Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City, A
Geffen Playhouse - Gil Cates Theater

Bizarre title, bizarre story.

Halley Feiffer (daughter of cartoonist Jules Feiffer) finds comedy and something resembling love in her cancer-ward play, which has come to the Geffen after its off-Broadway premiere a year ago. Feiffer also appears in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City, as Karla, a young, motor-mouthed, bawdy comedy writer whose mother Marcie (JoBeth Williams) is a patient at Sloan Kettering.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2017
For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday
Playwrights Horizons - Mainstage

Why do we want to grow up? Who wants the responsibility, the financial burden, the all-pervasive diligence and worry of having a house, a spouse, kids? Of course, when you come right down to it, what choice do we have in a life that’s full of choices, good and bad?

Kathleen Chalfant is such a fine actress that when she delivers her opening monologue in front of the curtain, for a moment we’re unsure whether or not she’s in character.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2017
Souvenir
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

Florence Foster Jenkins, a New York heiress who gave opera recitals in the 1930s and ‘40s, couldn’t hold a note if she pinned it down with a hammer. Still, Jenkins found a following. She made records and even gave a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall. The wealthy woman proved that money doesn’t only talk, it sings.

Souvenir takes us into her world, and it does so with great skill and craftsmanship by playwright Stephen Temperley.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2017
Bonnie and Clyde
Theater Wit

"Dying ain't so bad/not if you both go together/a short and loving life/that ain't so bad " croons our heroine. "I won't get to heaven/so why not raise some hell?" declares her paramour. Later they both proclaim, "This world will remember us."

Poets and playwrights nowadays may be wary of saying as much, but these are probably the most romantic words lovers can utter. In history, legend and literature, the most undeniable proof of devotion, allegiance conferring immortality on those professing loyalty thereto, is dying, young, in the arms of your beloved.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2017
Daytona
Met Theater

Oliver Cotton’s Daytona is a play about three different things: the need for vengeance and justice, the role of memory in people’s lives, and a psychological portrait of some traumatized human beings.

Now in its American premiere at Rogue Machine — after first being performed in the UK four years ago — the complex but engrossing play investigates the tangled relationships between two brothers, Joe (George Wyner) and Billy (Richard Fancy), and Elli (Sharron Shayne), a woman who has loved both of them.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2017
Night in Alachua County, A
The Den

All fiction begins with the question "What if," but what separates the basement/dorm-room scribblers from the inspired storytellers is that the former abandon their inquiry as the initial excitement wanes, while the latter forge ahead until all possibilities have been addressed.

Not only does playwright Jennifer Rumberger trust her audience to stay the course all the way to a satisfactory conclusion, however, but to apprehend every step in a narrative operating on several different levels.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2017
One Thousand Words
Theater Wit

Michael Braud and Curran Latas have written a musical containing everything a romantic story could want. To start, it's a memory play, with all the hindsight guilt and regret engendered thereby. Its framing device is that of an up-and-coming journalist assigned to write a thousand-word story on the once-prosperous, but now economically depressed, town of Winslow, located deep in the mountains of coal country.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2017
Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of New York City, A
The Den

Halley Feiffer's play, A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of New York City may not hold the record for the longest play title of the last half-century—that honor goes to the German play usually abbreviated Marat/Sade — but it bespeaks a playwright not lacking in chutzpah. When your father is Jules Feiffer, chronicler of button-down malaise in the Eisenhower years, and your play purports to be a romantic comedy, is set in a cancer ward and conducted under the semi-comatose chaperona

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2017
Iphigenia in Aulis
Getty Villa - Barbara & Lawrence Fleischman Theater

Chicago’s Court Theater has brought its 2014 production of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis to the Getty Villa, with excellent results. The Villa’s outdoor Fleischman Theater was inspired by ancient prototypes and has been the setting for plays by Aristophanes, Plautus, Sophocles and Aeschylus. Now Iphigenia in Aulis has taken center stage in the amphitheater, in a vigorous production that is also surprisingly relevant, considering that the play was first done in 405 BC (one year after Euripides’s death).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2017
Somewhere in the Middle, or Guess Who's Coming for Passover
Crown City Theater

In Somewhere in the Middle, Gary Lamb’s new play now premiering at Crown City, a mid-west family’s liberal values are put to the test by their rebellious daughter. Sarah (Julie Lanctot) is a college student who shocks her folks when she comes home with a fiancé in tow. Jamal (Luke King), you see, is not only black but Muslim.

