Once
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

Once is a boy-meets-girl yet unusual love story set in Dublin, Ireland, to Irish and Czech music. It takes place mostly in a bar and areas not far away from it. With the exception of the Girl’s little girl, everyone in the musical replaces any usual orchestra by being a sort of self-directed band. Their rambunctious performing starts with welcoming audiences onstage to buy and enjoy a drink while they flit and play and sing before settling into theater seats for the drama.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Junk
Vivian Beaumont Theater

Unless you are a math whiz or a business major, you may be bewildered by the financial concepts that are the underpinnings of Junk, the new play at Lincoln Center by Pulitzer-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar (Disgraced). However, as the play unfolds, you will find yourself thoroughly engaged.

Junk is a fast-moving intriguing look at the financial boom of the 1980’s and an upstart financial ‘wunderkind,” Robert Merkin. Using debt instruments, Merkin (a fine Steven Pasquale) plans a takeover of Everson Steel.

Elyse Trevers
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Bobby Pin Girls, The
Chicago Mosaic School,

It's been said of mating customs in 21st-century North America that every emotional cripple eventually finds a crutch and vice-versa. Janey Bell's fable, The Bobby Pin Girls, recounts the pivotal night that two young women break free of exploitive symbiosis to emerge as individuals capable of making independent decisions. Oh, by the way—it's a screwball comedy.

Childhood chums Ana and Bree share an apartment in a boho district of Chicago. Ana is an aspiring actress currently rehearsing a play written/directed/produced by a wealthy dilettante.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Junk
Vivian Beaumont Theater

Junk, an electrifying and riveting epic tale about the machinations of finance, was inspired by Wall Street of 30 years ago. It has the relevancy of this morning's newsbreak.

Ayad Akhtar's latest play, now at the Vivian Beaumont Theater scrutinizes how it all came about. One of America's finest contemporary writers, Akhtar presents the complex issue of identifying our devious money culture. He was inspired by the world of Wall Street in the 1980s, the inside trading of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky and the combative drama of corporate raiders.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Band's Visit, The
Ethel Barrymore Theater

The Band’s Visit is the show I’m going to recommend to those who want to know what to see—the best production so far this season. It’s a combination of Once and Come From Away, yet it has a totally distinctive voice which is thoroughly enticing. This is a quiet show, a little show, which makes a big impact on the heart.

Set in 1996, this is the story of a little Israeli outpost where nothing ever happens.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Sister Act
Irving Theater

Deloris Van Cartier (Cherish Robinson) is an aspiring singer preparing to audition in her gangster boyfriend Curtis’s (Jamall Houston) Philadelphia disco when she walks in on him fatally shooting one of his gang members. She makes a hasty exit and reports it to the police. They put her in hiding prior to Curtis’s trial in the only place the police think she will never be found, a convent. With the co-operation of the Mother Superior (Susan Metzger) Deloris is introduced to the other nuns as Sister Mary Clarence.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Kaidan Project: Walls Grow Thin
Mori Stage Company

There’s good news and bad news about Kaidan Project, the site-specific extravaganza now premiering at Mori Storage Company in mid-city L.A. Built in 1927, the six-story structure has been turned into the setting for the retelling of an ancient Japanese ghost story. Two theater companies have collaborated on this unusual and highly imaginative project: the Asian-American East/West Players and the puppeteering Rogue Artists Ensemble, backed up by a slew of grants from various foundations and charities.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
His Greatness
Pride Arts Buena

It's true that Tennessee Williams was a writer-in-residence at Vancouver's University of British Columbia in the autumn of 1980, and that one of his plays was produced in that city at this time. It's also true that the author, whose early work is now enshrined among the classics of the 20th century, found his creative energies waning in his later years. From these facts, Canadian author Daniel MacIvor has forged a multidimensional portrait—part biographical fantasy, part homage and part contemplation—of an artist whose muse may have abandoned him.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Billy Elliot
Ruth Page Center for the Arts

Porchlight Music Theater's delight in its nifty new home at the Ruth Page Center is palpable—indeed, on view for everyone to share. For starters, it can now assemble a cast of 35 performers on the stage—at the same time, mind—for a singing-and-tapping curtain call. It can hoist its young hero on fly-wires for dream sequences. It can dazzle us with a soliloquy choreographed by both dance and fight instructors.

It can spread its seven-piece orchestra over the width of the room to diffuse the volume evenly throughout the auditorium.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Billie Holiday: Front and Center
Barbara Morrison Performing Arts Center

Sybil Harris sure knows her way around Billie Holiday’s music. The Phoenix native first portrayed Holiday in the touring musical, Sang Sista Sang. Now she is impersonating Holiday again in her solo show Billie Holiday, which just opened at Barbara Morrison Performing Arts Center in south-central L.A.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Upstairs: The Musical
Pride Arts Broadway

New Orleans tourism thrives on that city's legacy of necrophilic attractions, so why do the circumstances surrounding the destruction of the Upstairs Lounge in its antebellum French Quarter district remain a mystery nearly fifty years later? Is it because 1973 is too recent for the tale to be safely swaddled in romantic myth, or because the 32 men and women — many unidentified to this day — who perished in the arson-initiated fire were in an LGBT establishment?

