Piano Lesson, The
Hartford Stage

August Wilson (1945-2005), in the “Pittsburgh Cycle,” created ten plays set in the decades from the 1900s to 1990s. Two of the dramas that chronicle generations defined by the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural, agricultural south to the industrial north, earned Pulitzer Prizes. Not in chronological order, the plays started with Jitney (the 1970s) in 1982 and ended with the 1990s and Radio Golf in 2005. He died between its premier and Broadway opening in 2007.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
November 2016
Relativity
TheaterWorks

There are few sure things in American theater, but dramatist Mark St. Germain is one of them. For the past two years he has been included on the New York Times list of most- produced homegrown playwrights, and theaters are lining up to stage his latest play, Relativity. The script was commissioned by the Florida Studio Theater, where it premiered in August. Productions are scheduled for Iowa and Illinois and others in the works. Closer to home, the drama is opening TheaterWorks’ 31st season in a production that stars veteran actor Richard Dreyfuss as Albert Einstein.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
November 2016
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Booth Theater

In Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the endangered aristocracy whiles away the years leading up to the French Revolution with games of seductive manipulations to humiliate and avenge those who did them wrong. While Christopher Hampton's adaption of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 epistolary novel has been done before, London's Donmar Warehouse's current production at the Booth Theater brings in two eminent big guns, Janet McTeer and Liev Schreiber, to portray the scheming protagonists. Therein lies the problem.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
November 2016
Book of Days
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Two storms hit the small town of Dublin, Missouri, in Lanford Wilson’s realistically written but stylistically staged Book of Days. One storm is a tornado during which the head of the town’s cheese plant, its economic center, is killed. The other is occurs when its plant bookkeeper, emboldened by her lead in Shaw’s drama about Joan of Arc, begins a search for what she’s convinced is the businessman’s murder and conspiracy behind it.

Wilson’s play starts as a narrative record as if from a medieval book that recorded important happenings.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2016
Resolution
Rivendell

Were it not for its decidedly modern attitude toward a topic until recently couched in silence, audiences might be forgiven thinking that Pride Films and Plays had stumbled upon a lesser-known work by Eugene Scribe or Victorien Sardou, founders of the "well-made" school of drama in the 19th century, or perhaps a stage adaptation of an early 20th-century novel by Edith Wharton or Henry James.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2016
Bottle Tree, The
Theater Wit

Its publicity claims the subject of Beth Kander's The Bottle Tree to be "gun culture"—a summary akin to declaring “To Kill a Mockingbird” a study of Alabama law practice. However titillating it is to speculate on a killer's motives, or emotionally satisfying to weep for slain victims, these options are open only to survivors like those at the center of Kander's contemplative narrative.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2016
Vicuña
Kirk Douglas Theater

Just in time for election day is the world premiere of Jon Robin Baitz’s political comedy, Vicuña, at the Kirk Douglas Theater, directed by Robert Egan. In it, a Donald Trump-like presidential candidate called Kurt Seaman (a swaggering Harry Groener) shows up at the swanky NYC workshop of Anselm Kassar (Brian George), an elderly Iranian-American bespoke tailor, to order a suit he can wear at a crucial TV debate with his Democratic Party opponent.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2016
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Booth Theater

This may be the perfect play for our times- and that is not a compliment. Les Liaisons Dangereuses is full of moral corruption, dirty dealing, and the most distasteful characters who ever elicited a laugh onstage. If you think rape and cruelty are funny, you’ll find this hilarious.

La Marquise de Merteuil is bored. As played by the exquisite Janet McTeer, she is beautiful, elegant, and great at faking affection for those she intends to harm.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
November 2016
How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying
Hobby Center

Ever since its opening on The Great White Way more than half a century ago in 1961, composer Frank Loesser’s witty musical satire on the corporate world of big business has been putting smiles on audience faces around the world. With a clever book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock & Willie Gilbert, and the lengthy title of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, the show succeeds in countless ways in this latest edition currently being presented by Theater Under the Stars in the Sarofim Hall of Houston’s Hobby Center.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Daddy Issues
Theater at St. Clement's

In Marshall Goldberg’s play Daddy Issues, a gay man, an actor named Donald, hires a ten-year-old boy to pretend to be his son for the benefit of his family. He’s aided in this deception by two friends, a woman named Henrietta and a male buddy named Levi who has a drag act. In the play’s climactic scene, Mom and Dad and Grandma come to Donald’s apartment to meet the young boy. As in all farce, the characters are no match for the situation, and we watch as comic bit by comic bit Donald is undone.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Life, A
Playwrights Horizons - Peter Jay Sharp Theater

David Hyde Pierce is lovable. There’s a vulnerability and a wry humor that’s totally endearing; from the moment he steps on stage, the audience is with him. This proves to be almost a liability as the play progresses.