A contemporary riff on the old bromide, “would you want your daughter to marry one?”, Somewhere in the Middle takes place in 2007, before Obama broke down racial barriers and became our first African-American president.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2017
Dreamer Examines His Pillow, The
The Lounge 2 Theater

Sexual obsession holds in its ferocious grip the three characters in The Dreamer Examines his Pillow, an early work by John Patrick Shanley which has been revived at the Lounge Theatre in Hollywood. Director Mark Blanchard has worked wonders with a trio of top-notch actors in bringing this strange, surreal play to life.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2017
Crucible, The
The Players Center

At the end of a 2017 hot, steamy Sarasota summer comes the chilling experience of a travesty of justice in Salem, Massachusetts, 1692. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible not only concentrates on its dictionary-defined trial. The play also “means” a great container that can resist heat to contain hard, molten material. Miller’s hard material is a society made of many elements: quick to accuse, even to kill for power and profit over its enemies, to make its insular policies prevail and punish all who do not obey or enforce its severe orthodoxy if only by association.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Chorus Line, A
Cardinal Stritch University - Nancy Kendall Theater

More than four decades since it forever changed the tide of Broadway musicals, A Chorus Line remains sharp, witty and poignant. Joining forces to present a unique twist on the show, Milwaukee performing arts companies TheaterRED and Milwaukee Opera Theater brought the magic alive again in a two-performance concert that packed a theater in one of the area’s universities.

The show’s typical cast comprises hungry young artists waiting for their first big break (and/or just a paycheck).

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Veil, The
The Edge

Conor McPherson's earlier plays proposed a news journalist hobnobbing with vampires and a poker game with Satan, so when he proclaims that this one "rests on a fault line between what's real and what isn't," we can't say we weren't warned. His caveat also describes the evolution of English literature in the 19th century, though, and thus may be read as an allegory of the transition from Romantic mysticism to scientific rationalism.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Audience, The
Baird Hall

Elizabeth Windsor was not the first English queen to embark on her reign like a new principal charged with bringing order to a schoolful of unruly children. From Henry Tudor's multiple marriages to the adulterous roistering of Victoria's sire and dame down through Uncle Edward's 1936 abdication, daughters ascending the throne have quickly perceived their role to be that of the adult in the room, a responsibility to be preserved for as long as such supervision should be required.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Prince of Broadway
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

It’s next to impossible to review Prince of Broadway objectively. It quickly becomes clear that the show not only defines the life of iconic theater royalty, Hal Prince, but that our lives are wrapped up in the music, too. I wasn’t the only audience member to tear up hearing the familiar and evocative harmony of “Heart” from Damn Yankees. How many times have we seen “If I Were a Rich Man” performed by Tevyes on stages both mighty and small?

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Hamlet
Public Theater

Plenty of characters die in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but plenty of them live long enough to make us laugh at their misfortunes, smile at their misguided assumptions, and maybe even smirk at their misplaced loyalties in controversial director Sam Gold’s vision/version of this great tragedy. I think we can agree that this is not the way the play is generally expected to hit you. In some ways, Hamlet has always been an entertainment.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Prince of Broadway
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

In my youth, I recall going with my parents to the Jewish Y in New Jersey to an annual entertainment called “Bits of Hits.” A wonderfully talented company of non-professionals would perform mostly well-known songs and even some dances from both past and current hit shows on Broadway. There was some scenery and a few props and an impressive orchestra in the pit that was also comprised of local musicians.

The well-directed show was fast, often funny and always a joyful valentine to the Broadway shows that so many of us either had seen or heard about.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Arsenic and Old Lace
Odyssey Theater

As Walter Kerr said about the 1928 Broadway comedy, The Front Page, the play was like “a watch that laughed.” The same could have been said, two decades later, about Arsenic and Old Lace. Written by Joseph Kesselring as a heavy mystery drama, the play was turned into a slick farce by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse, who in addition to writing comedies like Life With Father were skilled play doctors. Their uncredited re-write resulted in a hit; Arsenic ran for three years on Broadway and was later a Hollywood movie starring Cary Grant.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Fly Honey Show, The
Den Theater

The souvenir table in the lobby displays earplugs, T-shirts and dainty leather harnesses. A squad of genderfluid greeters dressed in bits of glittery black material and lots of bare tattooed flesh guide you to your seats in the Den's Bookspan space or mingle in the aisles to the music rolling off the spray-lit walls. A strolling photographer offers to record your presence in this carnival milieu. This is all before the actual show starts, by the way.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Machinal
Greenhouse Theater