Wayne Self refuses to let these ghosts go unrecognized.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Lysistrata Jones
Unity Lutheran Church

Scholarly playgoers scrambling to retrieve their SparksNotes will be relieved to learn that all that's left of Aristophanes’s much-tweaked comedy in this musical romp is the launching device of women initiating a moratorium on sex.

This adaptive conceit enables book author Douglas Carter Beane and composer-lyricist Lewis Flinn to bypass the difficulties of transposing the literary context from 411 B.C. to 2010. Protocol for making war may not have changed much over 25 centuries, but that for making love certainly has — sometimes as recently as yesterday.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage
Venice Theater - Stage II

It’s a tribute to the dedication to text of director, cast, and tech crew that Venice Theater’s production of Jane Martin’s silly play isn’t vacated by audiences at intermission. In Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage, guns don’t flame and nothing’s sage. It’s an overdone attempt to satirize pop Westerns, gory horror films, and the broad, barely believable characters who populate them. But it becomes itself a satirical target.

Cheryl Andrews is on the mark as Big 8, a former rodeo queen whose aging threw her out of the sport.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
M. Butterfly
Cort Theater

M. Butterfly is a chemistry lesson. There isn’t any between French diplomat Rene Gallimard (Clive Owen) and Chinese Opera Star Song Liling (Jin Ha). And without it, the show just doesn’t work. Each performer involved is fine on his own; but look too closely, and it becomes obvious that Owen is too much the roughneck fellow off the docks to be sympathetic, and Ha is just plain too masculine. Though slight of stature, Ha has a strong face, projects little feminine charm, and walks like a guy. The fact that we first see him in male attire doesn’t help.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Oedipus
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Staged on a three-quarter round space, the drama of the flawed King of Thebes has the FSU/Asolo Conservatory’s second-year class going mod with the greatest ancient Greek tragedy. The up-to-date wording of the translation and movie-like gates of Thebes’ palace attempt to claim the audience’s attention and make members an extension of the people of the place. It seems to work for some, but for others, it may seem like an old Dionysian Festival offering that’s required attendance.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Macbeth x 5
Odyssey Theater

Watching Macbeth x 5, Joel Asher’s abbreviated version of Shakespeare’s classic drama, I couldn’t help but wonder what The Bard would have made of the production. Would he have objected to the way Asher had cut his sprawling, complex story down to ninety minutes, ruthlessly shredding characters and poetry – in effect, trampling on his moral rights as author? Or, practical man of the theater that he was, would he have tipped his hat to Asher in acknowledgment that modern audiences don’t have the patience or concentration to sit through longish plays any longer?

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
M. Butterfly
Cort Theater

At Broadway's Cort Theater, David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, an ambitious Tony-winner for Best Play in 1988, dramatizes life and the world by focusing on the conflicts of men versus women and the cultures of East versus West. Now in revival, text tweaks by Hwang and director Julie Taymor's unique theatricality have shifted the ambiance of the play.

Almost 30 years ago, it was a provocative play to watch and intriguing to think about after the curtain went down. In this production, Hwang reveals more details and Taymor's staging is hit and miss. Still, M.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Portuguese Kid, The
Manhattan Theater Club - Stage 1

Gather a cast of first-class actors, add some laughs, some romance and chances are, you have a pretty good play. Not a great play, not flawless, not wall-to-wall hilarious, but enough to send out the audience with a smile.

John Patrick Shanley hit gold in 1988 with his Oscar-winning screenplay for “Moonstruck.” He earned a Tony Award for the drama Doubt, and plays like Prodigal Son and Outside Mullingar were hit or miss.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Red Dress, The
Odyssey Theater

Playwright Tania Wisbar tells a personal story in The Red Dress, a play set in Germany circa 1924-1936. A visiting production at the Odyssey, the drama deals with her parents, who, as she discovered late in life, were forced into divorcing by the Nazis for ideological reasons.

