Vanity Fair
Pearl Theater

William Thackeray wrote “Vanity Fair” as a monthly serial between 1847 and 1848. It was well received and set the foundation for later novels to come, in the Victorian era. Its story, set during the Napoleonic Wars, centers around two young women, friends, Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley. We meet them as they leave Miss Pinkerton’s Academy and follow them as their and their husbands’ fortunes rise and fall.

Thackeray’s moral points are clear throughout. His concerns are with money and status, and their corruption of society and our personal relations.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
April 2017
Amelie
Walter Kerr Theater

This fanciful tale of a young woman and her private, inner life begins in style; a blue curtain features butterflies which seem to flutter into the audience. Amelie Poulain is a creative child born to parents who are not familiar with the concept of unconditional love. They decide early on that their daughter is fragile, and must be schooled at home.

The little girl, pigtailed and dressed in red, names her pet fish “Fluffy,” and declares him her best friend.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
April 2017
Play That Goes Wrong, The
Lyceum Theater

Far be it for me to incite anyone to imbibe before going to the theater, but I must say that having a couple of drinks before covering The Play That Goes Wrong may well have enhanced my enjoyment of this zany farce. This Olivier Award winner for best comedy is not for the starched-collar set; think Three Stooges rather than Noel Coward.

The set is typical English drawing room, just perfect for “The Murder at Haversham Manor,” the show we’re (not) about to see.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
April 2017
Born Ready
Factory Theater

“All About Eve” and “Sunset Boulevard” are as celebrated for their manneristic melodrama as for their iconic status in the annals of Hollywood cinema. Born Ready, Factory Theater playwright Stacie Barra's wry parody of the two seminal films reaches beyond simple ridicule, however, instead reflecting a genre not only enjoyable in its own right, but departing from traditional ageist bias to grant the final victory to the proven survivor.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2017
Born Yesterday
The Greenhouse

Since its premiere in 1946, Garson Kanin's satirical comedy, Born Yesterday, has been largely reduced to a retread of the Pygmalion myth, in which learned men endeavor to educate ignorant women, only to meet with unanticipated results. With present events precipitating renewed interest in cultural divisions refuting our society's claim to interclass fluidity, however, the ramifications of this deceptively frivolous North-American classic take the foreground.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2017
Cinderella
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

The bling and glamour of the Cinderella tour was met with cheers, oohs and ahhs, mainly by the youngsters who attended the opening of this fabled fairy-tale musical. No wonder: This version, which was adapted for Broadway in 2013, started out as a modernized version of a made-for-TV musical. Those of us who recall the original cast – with the lovely Leslie Ann Warren as Cinderella – may be shocked to imagine that this TV event debuted a half-century ago.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
BO-NITA
Urbanite Theater

In a monologue delivered with much activity, a 13-year-old girl dramatizes an outstanding, murderous day in her life and a journey to get rid of a body. It happens in a confusingly described St. Louis, MO areas but involves flashbacks in time and space (including a country scene). It may even delve into the girl’s future place, along with that of her sex-addicted mother and various men to which she is or has been attached.

Marie J. KIlker
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Gun, The
Ruskin Group Theater

In Justin Yoffe’s quirky but provocative new play, The Gun, now in a world premiere at the Ruskin, Steve (Josh Drennen) comes across a homeless guy (Hamilton Matthews) in an alley. During the confrontation scene that follows, Steve discovers a pistol in a nearby pile of garbage. Surprisingly, the homeless guy not only denies ownership of the weapon but declines to take it from Steve, asserting in clairvoyant fashion that “you need it more than I do” (or words to that effect).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Mamma Mia!
Westchester Broadway Theater

There’s a good reason Mamma Mia! ran for 14 years on Broadway; it’s just plain fun. Who wouldn’t want to be on a scenic Greek Isle, preparing for a wedding celebration?