Spousal murder has all the elements for successful drama: sex, violence, deception, and conspiracy—all simmering beneath the placid surface of our culture's most intimate contract. Is it any wonder that so many writers have found inspiration in real-life accounts of wives killing husbands? Of the fictional hypotheses arising from the sensational case of Ruth Snyder in 1928 (among them, James M.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Roar: The Music of the 1920s and Beyond
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

Little lights twinkle in a curtain underneath a red velvet drape in the background. Down center comes twinkling-eyed Carole J. Bufford in a shimmering beaded flapper-style dress, rhinestone head band, and silvery high heels. Brightly smiling, she starts to sing songs of the Roaring 20’s when “hair and hem lines got shorter,” but the list of kinds of jazz got longer.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Deathtrap
Milwaukee Chamber Theater - Cabot Theater

Still considered Broadway’s longest-running comedy/thriller some four decades after its debut, Deathtrap appears to still have some sizzle in a tantalizing production by Milwaukee Chamber Theater.

Thankfully, director Michael Cotey keeps us in the play’s original time frame (mid-1970s). Instead of “modernizing” the play by introducing cell phones and other digital conveniences, we can blissfully return to an earlier time. The ringing telephone was America’s lifeline to the outside world, especially in a remote Connecticut estate.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Off the Wall Theater

Milwaukee’s “Off the Wall” theater troupe certainly lives up to its name (“off the wall”) with its homegrown production of, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? The play is a revival of its first production in 2011.

This Baby Jane is a completely campy rendition of the 1962 film, starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. It’s the work of witty and skillful playwright/Off the Wall’s artistic director Dale Gutzman, and this is a wonderful way to wrap up the summer.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Food Show, The
Metropolitan Brewery

The four necessities required by human beings for survival are air, water, food and shelter. On this occasion, the Neo-Futurists have forsaken their Andersonville digs to set up shop in the Metropolitan Brewery's future Avondale facility, where they can cook as they chat with us about the meaning of what we eat.

The agenda covers such historical milestones as Harvey Washington Wiley's "Poison Squad" and how it exposed the dangers of adulterants in food processing to found the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Monticello
St. Bonaventure Oratory

The date is July 2, 1826. Former President Thomas Jefferson lies in poor health at Monticello, his debt-ridden home in Virginia, where his nephew Randolph is pressuring the composer of our country's Declaration of Independence to refute his assertion of equality therein, pursuant to incorporating an endorsement of slavery into his Independence Day speech.

On this fatal night, however, Jefferson's habit of inviting students from the nearby university for evening chats precipitates a visit from a cheerful alcohol-abstinent would-be writer named Edgar Allen Poe.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Double Indemnity
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

In keeping with its dramatic film forerunner, a classic of film noire, the FSU/Asolo Conservatory production of Double Indemnity is scenically and thematically dark. On stage there’s a subplot, as in James M. Cain’s novel, aside a second romantic plot. Additions like these, however, add more time than suspense or cogency to the play. Maybe that’s why it begs to be done entirely, rather than partially, tongue-in-cheek.

It would help if Katie Cunningham were more complex. Or sexier as femme fatale Phyllis Nirlinger to make Walter Huff instantly fall for her.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Navigator in Love
Teatro Circulo

Red Lab Productions and Otar Margania have just produced The Georgian-American Theatrical Feast at Teatro Circulo, off-off-Broadway. The festival presented readings and full productions of plays by playwrights from The Republic of Georgia. One of the plays produced was Navigator in Love, by Lasha Bugadze.

This sad, funny play is about an office worker named Rostom who’s reassigned by his company to monitor its construction sites in the provinces.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Fair Maid of the West, The
Austin Gardens

Thomas Heywood's sword-and-cloak extravaganza, The Fair Maid of the West, was a blockbuster in 1631, but then faded from popularity until 1986, when Trevor Nunn turned it into a swashbuckling pageant for England's Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1994, Kevin Theis adapted the two-part action-adventure yarn for Chicago's CT20 troupe, where it received one of the first Jeffs for Stage Combat ever awarded. Now, nearly 25 years later, the Fair Maid of the West sails again, not over the bounding main, but through the bosky confines of Austin Gardens.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Last Dancer Standing: More than Hiphop
Black Ensemble Theater

A competition—whether between warring nations, athletic clubs, or ambitious entertainers—is suspenseful in its very concept, but rarely is the victory quickly determined. Compressing the events to the abbreviated length dictated by modern theater practice can be accomplished by dividing the dramatic focus according to geography (battlefield/headquarters, dugout/arena, dressing room/runway), or rank (soldiers/generals, teammates/coaches, directors/performers). Ah, but what if you want to include representatives from all these demographics?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Jerry's Girls
York Theater at St. Peter's Church

"Strike the band up/ It's today!" -- and through August 13, it's Jerry's Girls at the York Theatre with the outstanding piano accompaniment of Eric Svejcar, a one-man band himself, and Stephanie D'Abruzzo, Christine Pedi, and Stephanie Umoh singing the songs of Jerry Herman.