As fictionalized by Wisbar, her parents met in a Berlin bar not long after the end of WW I. Her mother, called Alexandra Schiele (Laura Liguori), was a successful and glamorous movie star; her father, Franz Weitrek (J.B.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Torch Song
Second Stage Theater

Torch Song by Harvey Fierstein is making a sentimental, if not quite sensational return, to its Off-Broadway roots — this time uptown. Originally comprising three related one-act plays (with their genesis more notably downtown than midtown), it became a hit in 1982 at the Little Theater, a small Broadway house where it continued a long and successful life under the umbrella title ”Torch Song Trilogy.” In its original run Fierstein, played the principal role of the drag queen Arnold.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Imbible, The
New World Stages

How drunk to you have to get to enjoy The Imbible? Judging by the boisterous giggles coming from one particular corner of the room, whose denizens likely downed a few before even setting foot in New World Stages’s bar-cum-theater space, the answer is probably a boatload. For the rest of us, the promise of three watered-down (or, in one case, ginger-aled-down) beverages included in the ticket price of this lecture-with-music in no way compensates for the show’s amateurish and wildly unentertaining content.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
This One's for the Girls
St. Luke's Theater

Towards the end of This One’s For The Girls, Janet (Jana Robbins) gets a phone call from Jason, a guy she’s been crushing on. She hasn’t heard from him in a very long time, and when he asks to see her again, a woman in the audience yelled “Go for it, honey!” There was much laughter, and some applause. When Janet turns down his invitation with “I don’t think so,” the applause is thunderous. That audience dichotomy is a pretty good indicator of the feelings evoked by this little musical.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
This One's for the Girls
St. Luke's Theater

What songs make up the soundtrack of your life? Do the hits of the last century reflect the moods of the times and attitude towards women? That was the question writer Dorothy Marcic sought to answer in her book “Respect,” the basis for the new Off-Broadway show This One’s For The Girls. Marcic examined the Top 40 songs sung by women, determining that the music showed the change of women’s attitudes from co-dependency to independent.

The show features an ensemble of four women performers.

Elyse Trevers
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
In the Heights
West Coast Black Theater Troupe

Westcoast Black Theater Troupe delves for the first time into the Afro-Carribean genre for a musical drama that hones in on a particular neighborhood in New York.  But its story is universal: group trying to keep identifying with its roots but aspiring to reach success in a new milieu and with a bigger multi-ethnic, multi-colored population.

Positioning the band behind curtains to one side makes the relatively small center stage, with cleverly mostly vertical structures represent an entire neighborhood.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Dracula
Shaw Festival

Without resorting to research (heaven forbid), I seem to recall that original author Bram Stoker's immortal creature of the night is the subject of more films and literary and stage adaptations than any other fictional character. As a fan of Dracula since childhood, each return in whatever form sparks renewed interest. Coincidently and just prior to my seeing this stage adaptation that Liz Lochhead wrote in 1985, I was given another interesting perspective called “Dracula, My Love,” by Syrie James which is told from Mina Harker's point of view.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Octoroon, An
Shaw Festival

Here's hoping you can last through the first scene of playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins purposely inflammatory and certainly challenging play. In the opening, one black man and one white man standing in their undershorts yell “fuck you” back and forth for longer than most scenes in a David Mamet play. If you can take it, you will be demonstrating more pluck than many did on the night I attended. And that was nothing compared to the even larger exodus at intermission leaving those who remained to see to a play clearly intended provoke and reopen racial wounds.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Bright Star
Ahmanson Theater

On a night loud with fiddles and banjos, the bluegrass musical Bright Star dosey-doed its way into the Ahmanson Theater, charming the audience with its folksy good spirits.

First workshopped in New York in 2013, then premiered a year later at the Old Globe in San Diego, Bright Star made it to Broadway in 2016 for a brief run. Now a nifty road company is performing the Steve Martin/Edie Brickell show, with excellent results.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Sex with Strangers
Studio Theater

There’s more than a few hilarious one-liners in Laura Eason’s timely play, Sex with Strangers However, like the soufflé it becomes, the play takes time to warm up. When it does, however, the heat is turned up to just the right temperature in this production by Milwaukee’s Renaissance Theaterworks. One could hardly imagine a better selection for this 25-year-old company, founded by a group of women and friends who wanted to see more women represented on both sides of the curtain.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Agitators, The: The Story of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass
Geva Theater - Wilson Mainstage

In the 53 years since I began teaching in the Rochester, New York area I’ve seen a number of developing plays, books, TV studies, and whatnot about two local historic pioneers in American civil rights, Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass; this is the best dramatic treatment thus far to deal with their achievements and close relationship.

The two were already gaining considerable notoriety as abolitionists when they met here in 1842.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Feathers of Fire
Bram Goldsmith Theater

A worldwide hit, Feather of Fire, has made its first appearance at The Wallis in a 70-minute show that dazzles from beginning to end.

Conceived, designed and directed by the Iranian-born Hamid Rahmanian (a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow), Feathers of Fire uses shadow play, computer technology, and film techniques to animate sections of a thousand-year-old Persian text, “Shahnameh, The Epic of the Persian Kings.”