As the show opens, we see a shimmery blue curtain in the background, and hear the sounds of the sea. Mariah MacFarlane is perfectly cast as the bride to be, 20-year-old Sophie. She’s lovely to look at, has a compelling voice, and delivers the perfect mix of spunk and wistfulness. Sophie has a dream; she wants her father to give her away. The problem is, she doesn’t know who he is.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Greater Tuna
Crighton Theater

Many years ago in New York I reviewed the opening night of a new musical titled, “The Devil of Delancey Street. I opened my report with these lines:

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Destiny of Desire
Goodman Theater

Karen Zacarias's homage to the world of telenovelas delivers more fun than anyone has a right to expect from the Latinx author of solemn feminist dramas. Audience members not yet counted among the genre's two billion devotees, but who have encountered the fiction of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters, Georgette Heyer, and John Fowler will have no problem acclimating to the intricate narrative arc of this internationally popular entertainment.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Scullery Maid, The
The Edge

No one disputes the practicality of eliminating options as a means of expediting decisions — the fewer possibilities, the easier the choice, right? That's not how our big sloppy world works, however, and therein lies the lesson illustrated in Joseph Zettelmaier's speculations on a fragment of historical minutiae.

The aforementioned fragment recounts how a Jewish servant of King Edward III was tortured and subsequently executed by Italian partisans after being forced to make a false confession of attempted murder and terrorism.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Evening with Groucho, An
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

Although it has been 80 years since the heyday of Groucho Marx and his team of comical brothers, there aren’t many among us who are unaware of this master comedian. Actor Frank Ferrante proves this in his one-man tribute, An Evening with Groucho, which opened a two-month run at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s Stackner Cabaret. The intimate space, dotted with tables that seat from two to eight, offers the perfect invitation to sit back, relax, have a drink, and get ready to belly-laugh ‘til it hurts.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Price, The
American Airlines Theater

Families: Can’t live with ‘em, can’t kill ‘em. No one is a greater chronicler of this phenomenon than Arthur Miller. Conflict is drama, and oh boy, is The Price ever dramatic. It’s also very long and very talky. Fortunately, this Broadway production features superb acting and directing. The last half hour or so is extremely repetitious; what keeps it moving is the uncomfortable realization that this is how siblings do argue with each other.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Grounded
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne Lab

Grounded takes a female ace pilot on a flight to a change of career and thus, at the core of her very being, to unexpected and supremely difficult family, moral, and mental positions. As a monologue, the drama requires a tour de force performance. Rachel Moulton delivers it.

As part of Florida Studio Theater’s Stage III series of special, hard-hitting dramas that work with the simplest sets and other production elements, Grounded takes place in front of a brick wall and is told from three chairs equally spaced horizontally across an intimate stage.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Glass Menagerie, The
Belasco Theater

There is greatness on the stage of the Belasco Theater, but it isn’t what has been done to Tennessee Williams’s masterpiece The Glass Menagerie. I’ve come to the conclusion having now seen this new consideration directed by the otherwise adventurous director Sam Gold, that you can’t kill this 72 year-old play written by the greatest playwright that America ever produced. You can turn it inside out, flip it upside down, strip it bare, or deconstruct it (to use contemporary lingo), but the words linger on.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Price, The
American Airlines Theater

Like a long overdue rematch between two heavy-weight contenders, the resurrected conflict between two estranged brothers in Arthur Miller’s The Price remains, as always, an entertaining but also long-winded slice of life. A good cast—Mark Ruffalo, Tony Shalhoub, Jessica Hecht, and a sensational Danny DeVito—are undoubtedly giving their all to director Terry Kinney for the Roundabout Theatre Company.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Boynton Beach Club
Manatee Players PAC - Mainstage

Retirees are seldom the subject of drama, so it was refreshing a few years ago to have a film devoted to their lives in a gated Florida community. On stage, though, all that’s new is that their world is musical and, if anything, the music and lyrics chosen to convey Boynton Beach Club’s world and its inhabitants don’t defy the stereotypical but rather swim in it.

Two somewhat redeeming features of this musical are that it supports a decent production and doesn’t need a huge cast.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Miss Saigon
Broadway Theater

It’s back and just as heart-wrenching, spectacular and exciting as ever this time cast with respect for its pivotal Asian character—The Engineer—played by a terrifically talented Philippine, Jon Jon Briones. Playing the title character is the absolutely radiant Eva Noblezada.