The second in this summer's Musicals in Mufti series, the music and lyrics of Jerry Herman offers a sure-fire refreshment for an August day, even when performed script-in-hand with costumes limited to different versions of Dolly Levi's hats.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Doublewide
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

There’s currency in this drama about a blue-collar family who live in a doublewide trailer. Big Jim, its head, has always hoped to use this mobile home’s land for an immobile real brick house that will eventually be willed to his daughter. Now the county will claim the land by eminent domain to further growth of a neighboring casino spurring the economy and tax revenues.

As Big Jim, effective Ross Licea gains immediate sympathy in his plans to fight for his land but then the sympathy gets diluted.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Lili Marlene
St. Luke's Theater

The new musical Lili Marlene owes so much to the old musical Cabaret that its producers should be paying royalties. It’s set in Berlin only two year later than Cabaret. Its songs are sometimes sung on the cabaret stage as part of an act. The singer has a romance with an aristocrat, as in “Cabaret” the movie. There’s a Christian-Jewish romance, and there's a gay element in the script.

Lili Marlene is produced by Tamra Pica and Write Act Repertory at St.Luke’s Theater. Its book, music and lyrics have been written by Michael Antin.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The
Ahmanson Theater

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time comes to L.A. carrying clutches of theater prizes from London and New York, plus a towering set by Bunnie Christie which must have cost a cool million to put together. Not only does it frame the vast Ahmanson stage, it is tricked out with video projections, computer screens, and sound and lighting effects, all of which are put to swift, dazzling use during the course of the story. We sometimes get the feeling of watching a play take place in a giant pinball machine.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Marie Antoinette
freeFall Theater

For a play without much drama, freeFall presents a historical central character without enough dramatization of her historical milieu. Though there are projections aplenty to each side of a long stage and some talk of the world outside Marie Antoinette’s palaces and gardens, author David Adjmi keeps her in a bubble. Director Eric Davis busily floats it up from the marble slab of a center aisle that’s her playing space.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Octoroon, An
The Biograph

What you need to know about the play called The Octoroon is that it was authored by Dion Boucicault in 1848, and recounted the story of a proud Louisiana family menaced by a neighboring slaveholder bent on seizing their property, along with the young mixed-race woman of the play's title.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Fight City
Factory Theater

Violent post-apocalyptic dystopias are hardly rare in fiction today, but what distinguishes Scott OKen's (sic) futuristic action-adventure fable from traditional speculations in this genre is that the dramatic question raised by its pessimism is not "How come I still can't get laid?" but "How do we fix the mess we got ourselves into — again?"

The circumstances leading to social regression, in this case, involve a widespread virus that left the majority of male survivors sterile.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Toy Gun, A
Teatro Circulo

The Georgian-American Theatrical Feast has been taking place Off-off-Broadway, introducing audiences to theater from the country of Georgia through several readings and two full stagings presented by Red Lab Productions. The production I attended was of Tamar Bartaia’s two-character play A Toy Gun, presented by Red Lab and Otar Margania.

The play’s story begins with a 14-year-old girl (Mea) auditioning for a popular actor (Yo), who humiliates her, saying “You’ve got not talent.” She soon returns to the theater threatening him with a realistic toy gun.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Ball Yards
Zephyr Theater

Playwright Chuck Faerberg pokes fun at the sports world in Ball Yards, his new play which just opened at the Zephyr Theater for a month-long world-premiere run. Faerberg (Zulu Time) and director Richard Kuhlman have put together a seven-person cast of actors each of whom plays multiple roles during the course of the evening.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Jessica
IRT Theater

Robots are a well-covered subject, and since Karel Čapek wrote R.U.R. in 1920, it has been discussed on the stage—so it’s good to see a playwright address the topic creatively. In Patrick Vermillion’s Jessica (produced Off-off-Broadway by Sanguine Theater Company with IRT Theater at the IRT Theater), the title character has been missing for four years. Her boyfriend, Allister, hires a Lyfe Industries engineer, Rudy, to create a duplicate of her. Life Industries generally makes sex robots, or “companions,” as Rudy prefers to call them.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
July 2017

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