Two by Tennessee Williams: 27 Wagons Full of Cotton & Kingdom of Earth
St. Luke's Theater

Tennessee Williams’s dialogue is naturalistic inasmuch as we can feel the southern heat in its details. It’s nearly expressionist in its evocativeness. It’s quintessentially American. Williams is served very well in 2 by Tennessee Williams, a pair of his one-act plays, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Kingdom of Earth, produced by Fabco Productions.

Williams called 27 Wagons Full of Cotton “a Mississippi Delta Comedy”. It comprises mostly f a seduction scene.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
July 2016
Florida Studio Theater Improv Festival 2016
Florida Studio Theater

Organized by Florida Studio Theatre's Rebecca Hopkins, Managing Director, who first conceived of the Improv Festival, this year's 8th boasted three full days of performances. From July 14 through to an All Play and Midnight Buffet on the 16th, 18 groups of 92 performers brought various forms of improvisation to four FST's venues. This issue also benefitted from the organizational work of Will Luera, engaged as Director of Improv last year, with the goal of having FST as the Southeastern Capital of Improvisation.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2016
Oslo
Mitzi Newhouse Theater

In 1993, an historic handshake in the White House Rose Garden offered a promise but failed to deliver fulfillment. Closer to fulfillment is J.T. Rogers's captivating and inspired drama, Oslo, now on Lincoln Center Theater's Mitzi E. Newhouse stage. Rogers goes behind the scenes of the Oslo Peace Accords between Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and chairman Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and reveal the vital role of Norwegians in bringing it all about.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
July 2016
Chops
Theater Wit

When the author is a hometown boy and the stage picture consists of three guys over the age of thirty swapping Big Talk in a bar, the odds are that at least one of them is trying to put one over on the others. This auspicious debut by CPS teacher-turned-playwright Michael Rychlewski fits snugly into the genre launched by David Mamet, whose tales of small-time hustlers continues to define the "Chicago style" of dramatic literature.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2016
Portrait, The
The Greenhouse

The stage contains a room identifiable as an artist's studio only by its array of easels and canvases. A door leads to a sunny garden; tea and coffee-making appliances are in evidence, along with indications of resident felines. The owner of this cheerful habitat is a portly man of middle age, wearing a voluminous caftan and a full beard, whose first words to the waiting visitor seated unseen among us are to apologize for his tardiness.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2016
Quietly
Irish Repertory Theater

A climate of tension and enigma insinuates its way into the U.S. debut of the Abbey Theatre production, Quietly, by Owen Cafferty at the Irish Repertory Theater. With an icy scowl and a limp, Jimmy (Patrick O'Kane), enters a quiet bar in Belfast. The bartender (Robert Zawadzki), a Polish immigrant, draws him a beer from the tap and they both turn wordlessly to watch the World Cup match between Poland and Northern Ireland on TV.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
July 2016
Kingdom of Earth
Odyssey Theater

Love and death in the Mississippi Delta.

Tennessee Williams puts three Southern characters under the microscope in Kingdom of Earth, which is a rewrite of his 1963 play The Seven Descents of Myrtle. The latter work premiered on Broadway and was something of a flop. Kingdom was produced in Princeton, NJ, in 1975 and won some plaudits but has rarely been produced since then. Thanks to the team behind the current production at the Odyssey, we now have a chance to see that forgotten play in a small-theater space that suits it well.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2016
CardShark, The
Florida Studio Theater

In The CardShark, Jason Michaels delivers an unexpected but involving kind of magic show, featuring card tricks. He tells stories about the circumstances of his learning the tricks and then educates the audience about how they work.

Michaels is a pleasant entertainer, who lays out his cards on a kind of desk, center stage. The card assemblages are filmed and shown on two screens, each one above and on an opposite side of the stage. Everything can be seen and heard.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2016
How I Got Over: A Tribute to Mahalia Jackson
WBTT Theater

Though Mahalia Jackson is hailed as the Queen of Gospel Music, Nate Jacobs centers her in a parade of outstanding gospel creators and performers. The theme of the show is a history of African Americans’ struggles throughout history, especially American, to be free and equal and recognized for their contributions. A narrator makes clear the role of gospel music accompanying the struggles of African Americans and what they have won in the musical and wider world.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2016
Between Riverside and Crazy
Steppenwolf Theater

When the 2015 Pulitzer Prize was awarded to Stephen Adly Guirgis's wry examination of marginalized citizens struggling to get by—and not particularly choosy how they do it—against overwhelming odds, nobody suspected that the troubles of these disenfranchised lowlifes would be vying for national attention a year later. Don't come expecting cheap ripped-from-the-headlines hindsight, though. Keep your fists at your sides and hankies in your pockets, and you will emerge wiser.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2016
Twilight Zone: Unscripted Episodes
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

In a three-day Festival of improvisation presented by 18 groups, Impro Theater of Los Angeles created a program of three short “real” plays based on the “Twilight Zone” TV series. Subjects and locales were suggested by the audience for each play. This presentation was the Festival’s “Headliner” show; hence, its length as opposed to other groups’ 30 to 50 minute shows.