But first: About a century ago writer John Luther Long wrote a short story that playwright David Belasco turned into a play that composer Puccini turned into an opera that has been going on ever since.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Skin of Our Teeth, The
Polonsky Shakespeare Center

Mankind’s ability to survive a confluence of horrific disasters, mass destruction and uncontrollable mayhem caused by wars and climate change is the subject of Thornton Wilder’s 1942 comedy The Skin of Our Teeth. This comical allegory has both delighted and distressed audiences (and critics) since its premiere and its subsequently checkered production history.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Sweeney Todd
Barrow Street Theater

It doesn’t seem to matter if you are seeing Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd for the first or, like me, the sixth time, it remains a spellbinder. Certainly the gasps of approval that filled the reconfigured Barrow Street Theater in Greenwich Village will attest to the musical’s ability to shock. Most audible was the scream from my companion in her too-close-for-comfort encounter with that infamous barber.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Phantom Pain
The Greenhouse

Barbara Lhota's fondness for procedurals is no secret to playgoers familiar with the canon of this prolific playwright. Although employed most often in crime stories, this literary construct may be applied to any plot proposing a riddle at the outset and then gradually disclosing — in infinitesimal increments, and not necessarily in chronological order — the information necessary to connect the dots until the complete picture is revealed.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Wiz, The
Theater Wit

If the brothers and sisters of Huckleberry Finn, Peer Gynt, Alice Liddell, or Ebenezer Scrooge were not to be found in every culture the world over, their stories would have faded from memory with their generation, rather than endure to achieve the status of a "classic." L. Frank Baum's tale of a farm girl in 1900 learning life lessons on an odyssey through a magical land should have easily adapted itself to Charlie Smalls and William F.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Twenty Four Words: The Equal Rights Musical
Stage 773

In an interview, Charles Kouri, book writer and lyricist for this history lesson framed in a musical revue, expressed concern over the number of young people who approach gender issues as if the Equal Rights Amendment introduced to Congress in 1972 hadn't failed to pass into law.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Source, The
The Den

Vernon Jenkins is a newspaper correspondent, and Oona Del Negro is a documentary filmmaker. He is armed with a laptop and all the latest apps; she packs old-school analog photography equipment. We are never told the location of this "large foreign city" where they have arrived, though their wardrobe hints at a warm climate. Neither of them knew that they would be sharing a single hotel room (boasting fridge, coffee-maker and minibar) registered under married-couple aliases, where they wait for an informant claiming to possess government secrets of interest to U.S security.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Night and Dreams: A Schubert and Beckett Recital
Walt Disney Concert Hall

Thanks to the vision and daring of director Yuval Sharon, those in the audience of Night and Dreams at Disney Hall recently were privileged to be in on the birth of a new theatrical art form. Sharon, head of the avant-garde opera company, The Industry, and an artist-collaborator for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, mounted six short plays by Samuel Beckett into whose text was woven Franz Schubert’s words and music. The result was a night of remarkable theatricality and originality — a miracle, really.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Last Days of Judas Iscariot, The
La MaMa - Ellen Stewart Theater

Courtroom dramas can’t be expected to have much plot. In plot, each piece of action leads to the next. In a courtroom, witnesses are called in a series without dramatic cause. And so we can’t expect Stephen Adly Guirgis’s play The Last Days of Judas Iscariot to have any sort of through line. It’s a courtroom drama, presented by La MaMa, in which Judas Iscariot is on trial. It’s not really about his last days. In fact, he isn’t on stage very much.

It’s not clear why Judas is on trial after all this time. The two attorneys are, after all, our contemporaries.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Significant Other
Booth Theater

It's not fun watching your best friends find their life partners and dance their special wedding song, leaving you standing alone clutching a soggy hanky in your fist. It's not fun to be the only one who has not found a significant other, desperate you never will. Yet in the hands of playwright Joshua Harmon (Bad Jews), the Broadway production of Significant Other has fiercely funny moments. Well, funny in a bittersweet but truthful way.

Gideon Glick (Spring Awakening) plays Jordan Berman, sweetly neurotic, Jewish, gay and single.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Little Foxes, The
Asolo Repertory - Mertz Theater

The Little Foxes could almost be a template for a realistic three-act melodrama, yet in this era of nontraditional structures, Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play laid in 1900 Alabama still works. Its anti-heroine, strong like women now more often onstage, is as grasping as her wealthy town-controlling brothers. Like a famous contemporary Wall Street film hero, this family acts on the premise that greed is good . . . for themselves. They want to make their fortunes great again and again and again in their family future. Men first, of course.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Light Year, The
Playwrights Horizons

Once again, Playwrights Horizons has given us a play that’s thought provoking. The Light Years demands our full attention; fact is mixed in with fiction, and the time frame swings back and forth. Let your mind drift, and you may get lost. Before the curtain even goes up — and there is a gorgeous deep red curtain — we hear yips and cries of men being shocked as they attempt to bring the new marvel of electricity to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Still Life
Met Theater

