner Cabaret

Black Pearl Sings! is based on a remarkable true story. Playwright Frank Higgins was inspired by the real-life relationship between legendary singer/guitarist Huddie William Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly) and Harvard folk musicologist John Lomax, who helped petition for Ledbetter's release from prison. However, in the playwright’s version, both the musicologist and singer are female. Higgins attempts to broaden the focus to encompass women’s issues in the early 1930s.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Native Gardens
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

On one side of the stage is the Butleys’ bright D.C. patio furnished for dining, looking in on a tastefully appointed home, and surrounded by a small white cement arc walling in a feast of colorful flowers. On the other side, a mess of a closed off threshold and dead foliage in beds of throw-away ornaments clutter under an imposing oak tree with overhanging brown leaves. This set reveals the action: a clash.

The Butleys welcome new neighbors Pablo Del Valle, an immigrant Chilean of a powerful law firm, and pregnant wife Tania for wine.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Balls
59E59 Theaters

As a modest player myself, and a frequent fan of the major tennis championships, I’ve been currently suffering my annual frustration at the elusive, wee-hours-of-the-morning, live telecasts of the Australian Open matches now underway in the distant time zone of “The Land Down Under.”

But relief has arrived right here in Manhattan, thanks to the fascinating production of Balls, now gracing the stage of the 59E59 Theaters right here in the Big Apple. Balls was recently developed and premiered by Houston's famed Stages Repertory Theater.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Traitor
A Red Orchid Theater

You see, there's this play about a doctor who discovers pollutants in his home town's main tourist attraction, but his brother's the mayor—yes, it's that one!

Of all Henrik Ibsen's so-called "problem plays," An Enemy of The People, his fable of the individual's duty to oppose criminal deception engendered by popular complacency, has proved most protean in its applicability to cultures worldwide throughout the ages.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Good Fight, The
Edgewater Presbyterian Church

When even African-American essayist Booker T. Washington declared European women—in particular, those of England's urban centers—to be exploited under the law to a degree exceeding the men of his own country, who could dispute the need for their immediate enfranchisement?

Making a case for women's right to vote in nations encumbered by several more centuries of oppression than ours, however, often mandated civil disobedience—and suppression thereof—of a severity approaching violence.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Spark
Flat Irons Building

When a play's synopsis begins, "Well, there's these three sisters," we immediately think of Chekhov, but the women of the Glimord clan are a long way from the bored, pampered, upper-class Misses Prozorov.

For one thing, they live in rural North Carolina—not in a swanky country-club mansion, but a shabby frame house in need of repair, just off Highway 40 (dubbed "Tobacco Road" for its surrounding landscape). For another, their father was no decorated general, but a hard-drinking wastrel who abandoned their late mother to a lifetime of toil in the fields.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Freud's Last Session
Odyssey Theater

Leading debunker of God meets famed Christian thinker in Freud’s Last Session, Mark St. Germain’s intellectual drama now on the smallest of the Odyssey’s three stages in West Los Angeles. The two-character play, first produced by the Barrington Stage Company, imagines a meeting in 1939 between Sigmund Freud (Martin Rayner) and C.S. Lewis (Martyn Stanbridge). Freud was living in London after having fled the Nazis; Lewis was a Cambridge don (and the author of numerous books on theology and mythology, including “The Chronicles of Narnia.”)

Author St.

January 2018
Date Reviewed:
Willard Manus
Russian Transport
Studio Theater

In the thick of a Wisconsin winter comes a surprising play that literally “transports” the audience to a modest Brooklyn flat, inhabited by an immigrant family. The foursome consists of two Russian parents and two teens. They are reaching for – but failing to achieve – the American Dream. The husband’s car company is failing, and the older teen is forced to turn over his earnings to pay the rent.

This is the world of Ericka Sheffer’s Russian Transport , produced by the reliably excellent Rennaisance Theaterworks.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Comedy About a Bank Robbery, The
Criterion

Many audience members and London critics liked this both-literally-and-figuratively-slapstick farce better than I did. The premise and action of The Comedy About a Bank Robbery are funny, true. But if you know anything about the real America shown in cops-and-robbers movies, this take-off on the same is not only silly but jejune. I had a hard time getting past the Minneapolis manager of the bank-to-be-hit who speaks with a Deep Southern accent.

The story, set in 1958, has a prisoner as if in a much earlier-type jail consorting with crooked guards and police.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2018

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