The show opens with Pierce, as Nate Martin, delivering a very long monologue about how lonely he is. This is delivered in such a conversational tone, it seems to glide. Easy to understand why this actor has won both an Emmy and a Tony; he’s just that good. This is a difficult play to understand, and at times, it’s even off-putting.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Other People's Money
Pico Playhouse

To see Other People’s Money is to understand why the French call our economic system “savage capitalism.” The ruthlessness and greed of Wall Street have also been grist for the mill of such contemporary American writers as Oliver Stone and David Mamet. Now we can add the name of playwright Jerry Sterner to that list.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Addams Family, The
Crighton Theater

I think it can be safely said that in my many pleasant years of reviewing productions at the Crighton Theater, I have never laughed harder than I did last Saturday night when doubled up in hysterics while enjoying Stage Right’s current offering of the Broadway musical hit, The Addams Family.

Let me first confess I was never among the many fans of the popular Addams Family newspaper cartoons of Charles Addams, upon which this musical comedy is based, or the later television show of the same name.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Multitudes
Biograph

Proclaiming the obvious is a common flaw of plays by actors-turned-playwrights, who tend to focus more on technique than content.

With Multitudes, John Hollingworth thinks his fellow Brits are not sufficiently aware that anti-immigrant bigotry exists in England, that impressionable teenagers may be seduced by terrorist recruiters into committing reckless deeds, or that do-gooders who align themselves with high-visibility radical factions may encounter suspicion, censure, and notoriety from their neighbors.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Starting Over
The Greenhouse

The course of true love ne'er ran smooth back when Shakespeare made his observation. Enlightened citizens in 2016 may congratulate themselves on their progress in striking down barriers once impeding marriages of like minds, but with that progress come new obstacles no less perilous.

The cards are stacked against classmates Jarrod Wintercastle and Rayna Hall from their first meeting at a high school dance in their rural Midwestern town.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Nora! What Happened After Nora Left Her Husband, or, Pillars of Society
Yugoslav National Theatre

Elfride Jelinek’s drama, Nora, seriously satirizes what happens to Ibsen’s Nora when she leaves his/her husband’s Doll’s House and has to deal with the kind of Pillars of Society Ibsen wrote about. When she appears to be going on holiday, by some railroad tracks she meets someone who learns she seeks a job. She wants “to be a human being,” a goal she had to leave husband and family to achieve.

Being allowed without references to go to work in a textiles factory, she finds fellow workers wondering how Nora could have been so vulnerable.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Front Page, The
Broadhurst Theater

Have you heard the expression “saved the best for last?” This is definitely the case with this production of The Front Page. Don’t leave at either of the two intermissions, because in Act Three, Nathan Lane struts his stuff. Everything we’ve come to love about this comic actor is there in spades: the perfect timing, the animated face, and the firecracker energy. As the bombastic newspaper publisher Walter Burns, he pumps up the volume in what often seems like an overworked old chestnut of a play. Lane is a living lesson in comedy.

Michael Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
What Did You Expect?
Public Theater

This is the middle play in a purposely timely trilogy about one family’s personal travails during the current election season set in Rhinebeck N.Y. Playwright Richard Nelson further calls the full opus, “The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family,” with this installment titled, “What Did You Expect?”.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Drowning Girls, The
Studio Theater

For a creepy Halloween thriller, one would be hard-pressed to find a better choice than The Drowning Girls, the season opener by Milwaukee’s Renaissance Theaterworks.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Joey Arias is with You
Joe's Pub

The otherworldly sensationalist Joey Arias is an avid experimentalist both off stage and off. I have been told – and my sources do not lie – that the daring chanteuse is up for just about anything. And if there is anything that he has not tried yet, well, rest assured, one way or another, Arias will get around to it. And if you are really lucky he may get around to you, too. Just keep the faith.

