Buried Child
Pershing Square Signature Center - Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theater

Ed Harris sits all alone on the stage. The house is shabby, on its last legs, as is Dodge, the character Harris portrays. There’s rain outside the window. The room is staged with two small TVs, a bucket on the floor, hideous old wall paper and carpet. Dodge himself is none too gorgeous. He wears a baseball cap, gray T-shirt, checked shirt. Coughing, dozing, drinking whiskey from a hidden bottle, covered with a spread that has seen better days, Dodge is pretty much out of it.

What’s amazing in this scenario is that Harris, doing practically nothing, is spellbinding.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
American Song
Quadracci Powerhouse

The Milwaukee Repertory Theater makes a bold attempt to focus on one of the most pressing issues of our time — mass shootings in America’s schools — in the world premiere of Joanna Murray-Smith’s American Song.

The play’s unusual structure consists of an 80-minute performance followed by a five-minute presentation by a Milwaukee community leader. After intermission, audiences are invited to join small discussion groups. Circles of chairs encircle the lobby as the audience enters. Complimentary wine and coffee are served.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
Disaster!
Nederlander Theater

Hey kids, let’s get together and put on a show! This is the spirit of Disaster! A large part of the entertainment is that the actors on stage are having so much fun; we get the idea that they’ve known each other and worked together for a long time. Adding to the fun is the disco/cheesy rock music of the day, 1979. From the first number, the Donna Summer megahit “Hot Stuff,” the audience is in for an evening of nostalgia and laughs.

At the heart of all the mayhem is a renowned professor, noted for his expertise in the field of disaster.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
Blessings of a Broken Heart, The
The Braid

The Blessings of a Broken Heart is a monologue adapted by Todd Salovey from the book of the same name by Sherri Mandell, whose 13-year-old son Kobi (Yaakov) was murdered in Israel along with his school chum, Yosef Ishban. The two boys had played hooky on that tragic day in 2001 to hike up into the hills bordering their kibbutz, only to be attacked by stone-throwing assailants who were never caught or identified.

The noted L.A.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
Ideation
59E59 Theaters

We’ve all heard the term “corporate consultants,” but what does that mean? Who are these highly paid, usually well-dressed people, and what, exactly, are they hired to do? Sorry, but you won’t find the answers here; if anything, there are more and more questions as the evening progresses.

The topic at hand in Aaron Loeb’s Ideation is Project Senna. The problem is how to find a way to kill and then dispose of a million, maybe more, people who are afflicted with some nebulous virus which could wipe out humanity.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
My Name is Asher Lev
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Theater

An entry in Florida Studio Theater’s Stage III Series, My Name is Asher Lev is that series’s typical “small” drama with big impact. In flashback, Asher both narrates and also presentationally acts out his coming of age. Maturity comes to him not only as a man but as an artist. To thus devote himself requires Asher to grow up from his family and the tradition in which they raised him. So they share his story.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
Women Laughing Alone with Salad
Kirk Douglas Theater

Rude, irreverent and outrageous, Sheila Callaghan’s Women Laughing Alone with Salad is a comedy that takes no prisoners. It shoots down with fiendish glee every single target in its sights: mothers and sons, boys and girls, boys and boys, girls and girls, the pharmaceutical industry, the diet craze . . . and more, much more.

Developed in part in Center Theater Group’s Writers Workshop, then at the Woolly Mammoth Theater Co.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
Sea Marks
Soulstice Theater

With St. Patrick’s Day just around the corner, what could be more appropriate than offering a production of Gardner McKay’s Sea Marks? The clever folks at Milwaukee’s Soulstice Theater have made this catch-of-the-day. They have paired two fine actors (both sporting plausible Irish accents) and the lilting dialogue that takes audiences to a remote village on an island off the west coast of Ireland.

Part love story, part poetry, Sea Marks tells the bracing tale of two mismatched lovers.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
Sleuth
Little Fish Theater

Peter Shaffer’s Sleuth premiered at the Music Box Theater in New York in 1970 and closed nearly three years later after 1,222 performances. While it was still running in New York, the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco produced it with Ken Ruta and Peter Donat in the leads. I saw that production when I was a student there, and it knocked me out. The virtuosity of the players was stunning to me, and the climax and dénoument was totally, I mean totally, unpredictable.

Paul Myrvold
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

In Asolo Rep’s five-year exploration of the American character, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner visits an historical moment. In 1967, as director Frank Galati points out, the composition of the American family around its dinner table is on its way to change. To the typical Asolo audience, the titular question is posed and — in a way beyond the film that first asked it — is also answered.