As in the television shows, Impro Theatre’s were introduced by a man in a dark business suit -- in this case, Ryan Smith, with typical opening Rod-Serling-like serious patter.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2016
Strange Bedfellows: The Funny Side of Unlikely Attractions
Starlite Room

At the end of Starlite Players’ first season come four short comedies. Each humorously answers a question or two by its end.

Ribbing Adam by Richard J. Budin takes place in a Garden of Eden well regulated by director Jamie Lee Butrum. Overseeing is Ken Basque as a kindly God. Good looking and pleasantly pliable Adam (Joseph Rebella) awakes. What an adventure follows as God gives him Eve (confident Liz Pascoe, flirty), who gets even more mod than Adam!

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2016
Grey Gardens
Ahmanson Theater

The challenge facing Doug Wright was obvious from the start: how to make a skimpy storyline work. In the documentary Grey Gardens (shot in the 70s by the Maysles brothers and others), the camera stayed on real-life Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Little Edie as they tottered around their crumbling, cat-filled family mansion in East Hampton, bickering and bantering the whole time.

The unfolding of their weird, tragicomic relationship — plus the visual evidence of their impoverished existence — a provided enough drama for a documentary.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2016
Roommate, The
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Theater

All the laugh-out-loud humor throughout The Roommate tempts me to call it a comedy. But the change that always takes place in a good drama is real here, and it’s not just funny. The final ending is a mystery, led up to by several seeming endings, all of which would have served a run-of-the-mill domestic comedy. Still, Jen Silverman’s kitchen-table-contemporary take on a female odd couple is decidedly more of a delicious dilemma.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2016
Four Chords and a Gun
Bootleg Theater

The Bootleg Theater company works out of an old L.A. warehouse now serving as a rock club. A back room of the club has been turned into a 99-seat theatre which presently serves as the ideal setting for Four Chords and a Gun, John Ross Bowie’s hard-edged play about the Ramones, a leading NYC punk-rock band.

The action takes place in L.A. and New York “between December 1978 and December 1980,” when the band, in desperate need of a hit record (although their stance was anti-establishment and anti-commercial), turned to music producer Phil Spector for help.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2016
Little Night Music, A
Stratford Festival - Avon Theater

Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler created this witty, beautiful musical based on Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece, “Smiles of a Summer’s Night” (1955), a top entry in most 20th century experts’ lists of the ten greatest films ever. So it is no small praise to note that many of us think the musical entirely worthy of its source. Stratford’s revival has its own eccentric elements but remains a first-rate entry in that complex artistic history.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
July 2016
Day Shall Declare It, The
Imperial

Working out of a dreary ex-machine shop in an equally dreary section of downtown, industrial L.A. (which is slowly being gentrified), a company called Wilderness is making theatrical magic with a play called The Day Shall Declare It. The setting suits the material, which is derived from interviews in Studs Terkel’s “Working” and from various bits of dialogue culled from some of Tennessee Williams’s lesser-known works (such as Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry and Talk to Me Like the Rain). The play also quotes from his essays, stories and poems.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2016
On the Verge, Or, The Geography of Yearning
Walkerspace

Eric Overmyer engages in some pretty fancy word play in his 1985 play On the Verge or The Geography of Yearning. The play is a language-based fantasy about three women who travel from 1888 to 1955. They set out from Terre Haute to explore a tropical land called Terra Incognita and end up at a nightclub in a city called Peligrosa.

The erudite dialogue uses an expansive vocabulary and techniques like alliteration and assonance. It takes a few minutes for our ears to realize the demands that the playwright is making, but when we do, it’s fun to meet the challenge.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
Ideal Husband, An
Up the Hill stage

“Love is greater than ambition,” proclaims a character in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 comedy, An Ideal Husband. Whether that statement is true or false takes the audience on an invigorating and devilishly funny journey through “society” and politics in the late 1890s.

