Marvin's Room
American Airlines Theater

When Scott McPherson's Marvin's Room opened off-Broadway in 1990, most theatergoers were thinking of AIDS, the frightening plague that caused the death of McPherson's partner and later his own death. In the 1980's and '90's, New Yorkers saw The Normal Heart, As Is, Angels in America, Love! Valour!, Compassion! — all productions concerning AIDS.

While Marvin's Room seems focused on the imminent death of the patient in the next room, it is a play more about love and empathy.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Pipeline
Lincoln Center - Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

With Karen Pittman's scorching portrayal of Nya Joseph, an exasperated single mother and dedicated inner city high school teacher, playwright Dominique Morisseau (Skeleton Crew) probes a social problem through a personal frame of reference. At Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater, Morisseau's eloquence and Lileana Blain-Cruz’s fine-tuned direction examine, in Pipeline, an all-too familiar headline of school violence.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Black!
Athenaeum Theater

Early in his solo show, Michael Washington Brown recounts how, one night, he went to bed Black and awoke to find that he was "African-American"—only he wasn't. Brown is a citizen of the United Kingdom, you see, the son of West Indian immigrants — and thus is neither African nor American. He then proceeds to dispel erroneous assumptions arising from the imposition of overly restrictive categories upon a designation too diverse to support such taxonomic sophistry (after the fashion of the 17th-century French scholars who first codified the concept of "races").

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Megastasis
Athenaeum

If Kia Corthron weren't writing in 2017 about 2017, it would be easy to imagine her plays ranking alongside the gritty portraits of life among the underprivileged found in the Social Realism movement of the 1930s. Indeed, the tone of this Eclipse Theater world-premiere of Megastasis, with its parable of a fundamentally good man trapped in a cruel faceless universe, reflects a period ambience recalling Sidney Kingsley, Lillian Hellman, and Clifford Odets.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Government Inspector, The
New World Stages

Michael Urie is a comic genius; he must be seen by the theater-loving public. If there were no other reason to recommend The Government Inspector, his performance alone would be enough. As it is, this is a killingly funny production, performed at breakneck speed, featuring a superb cast, and brilliant ensemble chemistry.

Not surprisingly, Mary Testa stands out as the vain, frivolous Anna Andreyevna, who will do anything to get her daughter Maya (Talene Monahon) married off- providing it doesn’t interfere with her own pleasure.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Our Great Tchaikovsky
Bram Goldsmith Theater

Hershey Felder, maven of solo shows about famous musical personages, has returned to the Wallis with his latest opus, Our Great Tchaikovsky. Having done Gershwin, Chopin, Bernstein, and Liszt in recent years, the actor/pianist/designer/producer Felder has now trained his sights on the life of the Russian composer, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. And what a life it was: packed with struggle, pain, triumph, joy, and suffering.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Timon of Athens
Stratford Festival of Canada - Tom Patterson Theater

Timon of Athens has not been a popular Shakespeare classic: in fact, it has not been revived so often as most of his others. Its horrors are more melodramatic than tragic; and its comic elements are more bizarre satire than familiar foolishness. There’s a self-indulgent quality to Simon’s obvious pleasure in the abject worship he receives for his generosity when giving away his treasures to his grateful followers that undercuts our admiration.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Romeo and Juliet
Stratford Festival of Canada - Festival Theater

I don’t know what Scott Wentworth doesn’t do brilliantly in the theater, and for Stratford’s opening week this season, he has contributed a first-rate Romeo and Juliet. Perhaps the most popular, and certainly best-known Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet has had many Stratford productions, most recently rather problematical ones, but this is an efficiently paced, moving, and affecting one, without bizarre surprises.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Born for This
The Broad Stage

Los Angeles has been sanctified, thanks to the gospel musical, Born for This, which has just opened at The Broad Stage for a two-week run. First produced at Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, , Born for This is on a road tour which might just end up in Times Square.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Beauty's Daughter
American Blues Theater - Stage 773

The only thing worse than being somewhere you don't want to be is seeing no way to leave it for someplace better. A young Dael Orlandersmith once surveyed New York City's East Harlem streets and vowed to escape. She made good on her promise, as evidenced by her casting as our stand-in narrator a successful author/poet. When we meet "Diane," she is sipping wine in a chic Village apartment where she regales us with the saga of her latest love affair — ending, like many others, abruptly and untimely.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Hir
Steppenwolf Theater

The phenomenon of "paradigm shift" occurs when an object undergoes a perceived change after being observed from a different angle—the scientific equivalent of the adage about seeing things from the other person's point of view. Be warned that several such transformations are embedded in Taylor Mac's portrait of the unlucky Conner clan.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Blue-Eyed Bettys, The
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

All of “The Blue-Eyed Bettys” instrumentalists play string instruments. Three also sing and give bits of unsung narration. Those three all met at Florida Studio Theater, formed their group (whose name is not explained), and have been together since, mostly touring but based in New York City. “The Blue-Eyed Bettys” show now marks a kind of sentimental return to their beginnings.