Dinner will be served in a home of understated elegance on a slope overlooking San Francisco’s Bay Bridge.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
Safe at Home
Pacific Resident Theater

Orson Bean has been an actor, magician, stand-up comic, writer, and TV host in his 60-odd years in showbiz. He weaves all of those separate strands into a satisfying whole in his solo show, Safe at Home, now enjoying an extended and critically acclaimed run at Pacific Resident Theater (which is celebrating its 30th anniversary).

Bean tells the story of his life with disarming honesty; although he is basically a funny man, an entertainer, he isn’t afraid to talk about his failings as a son, husband and father.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
Sam Cooke Story, The
West Coast Black Theater Troupe

Cecil Washington Jr. not only sings and performs wonderfully as creative music and entrepreneurial pioneer Sam Cooke, he also manages to look like him--only even more handsome. Of course, Sam Cooke’s major talent was as the originator of the music he performed. It’s this, presented by Washington and a stellar supporting song-and-dance cast, that’s drawing hearty audience applause at WBTT.

An as-yet too complicated effort to tell Sam Cooke’s “story” entails staging of biographical events in scripted scenes between musical numbers.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
Sex with Strangers
Geffen Playhouse - Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater

It’s boy-meets-girl time at the Geffen Playhouse, where Laura Eason’s Sex with Strangers is having its West Coast premiere (after debuting at Second Stage Theater, New York in 2014). The love story, which is more raunchy than romantic, dissects the relationship between Olivia (Rebecca Pidgeon) and Ethan (Stephen Louis Grush), two writers from dissimilar worlds who fall for each other in an unlikely but passionate way. How to keep the flame burning, despite misunderstandings and squabbles, is the question posed by the playwright.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
Bachelorette, The
Alchemist Theater

A trio of young women — all in their late 20s, which is significant — trash a posh hotel suite in Leslye Headland’s hilarious The Bachelorette. The play makes its Wisconsin debut at the cozy, 64-seat Alchemist Theater, located in one of Milwaukee’s southern suburbs. The show is produced by Theater RED.

A fourth young woman, whom the other three have known since childhood, is getting married. Becky is the first one in their group to tie the knot, and the other women are seething.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
Blood
The Complex

Blood, in its world-premiere production at The Complex, boldly tackles an important and shocking subject: the sale by the USA of AIDS-contaminated blood to Japan, Written and directed by Robert Allan Ackerman (who lived in Japan for two decades), the play goes deep into the HIV scandal, blending fact and fiction to tell its story, one which has been kept secret by the powers that be ever since the early 1980s.

Politics and greed were the main culprits in the scandal.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
Familiar
Playwrights Horizons - Mainstage

The United States is a nation of immigrants. The tug-of-war between assimilating and keeping tradition alive is indeed “Familiar” to many Americans. And what better way could this conflict come to a head than planning a wedding?

Marvelous Chinyaramwira (Tamara Tunie) and her husband, Donald (Harold Surratt), have come a long way since they escaped thirty years ago from their home in war-torn Zimbabwe. She’s a biochemist; Donald is a successful lawyer. Their house in a suburb of Minneapolis, circa 2011, is done up in impeccable taste.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
Gambler's Guide to Dying, A
Ruskin Group Theater

A hit at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, A Gambler’s Guide to Dying comes to Los Angeles with an American actor delivering the monologue, which was written (and first performed) by a Scot, Gary McNair. Maury Sterling (Max on Showtime’s “Homeland”) substitutes for McNair masterfully, not only commanding the stage in charismatic fashion but speaking with a believable Scottish accent.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
Domestic Tranquility
Little Fish Theater

Rich Orloff lampoons the idealized 1950s America with his wacky play, Domestic Tranquility, now playing at Little Fish Theater in San Pedro. Think of it as a cracked “Father Knows Best” with a dad who drives off to the office every day, a stay-at-home mom who cooks and dusts, and a teenaged daughter about to turn eighteen. They profess their earnest liking for each other with enthusiastic brittleness as they salute Ike and Mamie. Soon, however, the façade starts to crack.

Paul Myrvold
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
Tempest Redux
Odyssey Theater

In 1970, Peter Brook and the Royal Shakespeare Company shook the dust off a perennial favorite and liberated Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, infusing it with a modernity that fit the times. It was heralded as the “Circus Midsummer,” a muscular version featuring actors on trapezes. It was a ground-breaking, heralded production that toured the world.

As adapted, directed and choreographed by John Farmanesh-Bocca, Tempest Redux is every bit as bold and muscular as Brook’s Dream.