Death does not take a holiday in Still Life, Alexander Dinelaris’s play at Rogue Machine. On the contrary, death crops up everywhere in the play, beginning with the portraits of dead chickens shot by lead character, Carrie Ann (Laurie Okin), a photographer we are asked to believe makes profound statements with her work.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Beauty and the Beast
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

It appears the old fable, Beauty and the Beast, is well-represented these days. Disney just opened its live-version film recently, and the Milwaukee Ballet Company is taking a crack at it soon. But there’s no need to feel overkill at yet another version, such as the one presented by Milwaukee’s Skylight Music Theater. This bewitching blend of vocal gymnastics, lovely costumes, medieval-style dancing and fantastic puppetry make this production not to be missed.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Sweat
Studio 54

Finally, Lynn Nottage’s powerful, timely play is on Broadway, officially opening March 26, 2017. I read it for an award-granting committee in 2015 and got detailed reports on its sold-out productions at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Arena Stage in D.C. They got rave reviews. Then I saw this same production at the Public Theatre in New York, which also sold out and got raves. Now it’s moving intact to Studio 54 with only one cast change.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Cruise, The
Los Angeles Theater Center

The Latino Theater Company has given a new play by a young L.A.-based Mexican-American playwright, Jonathan Ceniceroz, its world premiere at the Los Angeles Theater Center. Called The Cruise,, the five-character play is set aboard a luxury cruise ship toodling around the Caribbean islands; the secondary meaning of the title refers, of course, to the insatiable hunt for sex on the part of some homosexuals.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
C.S. Lewis: The Most Reluctant Convert
Acorn Theater

C.S. Lewis lived between 1898 and 1963. He’s best known for his works of fiction such as “The Screwtape Letters” and “The Chronicles of Narnia,” although his non-fiction work is arguably more important. He ranks among the foremost 20th-century Christian apologists and theologians.

Max McLean has written a terrific solo show in which he presents Lewis in his study at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1950, C.S. Lewis on Stage: The Most Reluctant Convert. Mr. MacLean is the show’s actor, and he’s co-directed it with Ken Denison.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
At Home at the Zoo
Wallis Annenberg Center - Lovelace Studio Theater

Deaf West (recent producer of Spring Awakening) has teamed up with the Wallis Center in its presentation of At Home at the Zoo, two short plays by Edward Albee. In keeping with its mission to “improve and enrich the cultural lives of deaf and hard of hearing individuals,” Deaf West’s productions feature deaf and hearing actors working together, using a mixture of ASL (American Sign Language) and spoken English.

In At Home, the main actors move and sign, with their speaking counterparts standing nearby and reciting Albee’s dialogue.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Fjeldfuglen

(see reviews under MOUNTAIN BIRD, THE)

Mountain Bird, The
La MaMa

In 1859, Henrik Ibsen wrote an opera libretto – more precisely, the beginning of an opera libretto. He never finished it. It’s titled ”The Mountain Bird” (in Norwegian, “Fjeldfuglen”), and it was produced for the first time in 2009 by a Norwegian company, Grusomhetens Teater, with contemporary music by Filip Sande.

The company presented the piece at La MaMa recently, in Norwegian with English surtitles. What a brilliant production! The work is based on Artaud and Grotowski, with a minimalist set and elegant, stylized acting.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Wakey Wakey
Pershing Square Signature Center

We first meet Guy (Michael Emerson) passed out on the floor in his pajamas. Lights out.

When the lights come back on, he is in a wheelchair, alone in a room surrounded by boxes, a free-standing door, and a wall where photos and videos can be flashed. "Is it time yet? Guy asks. "We're here to say good-bye and maybe hopefully also get better at saying hello. To celebrate Life, if that doesn't sound too passive-aggressive." Designed by Christine Jones, the set gives a feeling of transition, and Guy has things he wants to say in this time he is given.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
March 2017
Kid Victory
Vineyard Theater

Kid Victory is a powerful, ambitious and disturbing new musical by legendary John Kander and playwright Greg Pierce about pedophilia, kidnapping, and adolescence. It is a story as gripping in emotion as in psychological insight.

When Kander was composing with the late lyricist Fred Ebb, he was not a stranger to the dark side. Tackling strong dramas like Nazi Germany (Cabaret), murder (Chicago) and racism (The Scottsboro Boys), they drew you into the night with their captivating music blanketing the underside of life.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
March 2017

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