The group established its sound, mostly bluegrass, with “Someone Like Me” after a “Grass Is Always Greener” harmony among friends.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
King of the Yees
Kirk Douglas Theater

It’s rude, irreverent and funny from beginning to end.

The play is King of the Yees, and it’s the work of a Chinese-American playwright, Lauren Yee, who isn’t afraid to poke fun at her people even as she pays tribute to them. Yee, who grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, makes that community the focus of her play, which is now in a world-premiere production at the Kirk Douglas (after having been work-shopped in Chicago).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Flea in her Ear, A
Hill Theater

For pure entertainment, nothing beats a well-done French farce. When done as expertly as it is at American Players Theater in Spring Green, Wis., the laughter bubbles up almost from the first line of dialogue and continues until the final curtain.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Sarasota Improv Festival - Part II
Florida Studio Theater

The last of three days of Florida Studio Theater’s 2017 9th Annual Improv Festival continued with a record overall crowd. Taking advantage of a full weekend day, four of FST’s venues filled with audiences full of suggestions on which improvisations could be based. From 5 to 11 p.m. I was able to see six shows to review as follows.

COMPLOT ESCENA

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Sarasota Improv Festival - Part I
Florida Studio Theater

Twenty-three groups with 94 performers improvising over three days at Florida Studio Theater makes it impossible for one person to see every performance, much less review everything. With a program expanded over previous years, 23 groups from five states and one foreign country (Mexico) participate. As might be expected, Florida is the most widely represented state. As might not, the host city’s FST Improv may be the most effective performers overall — or at least on Friday, July 14.

FST IMPROV

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Midsummer Night's Dream, A
Hill Theater

It’s not for nothing that Shakespeare’s magical journey through the woods, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is often cited by theatergoers as their favorite Shakespeare play. In a good production, such as the current one at American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wis., there’s more than a hint of pixie dust sprinkled through the proceedings. There’s romance, jealousy, competitiveness, tears, and lots of laughter. Adults are made to look as silly as one could imagine. The sillier they become, the more fun they are to watch.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Any Night
Sacred Fools Theater

Brilliant writing, directing and acting make Any Night the success it is. A psychological thriller about a woman, Anna (Marie Fahlgren), in extreme jeopardy, Any Night is the work of Canadian playwrights Daniel Arnold and Medina Falghren and was first produced in 2008 at the Belfry Theatre in British Columbia. The play has since been done off-Broadway (and elsewhere) and is scheduled to open this fall at the Filigree Theater in Austin. The latter company is polishing the production during a two-week guest run at Sacred Fools in Hollywood.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Relatively Speaking
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

There couldn’t be a better vehicle to launch a new summer “Dog Days of Summer” program of FSU/Asolo’s Conservatory than master farceur Alan Ayckbourn’s first big hit, Relatively Speaking. It takes us back to England in the 1960s as sexual liberation meets sexual hanky panky affecting a traditional troubled marriage. And maybe a future non-traditionally born one.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Amerike: The Golden Land
Museum of Jewish Heritage

Amerike is the saga of Jewish immigrants to America, told by a skilled company of actors, all of whom have strong singing voices. The musical, performed in Yiddish with subtitles in both English and Russian, shows that the opportunity to leave Mother Russia was met with both delight and a reluctance to desert that which was familiar. The voyage was long and uncomfortable, and being processed through Ellis Island must have been exhausting, confusing, and for those who equated uniforms with brutality in the old country, terrifying.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Nance, The
Pride Arts Broadway

The effeminate — or merely unmanly — male has been a stock character in comedy since antiquity, his risible appeal arising from the reversal of expectations at the foundation of popular humor to this day. In Western literature, the overtly gay element gradually became de-emphasized, with Aristophanes’s Cleisthenes and Plautus’s Ballio giving way to the less sexually disambiguous Casper Milquetoast.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
School for Lies, The
The Artistic Home