Paul Myrvold
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
Tempest Redux
Odyssey Theater

What would Shakespeare make of this modern take on his play The Tempest? Would he exert his moral authority and denounce the liberties John Farmanesh-Bocca has taken with it, stripping it down to 95 minutes, having two actors (Dash Pepin and Willem Long) play Caliban, employing three dancers to play Ariel (with her lines coming to us via voice-over), using music by Vivaldi and Dinah Washington to spice up the action?

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2016
slowgirl
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

The most unlikely of roommates – a teenage girl and her much-older uncle — embark on physical and emotional journey together in Greg Pierce’s Slowgirl, The girl, a wise-cracking, know-it-all American, arrives on short notice to visit her uncle in faraway Costa Rica. The girl is getting away from a terrible tragedy in which she has played some role. Not many of the circumstances about this even were communicated in advance to her uncle Sterling. He hasn’t seen the girl for almost nine years. It’s a good thing that the play opens with Sterling dozing in a hammock.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Women Without Men
City Center - Stage II

At City Center's Stage II, The Mint Theater Company is currently reviving Women Without Men, a 1938 Irish play by Hazel Ellis that visits a group of unmarried women living and teaching at Malyn Park Private School. In that period, women without husbands had few choices, and in their limited lives in a world ruled by men, they still found they were often each others' worst enemies.

Young and idealistic, Miss Jean Wade (Emily Watson), arrives at the school for her first teaching job.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Invisible Hand, The
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stiemke Studio

Ayad Akhtar’s gripping drama, The Invisible Hand, is so palpably intense that it seems to put the audience squarely in the middle of a terrorist/hostage situation in Pakistan. Needless to say, this is not a desirable place to be. But it works wonders in terms of getting the audience to identify with the play’s captive, an American banker who finds a clever way to pay the terrorists’ ransom demands.

The Invisible Hand opened Off-Broadway in 2014, at the same time Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Disgraced was playing on Broadway.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Interrogation
The Artistic Home

A few playgoers attending this world-premiere production of Interrogation may claim to identify the murderer before the end of the play. They will be lying.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Macbeth
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Traditionally in the theater, it’s considered bad luck to name Macbeth and especially to quote from it when a production is near. Director Jonathan Epstein, whose previous work with Shakespearian plays and his FSU/Asolo Conservatory students was outstanding, has defied tradition directing The Scottish Play. Too bad, because the result is truly, as Professor Epstein quoted without knowing he was predicting: “horrible imaginings.” The production overwhelms the play.

A major problem is scenic.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Cabaret
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

Almost a year has passed since the Broadway closing of the incredibly successful revival of Cabaret, produced by the Roundabout Theater Company. This national tour brings the Broadway production to Milwaukee, among numerous other stops on its lengthy tour. The show is a not-to-be-missed spectacle. It’s decadent, splashy, naughty, heart-wrenching and joyful, as residents of 1931 Berlin party away while the Nazis rise in power.

The Roundabout version knocks this concept out of the ballpark.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Little Mermaid, The
Nancy Bock Center for the Performing Arts

It is always a pleasure when a fine pit orchestra sets the tone for a delightful musical even before the curtain rises. Such is the case when gifted music director/conductor, Rae Moses, leads his musicians in the Overture for Class Act’s sparkling current production of the cheerful Disney musical, The Little Mermaid. Inspired by the popular Disney film of the same name, the charming show features music of Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman & Glenn Slater, and book by Doug Wright.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Colony Collapse
Theater @ Boston Court

The Theater @ Boston Court’s production of Stefanie Zadravec’s Colony Collapse creates a strong sense of place, time, and action even before a word is spoken. Barely audible pre-show forest sounds give way to foreboding music, then yield to a cacophony of voices and the intrusive noise of a hovering helicopter as a brilliant searchlight sweeps the stage and audience.

Paul Myrvold
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Jupiter
La MaMa ETC

The subject of Jupiter (a play about power) is fossil fuels — and their absence. Accordingly, the production uses a solar-cell/battery-powered LED system to power a portion of its lighting. And there’s a digital display on stage telling us how many kwh’s and how much CO2 the production has used; it tallies up the sums as the evening progresses.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Placas: The Most Dangerous Tattoo
Casa 101

Gang tattoos, or “placas” in barrio slang, indelibly communicate a statement of persona and affiliation to a group, a neighborhood, and the world in general. They can be a thumb-in-the-eye statement of identity, a fuck-you statement of philosophical outlook, or, hidden beneath a shirt, an homage to a dead homie, or a sentimental expression of affection and loyalty to a lover or relative. They can be as subtle as three dots on the hand between thumb and forefinger, or a scream of loyalty emblazoned on a face.