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Dancing at Lughnasa
Shaw Festival

It takes only a few minutes into Brian Friel's bittersweet play about his childhood in Ireland to see it take its place on the same shelf of memory plays alongside Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and Truman Capote's “A Christmas Memory.” A winner of the 1990 Tony Award for Best Play, Dancing at Lughnasa is set during the summer in the 1936 when his elderly and ailing Grand Uncle Jack (Peter Millard) has returned to his nieces' home in County Donegal after a lengthy sojourn in an African leper colony.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
St. Joan
Shaw Festival

Shaw's 1923 play about Joan of Arc, the young girl who heard voices of angels in the 15th century and guided the French army to drive the English out of France, is usually as good as the director who can guide the actor in the titular role through a great performance. In his first production for Shaw Festival, Tim Carroll is the splendid director and Sara Topham is the wonderful Joan. A highlight is the production's post cubism monolithic designs by Judith Bowden enhanced by Kevin Lamotte other-worldly lighting.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Madness of George III, The
Shaw Festival - Royal George Theater

What to do when a country's ruler talks gibberish, makes wild assertions, and appears to be losing his mind? The strait-jacket helps for a while in Alan Bennett's 1991 play, in which George III loses his marbles soon after England has lost its American colonies in the late 1700s. Inspired by the historical reality, The Madness of George III makes no allusion to any contemporary head of state...not that we don't draw them anyway.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Androcles and the Lion
Shaw Festival

The plays of George Bernard Shaw are arguably as intellectually challenging as they are dramatically long-winded. But this one, written in 1912, as directed by the Festival's new artistic director Tim Carroll, puts Shaw’s witty exercise in Christian morality vs pagan demagoguery into an extraordinarily playful arena. During the progress of Androcles and the Lion, audience members become co-contributors with the actors as their own stories of become mixed into Shaw's verbose text.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Turn Me Loose
Lovelace Studio Theater

The Lovelace Studio Theater (at the Wallis) serves as a 1961 Playboy Club where the comic Dick Gregory is making one of his appearances. The actor Joe Morton channels Gregory in Turn Me Loose, a solo play which serves as a tribute to the famed performer and activist, who died only a few months ago.

Like Lenny Bruce (“the white Dick Gregory,” is one of Morton’s lines), Gregory came to prominence in the 1960s and 70s, thanks to his blunt, unvarnished takes on sex, profanity and authority.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Underneath the Lintel
Geffen Playhouse - Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater

Arye Gross delivers a memorable performance in Glen Berger’s Underneath the Lintel, a solo drama now in production at the Geffen Playhouse, directed by Steven Robman. The play, which was first done Off-Broadway in 2001, calls for Gross to command the stage while impersonating a Dutch librarian who puts his safe, mundane life behind him when he sets off a personal odyssey to solve a mystery triggered by the sudden return of a long-overdue book.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Me and My Girl
Shaw Festival - Festival Theater

This endearingly corny 1930s hit was successfully revived in London and soon after in New York in 1986 where it was the inaugural show at the then new Marquis Theater. There, it enjoyed a run of three years with its British star Robert Lindsay getting a Tony for his performance.

Revisiting this show thirty-one years later was a treat.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Evening at the Talk House, An
A Red Orchid Theater

It's been said that the most ruthless murderers are doctors-gone-bad, since "they have the knowledge and they have the nerve." Wallace Shawn presents us with another occupation endowing its representatives with an abundance of nerve, needing only the knowledge to apply it. They're not who you think they are, either.

Talk House is the name of an urban after-hours cocktail lounge, its sleek art-deco ambience reflecting its history as a refuge for theater people, while the rumble of traffic overhead lends an atmosphere of cozy seclusion akin to that of a bunker.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Two Mile Hollow
The Den

Arnel Sancianco's scenic depiction of the summer home once owned by now-deceased Hollywood mogul Derek Donnelly boasts a beachfront porch in its foreground and a large dining table farther upstage. Here, the surviving Donnellys—widow Blythe, stepdaughter Mary, sons Joshua and Christopher (the latter accompanied by "personal assistant" Charlotte, whose surname we never learn)—have gathered, following the sale of the property, to pack their belongings and discuss the terms of the late patriarch's will.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2017
Honeymooners, The
Paper Mill Playhouse

For those who were weaned on Jackie Gleason’s sitcom, “The Honeymooners,” there’s cause to rejoice. There’s a new musical based upon the 1950’s classic characters, directed by award-winning John Rando (Urinetown, On The Town), premiering at The Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey.

The musical with music by Stephen Weiner, lyrics by Peter Mills and book by Dusty Kay and Bill Nuss, follows the TV formula. Loud-mouthed Ralph Kramden (talented Michael McGrath) is passed over for a promotion.

Elyse Trevers
Date Reviewed:
October 2017

Pages