It is this very sex-tinged promise that anything can happen at any moment and often does that guarantees Arias full houses and sold out shows.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Cherry Orchard, The
American Airlines Theater

It takes chutzpah as well as a fair amount of integrity to mess around with what is arguably Anton Chekov’s greatest, if also most loosely structured, play. I can imagine nitpickers and purists are already lining up en masse to berate and decry the liberties taken by both Stephen Karam for his almost tipsy adaptation and by Simon Godwin for his equally shaky yet surprisingly energizing direction: the result being as jarring as it is also justifiably anarchic.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Romeo et Juliette

(see articles/reviews under ROMEO AND JULIETTE)

Romeo and Juliette
Salle Richelieu

Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s tragedy of young lovers had not been staged by the Comedie-Francaise since the ‘50s. Since one of its primary missions, says Eric Ruff, is to “re-expose legendary plays that have become part of the collective memory,” he aimed to get through the many historical interpretations of the play to an essential: to tell a story. He wanted not to omit Shakespeare’s rough-and-toughness, luxuriance, and humor but use the mix and make his language accessible by wedding it to action.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Frankenstein
Players Theater

Mary Shelley published “Frankenstein” in 1818. The book is one of the inspirations of the steampunk aesthetic that was first named in the 1980’s. Be Bold! Productions has created a musical stage adaptation of Shelley’s book and combined it with steampunk and expressionism. The result is an interesting if disappointing show.

The script is faithful to Mrs. Shelley’s book, which varies in several points from the famous Boris Karloff movie of 1931.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Bare: A Pop Opera
Epworth United Methodist Church

In 1891, Frank Wedekind wrote a play protesting the destructive behavior arising from teenagers suffering under sexual ignorance promulgated by those in authority.

In 2000, Damon Intrabartolo and Jon Hartmere Jr. explored the same themes in a song cycle excoriating the Catholic church for its neglect, leading it to be performed widely in regional productions aimed at the youths whose troubles it addressed.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Henry IV
The Greenhouse

Luigi Pirandello is probably the best-known proponent of the connection between real-life actors impersonating fictional characters and our own everyday adoption of different roles as occasion demands. The legacy of this early 20th-century playwright has long been impeded by atonal translations intended for academic study, but Tom Stoppard, himself a champion of sleight-of-hand narratives, has crafted from his intellectually dense source material an adaptation at once breezy and concise.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Sylvia
Odyssey Theater

Dog is a lot more than man’s best friend in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia, a canine comedy now getting laughs — or is it barks? — at the Odyssey Theater. The visiting production is directed by Tanna Frederick, who won plaudits five years ago for her work as actress in the same play, which ran for a year at Edgemar Center for the Arts and at Sierra Madre Playhouse.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Model Apartment, The
Geffen Playhouse

The Geffen theater has become a second home to the New York-based playwright Donald Margulies. Now, to continue riding the wave of his popularity, the Geffen has chosen to revive one of his earlier works, The Model Apartment, which had its world premiere at the Los Angeles Theater Center some thirty years ago (and opened at NY’s Primary Stages Company soon afterwards).

The Model Apartment is a Holocaust play, one that dramatizes the impact of that calamity on a Jewish family in the late 1980s.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Love, Actually: Four Short Comedies Laugh at Love
Starlite Room

Starlite’s comedies present “love at first sight, second sight, hindsight, and out of sight.” In each, love is actually a laughable matter.

“It’s Only a Minute a Guy” for Sandra Musicante’s able-to-retain-dignity Betty who wants her cover charge returned from a bar where, in a few moments, she hasn’t seen her intended evening’s companion.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Wizard of Oz, The
National Childrens Theater Complex

Serbian playwright Milena Depolo, encouraged by Frank L. Baum’s comments that it’s time for new “wonder tales” to replace old-time fairy tales, has written what she hopes is a modernized fairy tale. Though faithful to Baum’s story, she’s tried to present a Dorothy of today and allied characters with contemporary meanings of being smart, brave, loving.