You have to admire David Ives’s commercial savvy: After making his fortune in 1993 with a collection of short, funny, low-budget, actor-friendly sketches suitable for classroom or cabaret, his "translaptations" of obscure pre-19th-century French playwrights have, since 2006, attracted hitherto-undetected legions of theatergoers enamored of actors dressed in big skirts and big wigs making dick jokes and saying "fart" in rhymed couplets.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Enchantment, The
HERE

Victoria Benedictsson was a Swedish writer writing at the end of the 19th century. She’s noted for her novels and, to a lesser extent, for a play called The Enchantment. She had a passion for the famous critic Georg Brandes, and it’s conjectured that he seduced her. At any rate, she committed suicide in 1888, just after writing The Enchantment.

Her life was well known, and she is said to have been a model for Strindberg’s Miss Julie and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Unexpected Man, The
Touchstone Theater

As one walks into the cool darkness of the American Players Theater 200-seat indoor theater, waiting for Yasmina Reza’s The Unexpected Man to begin, there is not much to see onstage. Two park-type benches face each other. On the backdrop are nine rectangular projections (the size of train windows). The sounds of a train are heard before the play begins.

As the lights come up, an older Woman settles into one seat. She is carrying a tote bag. Soon the man appears. He is about the same age as the woman, and carries a worn leather pouch.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2017
Bastard Jones
the cell

Bastard Jones, produced off-Broadway by the cell, is a musical adaptation of Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel, “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.” Fielding’s title character, of course, is a good-natured libertine, the sex addict who falls in love with the nice girl, Sophia. The plot, which is convoluted even in this pared-down adaptation, is of no particular importance. It just concerns Tom’s sexual adventures. He’s banished and nearly executed for his ill-considered lifestyle. At the end, of course, he wins the virtuous Sophia.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Marvin's Room
American Airlines Theater

Bessie is a saint. As played by Lili Taylor in Marvin’s Room, she’s also warm, optimist, and altogether lovely. So why is she so annoying? Maybe our sensibilities have changed, but it’s hard to identify with this woman who has sacrificed her life to take care of her father, who’s been dying slowly for the last twenty years. He’s the Marvin of the title, and while we hear him moaning throughout, we never see him. The other obvious question is when Bessie needs a bone marrow transplant, why does no one suggest Marvin?

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Annie
Westchester Broadway Theater

We all remember the tunes from Annie: “Tomorrow,” “Maybe,” “It’s the Hard-Knock Life.” What we tend to forget is the political message and the real underlying poignancy.

The year is 1933, and many people are desperate. They’ve lost their homes, and a lot of them are forced to live in makeshift shacks in “Hoovervilles.” Daddy Warbucks (Michael DeVries) is so named because, we assume, he was a war profiteer. His confession that he was bound to do anything at all to be rich and successful brings chills. Yes, we know such people.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey, The
Florida Studio Theater - Keating

Leonard Pelkey, a 14 year old boy, is missing from his New Jersey shore small town. Hard-boiled detective Chuck DeSantis (played by Jeffrey Plunkett who also plays everyone else in monologues plus scenes) tells us about the search for him. He’s letting us in on Leonard’s “absolute brightness” that physics defines as what a star might have in certain light years from earth. Leonard let his shine all over town.

When Plunkett’s DeSantis is not addressing us, he’s embodying characters like teenage Phoebe, whom he often coaxed out of her shell, and her mother Ellen.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
It's Only Life
Attic Theater

Thanks to splendid singing, catchy tunes, and clever direction, the musical revue It’s Only Life sparkled in its just-closing run at the Attic Theater. Based on the music of John Bucchino, who has written for such disparate vocalists as Art Garfunkel, Liza Minnelli, and Deborah Voight, It’s Only Life features six young singers who surely will be heard from again in future: Jill Marie Burke, Devon Davidson, Kayre Morrison, Joaquin Nunez, Philip McBride, and Ken Shepski.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Heisenberg
Mark Taper Forum

Simon Stephens’s take on the May/September love story formula, Heisenberg, is slight but entertaining, thanks largely to the comedic gifts of its two actors, Denis Arndt and Mary-Louise Parker, who have been performing the play since it was first produced in New York by Manhattan Theatre Club in 2015, with a subsequent Broadway run a year later.