How amazing to think, more than 100 years later, that some of the same political chicanery is playing out before our very eyes between the Republicans and Democrats. In an election year, An Ideal Husband resonates more than usual.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
Death of a Salesman
American Players Theater - The Hill

The slightly crumpled brown suit, the stooped shoulders and the silhouette of an older man dragging heavy cases can mean only one thing: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman has come to town. The verdant, rolling hills and forests surrounding Spring Green, Wis., greet Willy Loman, one of the most famous characters in American theater. He appears onstage in an outdoor amphitheater known as “the Hill.” This is the term is commonly used to describe the American Players Theater’s 1140-seat stage.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
Breath of Kings: Redemption - Henry IV, Part 2 & Henry VI
Stratford Festival - Tom Patterson Theater

Most who see this condensation of the four Shakespeare plays will see them back to back, probably in matinee and evening performances, so, obviously, the Richard II and Henry IV, Part 1 will be fresher and more stirring than the final two. But in many ways those plays seem, overall, more grabbing to me. I’ve been finding the opening sections of Henry IV, Part 2 less amusing than most of Part 1 recently, anyway.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
Breath of Kings: Rebellion: Richard II & Henry IV, Part 1
Stratford Festival - Tom Patterson Theater

This monstrous project has so many rich rewards for an audience that I suppose that it really ought to be experienced by those attending Canada’s Stratford Festival this season. But so many problems are inherent in The Breath of Kings: Rebellion -- including staging and flaws in current decisions and compromises — that I don’t think this a viable continuing or revivable dramatic creation.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
Dry Land
Urbanite Theater

Written by an adolescent, Dry Land solves a dire problem in the life of an adolescent today and how it affects her friendship with a peer. This play seems meant to appeal especially to a young audience with dialogue and attitudes typical of contemporary adolescents. It may also seek adult understanding of, and even sympathy for, the adolescents it portrays. Quite clear, though, is that the writer purports to make a splash with a horror scene: a painful abortion on a locker-room floor.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
Light in the Piazza, The
freeFall Theater

The light Ryan Finzelber designs for freeFall Theater’s piazza illuminates American mother Margaret and her daughter Clara visiting Florence, Italy, in 1953. An overture, much like an opera’s, leads into the intertwining stories of three women and three marriages. And a gorgeous statue (Joshua Romero, perfect) comes to life to bring unerring dance and shift of architectural elements to create scenery and scenes. When he carries a hat on the wind, it leads to a whirlwind romance but with unromantic challenges.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
Relativity
Florida Studio Theater - Keating

Once again, a play of substance by Mark St. Germain, so at home at Florida Studio Theater! Relativity is about scientist Albert Einstein and a daughter he fathered who seems to have long disappeared from history. Exploring his past and character, St. Germain’s play tries to uncover how these illuminate who Einstein was in relation to the present. This would, of course, also explain a lot of history, even of science.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
Home/Sick
Odyssey Theater

Shock theater! The first shock came while stepping into the Odyssey’s Theater 2, whose walls were smeared with political graffiti, floors strewn with filthy mattresses, clothes, books and jugs of Gallo red. The second shock came when the six actors on stage launched into an agit-prop play, Home/Sick.

Agit-prop? It’s about as hard to encounter that kind of theater in L.A. as it is to encounter a goony bird.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
American Son
Barrington Stage - Boyd/Quinson Main Stage

In racist America, for young African-American men, there is no such thing as a routine traffic stop. The award-winning American Son by Christopher Demos-Brown, having its world premiere at Barrington Stage Company which commissioned it, is built on the theme that black lives matter. It is the kind of message play that director Julianne Boyd regularly programs to interact with the community and the fall school curriculum. There is a schedule of programming related to this production.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
Eccentricities of a Nightingale, The
Pacific Resident Theater

Pacific Resident Theater has celebrated its 30th anniversary by mounting The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Tennessee Williams’s revision of his 1950s play Summer and Smoke. Williams has said that he preferred Eccentricities over Smoke because “it is less conventional and melodramatic.” He also added that Alma Winemiller is his favorite character.

This time around, Alma (strong, lustrous performance by Ginna Carter) is a more active character, fighting as best she can to win the heart of her girlhood crush, Dr John Buchanan (Andrew Dits).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
West Side Story
Paper Mill Playhouse

When it happens that another terrific production of West Side Story comes along, there is always a case to be made that it, like the current Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof, reaffirms its status as a landmark American musical.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
Smoke
The Met Theater

Smoke is the best play I have seen at the 2016 Hollywood Fringe Festival, a black, edgy, brilliantly acted and directed drama which thrills from start to finish. Let’s hope that Rogue Machine will keep it running long after the Festival ends.