Paul Myrvold
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Mystery of Love & Sex, The
Mark Taper Forum

The nuclear family is dissected tenderly, skillfully–and sometimes hilariously–in The Mystery of Love & Sex by Bathsheba Doran, now in its West Coast premiere at the Mark Taper Forum. Originally produced by NYC’s Lincoln Center Theater in 2015, the play is set in “major cities in the American South” and covers five years in the lives of its four main characters.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Free Spirits: Four Short Comedies
Starlite Room

From Starlite Players’s first season come four audience favorite short plays. One could easily see why they were favorites.

In Confessions a Deux by Stephen Cooper, sharply directed by Mark Woodland, Don Walker plays an older, staid priest with Brian Keys as a nervous young one, who confesses the sin of adultery. He’s even more nervous when he must, in turn, hear the elder’s confession. Soon, the latter learns from the former that they can share in sins and absolutions.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Laughing Matters - Volume 5: Lock the Gates!
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

For the fifth time, Florida Studio Theater and a collaborating cabaret staff of writers and performers pool national and hometown humor to plunge into a satire on everyday life. Locally, saturation with snowbirds, hopelessness re homelessness, and despair from over-development mix with national problems like immigration, guns, and presidential politics. Putin epitomizes international ones. So what’s so funny?

In a musical skit “Sar-a-sota!”—like Oklahoma!—the city just “cain’t say no” to developers.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Lamps for My Family
Tenth Street Theater

Milwaukee’s In Tandem Theater, now in its 18th season, reminds us that local theater exists to allow creative people an outlet to exhibit their craft. This refers not just to local actors, but local playwrights, too. Milwaukee-born and raised Michael Nevile shares his semi-autobiographical play, Lamps for My Family, at In Tandem. Neville’s plays also have been seen at ACT Seattle, the Actors Theater of Louisville, and Denver’s Changing Scene, as well as at several theaters in Milwaukee.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Closer than Ever
Long Beach Performing Arts Center

Closer than Ever, an award-winning musical revue kicking off the new season at International City Theater, consists of 24 songs in two acts with no book or specific characters. With music by David Shire and lyrics by Richard Maltby, Jr., the show explores the joys and angst of professional-class, apartment-dwelling New Yorkers as they navigate the vicissitudes of life. The songs range from the exhilaration of youth to the ever-accelerating onset of age.

Paul Myrvold
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Looking Over the President's Shoulder
The Greenhouse

They used to be called "domestic servants" (or, perhaps, "hired help") but nowadays most often appear on personnel rosters as "support staff." Before you dismiss those who make their living through the exercise of housekeeping skills, however, consider what your place of business would look like if the janitors quit for even one week. When President Franklin Roosevelt exhorted the stewards of the 107-room residence in our nation's capital to remember that they shared in making history, his were wise words.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Far from Heaven
Stage 773

For theatergoers of certain age, merely hearing that their play's setting is a middle-class Connecticut suburb in 1957 is enough to trigger expectations of secrets, shame, and illicit sex lurking beneath a veneer of privileged tranquility. The “Far from Heaven” screenplay by Todd Haynes providing source material for this song-cycle musical is not an authentic product of that repressive era, however, but a conscious replica thereof, steeped in hindsight.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Stupid Fucking Bird
Urbanite Theater

At the heart of Aaron Posner’s satiric view and review of modern theater beats Anton Chekhov’s prescription for his play The Seagull: It presents “a great deal of conversation about literature, little action, tons of love.” In it, the seagull is a being in the play’s real life setting but also a symbol of a character with whom it’s entwined. Urbanite uses a gull’s picture as a scenic-sans-symbolic backdrop. Its titular import is that it’s Posner’s successful attempt at shocking and commercial success.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Barcelona
Geffen Playhouse

In Bess Wohl’s Barcelona,, now in its West Coast premiere at the Geffen after a successful run in New York, Irene (Betty Gilpin), an American tourist, and Manuel (Carlos Leal), a native Spaniard, meet at a tapas bar in Barcelona and hit it off, strongly enough that she agrees to go back to his place with him. The two-character play begins when they step in the door, rip off their clothes and begin to make brief but frantic love.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2016
Act of God, An
Ahmanson Theater

Sean (“Will & Grace”) Hayes plays a campy, wise-cracking ruler of the universe in An Act of God, now drawing laughs after a successful run on Broadway (with Jim Parsons in the lead role). Written by David Javerbaum, head writer for “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” the solo comes off as a stand-up routine with a few show-biz accessories: two aide-de-camp angels sprouting ostrich-feather wings (David Josefsberg and James Gleason), plus a glitzy, stairway-to-heaven set by Scott Pask.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2016

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