None of the characters is perfectly good or evil. Dorothy begins as immature. In Oz, far from her home and its values, she has a hard time explaining Kansas to those she meets.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Cherry Orchard, The
American Airlines

Diane Lane has never looked so beautiful. When she enters the set in a long off-white fur coat, chestnut hair shining, tears of happiness glistening in her eyes, the audience fairly gasps. As Lyubov Ranevskaya, she is the definition of glamour. Lyubov’s clothing is exquisite, largely because as she admits, she spends money like a madwoman. She’s just arrived from Paris to meet with her family, relive memories both joyous and painful, and say goodbye — maybe — to her beloved childhood country home. But this now nearly impoverished noblewoman refuses to accept the truth.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Le Depeupleur
Theatre les Dechargeurs

Adapted for the stage from a short story by Samuel Beckett, Le Depeupleur or “The Lost One” involves, according to director (metteur en scene) and co-adapter Alain Francon a passion for seeking that demands a search of everything. That both the search and its objects remain mystifying must be charged to Beckett and not to his talented interpreter Serge Merlin.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Wiz, The
WBBT Theater

With vivid colors used in the background as well as a grand array of costumes and striking lighting, The Wiz typifies Westcoast Black Theater Troupe at its best. The musical is an African-American journey to and recognition of the engulfing human habitat called home. For teenage Dorothy, that may be Harlem, but for all others in and out of Oz, it’s also shown as a place where a good life is found from giving and getting respect, love, and friendship.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Heisenberg
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

The key to a successful two-person play is that there has to be massive amounts of chemistry between the players. As unlikely a duo as septuagenarian Alex and more than a little unpredictable Georgie, in her early forties, may be, there is definite electricity on the stage. Kudos to the eternally young Mary-Louise Parker and to her leading man, Denis Arnt. The air fairly crackles when they’re onstage together- which is all the time.

Georgie spies Alex at a London train station, and out of the blue, kisses him on the neck.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Le Cantarice Chauve
Lucernaire’s Theatre Rouge

Introduced by “God Save the King,” British seeming protaganists Mr. and Mrs. Smith stand together and speak directly to the audience. In fact, one very new thing in Alex Rocamora’s production of Eugene Ionesco’s absurd classic, The Bald Soprano, is that all the characters line up for what seems like today’s interactive theater but may also be an old fashioned carnival or burlesque act. The main thing I noticed that the subtitle predicted I would not have seen before is most of the actors in white face and formal black dress.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Goosebumps: Phantom of the Auditorium
Todd Wehr Theater

Milwaukee’s First Stage offers its own version of a Halloween treat with the opening of Goosebumps: The Phantom of the Auditorium. This world premiere was written by John Maclay, who also contributed lyrics along with Danny Abosch, the show’s music writer.

In this slightly spooky and scary tribute to The Phantom of the Opera, a couple of kids begin the show by talking excitedly about the upcoming middle-school annual play.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Holiday Inn
Studio 54

Christmas in October? Just fine this year, with the opening of Holiday Inn, The New Broadway Musical. The show is based on the hit 1942 movie that is best known for the classic “White Christmas,” which won the Oscar for best song and featured song and dance by Bing Crosby as Jim Hardy, and Fred Astaire as Ted Hanover. Here, Jim is played by Bryce Pinkham, who, it must be said, is a much better singer than crooner Bing. Corbin Bleu skillfully tackles the role of Ted, who loves performing almost as much as he loves himself.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Oh, Hello
Lyceum Theater

Zing! There goes another one-liner, and the audience howls with laughter. The two altercockers onstage are yucky it up, often cackling at their own jokes. They are Gil Faison (Nick Kroll) and George St. Geegland ( John Mulaney), residents of the Upper West Side who have seen better days.

The audience enters to the sound of Steely Dan, who are mentioned in the show. Accompanying the ‘70s tunes is a search light which rakes the house.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
More Lives Than One: Oscar Wilde and the Black Douglas
Theatre de Nesle

Les Clack proves in his monodrama, More Lives than One: Oscar Wilde and the Black Douglas, that Wilde indeed lived a number of lives. In flashback from an account of references to his clash with his lover Bosey’s father and the trial that followed, Clack goes back to Wilde as always a topic of conversation, no matter where: even at Oxford. In London, of course. On a tour of America. Back in England--where, for the most part, Clack chronicles Wilde’s life.

Clack shows Oscar did appreciate women.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Room, The
A Red Orchid Theater

One of the reasons that actors love Harold Pinter is the almost limitless opportunities for individual interpretation offered by his enigmatic texts. The atmosphere of impending disaster arising from intense emotional agitation devoid of expository signposts occurring within everyday environments is what made Pinter's reputation in 1957, when this brief—running barely over an hour—one-act exercise in shivery menace premiered in an England still recovering from wartime devastation.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2016

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