Now Arndt and Parker are strutting their stuff at the Mark Taper Forum in a production which poses some problems for them. Even under normal circumstances the Taper has poor acoustics, owing to its three-sided design.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Going To a Place Where You Already Are
Redtwist Theater

Rare is the human being who has not grappled with the mystery of death and its aftermath. Cultural speculations on the realms beyond the grave encompass simple regression to the earth (as observed in animals) and regeneration (as observed in plants), as well as elaborate recycling schemes involving transmigration into altered physical states. Christianity, however, promises its believers eternal liberation from corporal restraints within a mythic sanctuary—descriptions of which differ widely, no first-hand witness accounts ever having been reported.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Johnny Johnson
Stage 773

Some experiences cannot be described in words, war being one of them. The difficulty of summarizing so vast and varied a topic accounts for the similarities evident in their documentation, popular motifs generally focusing on assertions that armed conflict is cruel, that warriors suffer and die at the behest of reckless leaders, and that those who survive are shunned by their fellow citizens as reminders of how quickly populaces can be gulled by flag-waving oratory.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Imbible, The
New World Stages

We live in a crazy busy world. With jobs, families, and other responsibilities, there just isn’t a whole lot of time to hang out with our friends. Add to this the sense that everyone is on the phone, all the time, and the very pleasant notion of a leisurely brunch with pals sinks to the bottom of the to-do list. This is the dilemma faced by four modern, over-scheduled, over tech-connected New Yorkers who really want to get together but just can’t fit socializing into the schedule.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Bare: A Pop Opera
Tenth Avenue Theater

The relatively young Outskirts Theater takes on its biggest challenge with a production of Bare: A Pop Opera. As artistic director Ryan Albrechtson explains to the audience prior to the performance, this is the company’s largest and most complex production in its four-year history. If nothing else, Outskirts deserves credit for tackling material that is far beyond what many community theaters would attempt. It truly lives up to its name, which implies something more daring than what’s offered at mainstream theaters.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris
Odyssey Theater

Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris was first performed off Broadway in 1968, where the revue ran for several years and was released by Columbia Records in a two-box set that made the hit-parade charts. The Belgian-born Brel became a major influence on such artists as Leonard Cohen and David Bowie, thanks to the English translations of his French-language songs by Rod McKuen.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2017
Cost of Living
City Center - Stage I

Manhattan Theater Club's New York City premiere of Cost of Living explores the abyss separating people, those who have, those who don't, and the universal needs that everyone shares. It could be a drama ripe with sentimentality. Instead, Cost of Living studies four people, emotional but pierced with bitterness and, surprisingly, laughter.

“The shit that happens is not to be understood," says Eddie (Victor Williams), an unemployed truck driver sitting in a bar.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
June 2017
(Not) Water
3D Technology Center

For the first hour or so of (Not) Water, the audience sits in a large circle in a very large room. The actors present, in a disjointed flow, vignettes representing the process that led to the production. We meet the artists and watch some fictitious scenes and hear some stories, even some stand-up.

The show, we learn, was conceived in 2006, and following years are marked by climate events – a 2007 flood in India, a 2008 snowfall in Baghdad, Hurricane Sandy.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2017
Broadway in Black
WBBT Theater

African-Americans impacted Broadway through performances and literary and musical creations that significantly contributed to the American theater and culture. Broadway in Black celebrates this contribution by reproducing parts of it in musicals and highlighting — through exemplary entertainment — their importance.

From 1921’s Shuffle Along to later Broadway hits like The Color Purple and Dreamgirls, black composers and lyricists made their mark and developed stars emulated in WBTT’s tribute.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2017
Letters from a Nut
Geffen Playhouse - Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater

The history of Letters from a Nut goes back to 1995, when comedian Jerry Seinfeld was watching the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon in a friend’s house and discovered a handful of letters sitting on a coffee table. The letters were written by his host, fellow comedian Barry Marder, to various companies, countries and celebrities. Using the pseudonym of Ted L. Nancy, Marder played practical jokes with these letters, making outrageous requests of the recipients, punking them with a straight face.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2017
Pacific Overtures
Classic Stage Company

This Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical remains as it has always been since it first opened on Broadway in 1976 and in its few incarnations, a shining example of the concept musical. In episodic music hall fashion, it tells the East-meets-West story with acknowledgments to both the Oriental and Occidental theatrical traditions. But, most of all, Pacific Overtures boasts a remarkable Sondheim score that evokes age old Eastern simplicity with new age Western resonances.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
June 2017

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