Smoke, which was first done in New York in 2014, deals with the intense relationship between a contemporary young couple, Julie (Emily James) and John (Patrick Stafford), who meet in the back room of a Manhattan club where a sex party is in full swing.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
Disgraced
Mark Taper Forum

Disgraced, the 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, has been revived at the Mark Taper Forum in a powerful but flawed production. Repeating director Kimberly Senior has assembled a strong cast but allowed some of its actors–mostly the women–to swallow their words at key moments. Their inaudibility spoiled much of the play for this critic.

Ayad Akhtar’s drama is rooted in the ongoing ideological debate over radical Islam.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
Shakespeare in Love
Stratford Festival - Avon Theater

Yes, Shakespeare in Love is a winner of an original comedy, but since this is a “North American premiere by special arrangement with Disney Theatrical Productions and Sonia Friedman Productions,” I haven’t heard whether Stratford could take it to Broadway. Not a bad idea, though.

None of the charm of the film is lost here, but, of course, Stratford has a picnic with the jokey origins and Elizabethan attitudes toward the young playwright from Stratford Upon Avon.

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
Shining City
Irish Repertory Theater

Conor McPherson’s Shining City is more somber than shining, reflecting the loneliness, yearning and guilt of four characters, communicating and suffering yet never really connecting. The immediacy of their stories is emotional, each one enveloped in his own anguish and the world he cannot understand.

At the renovated Irish Repertory Theater, McPherson explores these problems through storytelling between two men in a series of short scenes and the playwright's trademark broken dialogue that vibrates with authenticity.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The
Stratford Festival - Avon Theater

I did not grow up with this story, and, in fact, have seen only two of the “Narnia” films, so I was less familiar with or informed about this delightful play than were many of the children and younger members of the audience.  In fact, they were apparently comfortably acquainted with the material and more sophisticated in their appreciation of its many magical elements.  Without punning on its supernatural fantasies, I really found this material enchanting.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
As You Like It
Stratford Festival - Festival Theater

Because this is a production of a beloved, great comedy by William Shakespeare, and because this is the great Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Ontario, Canada, three or four scenes in As You Like It are played superbly by some of the finest Shakespearean actors in the world. And they are charming, unmistakably clear, and a special rare delight.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
All My Sons
Stratford Festival - Tom Patterson Theater

Arthur Miller’s All My Sons has always struck me as his stepchild, which even potent productions of, all seem to get qualified or grudging approval.

Skirting the Law: Four Short Comedies about People Playing the Angles (Badly)
Starlite Room

Under the title, Skirting the Law, four sparkling short plays illuminate the announced theme, all quite differently.

‘Honest Abe’ Mazulu by Stephen Cooper takes its name from the lead (played by a forceful Michael Kinsey) from Gabongo, determined to get names of its citizens who’ve been illegally taking money out of the country and putting it into a Swiss bank. Mazulu threatens to kill its director (staunch Joseph Giglio), who refuses revelation to the point of death. His secretary (Philip Troyer, funnily fearful) can’t help.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
Come Fly with Me: The Sammy Cahn Songbook
Court Cabaret

It’s telling that there’s no program listing for the changing colored, stretched-curtain design of Come Fly With Me’s backdrop, for it’s the best part of this show. All else seems to be imported by Florida Studio Theater, which has never to my knowledge, itself created such an amateurish revue. It has little or no real script, the music is divided between on-site and recorded, and its cast members lack chemistry and vocal chops, individually and together.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
Punch and Judy
The Complex

“Not suitable for children of any age” states the flier for Punch and Judy, the live-action adaptation of the classic puppet show which has entertained multitudes for the past two thousand years. Written and directed by Christopher Johnson, founder of Chicago’s Defiant Theater, this X-rated Punch and Judy mixes Commedia dell’Arte, Grand Guignol, chainsaw horror movies and gleeful raunch to tell its manic, blood-spattered story.

The play, which is now running at the 2016 Hollywood Fringe Festival, stars Jimmy Slonina as Mr.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2016
I'll Say She Is
Connelly Theater

I’ll Say She Is is a Marx Brothers musical revue that opened on Broadway in 1924. The book and lyrics were written by Will B. Johnstone; the music was written by his brother, Tom Johnstone. It was the Marx Brothers’s first Broadway show, and it was a big success.

Noah Diamond has adapted the review for the Off-Broadway stage. It’s been produced at the Connolly Theater by Rest of the Crew Productions, Loobit Ventures, Trav S.D., Deroy Murdock, Stephen Diamond and Gimme a Thrill Productions.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2016

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