Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
WBTT Theater

”Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” refers to the signature song of Ma Rainey, “Mother of the Blues.” She’s a singer in 1927 whose records have made big money and, in August Wilson’s only play set in Chicago, she still has power, if waning, against racists who exploit her. Her control sets her apart from the black musicians who accompany her and, like the white businessmen, depend on her. Only one young black aspires beyond his present role, and Wilson’s tragedy mainly follows him.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
Yes
Hudson Guild Theater

Tim Realbuto’s play, Yes, though billed as one act with two scenes and an epilogue (it runs nearly 90 minutes) has the feel and heft of a full-length play. I can’t imagine a second act. But on the other hand, given the obvious genius of Realbuto—he wrote, directed, and acts to a faretheewell in this riveting play—I wouldn’t put it past him. More to the point, this one-act was so wonderfully executed and so beautifully realized that I left the theater craving more Realbuto, as well as more from his equally brilliantly co-star, Joe Blute.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
Holes
Marcus Center - Todd Wehr Theater

First Stage, Milwaukee’s long-running children’s theater company, is reviving its 2004 hit, Holes. The play, based on a Newberry Award-winning book by Louis Sachar, is an engaging tale of a boy mistakenly sentenced to a detention camp in the desert. It’s called Camp Green Lake, but it is neither green nor contains a lake. It is located near a dry riverbed.

Fourteen-year-old Stanley (Kaden Rhodes) is the main character who believes that his family has been cursed for generations (by the same gypsy who supposedly caused the lake to dry up).

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
What I Learned in Paris
The Athenaeum

The title of Pearl Cleage's What I Learned in Paris initially suggests coming-of-age erotica in the Anias Nin mode, or perhaps a Lost Generation roman a clef. Her play's chronological setting on the day in 1973 (when Maynard Jackson was elected Atlanta's first Black mayor) leads us to anticipate political hijinks—a reasonable assumption when all but one of the characters were, a few hours earlier, part of the winning candidate's campaign staff.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
My Sister
Odyssey Theater

The despicable treatment of disabled people in Nazi Germany sets the historical context for My Sister, Janet Schlapkohl’s two-character play which just opened at the Odyssey Theater. The piece was first produced in L.A. at the 2014 Hollywood Fringe Festival where its strong reception attracted the attention of the Odyssey’s artistic director, Ron Sossi, who optioned the play for his company and came aboard as co-director. Changes were made to the script and period songs were added, resulting in a longer, more atmospheric and nuanced story.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
Living on Love
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Where Living on Love fits into Asolo Rep’s five-year exploration of the American character is a mystery. To say that the two sets of major characters pursue the American dream (whether as successful diva and conductor or as major writers) is less accurate than to say silly pap will draw in more bourgeois buyers of “culture” (that is, tickets) to see a cheap-laugh-a-minute comedy than will a classic one with substance. Living on Love departs from the first comic type in one significant way at Asolo Rep: its production is not cheap, but lavish.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
Maurice Hines: Tappin' Through Life
New World Stages

This show may not be more than a gussied-up Las Vegas styled lounge act, but its centerpiece Maurice Hines is a consummate song-and-dance man, an entertainer with a winning personality and an incomparable style that harks back to an era that has sadly disappeared. Famously/formerly partnered with his now deceased brother Gregory, Hines, at the age of 72, continues to deliver the goods that has made him a legend.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
Thom Pain (based on nothing)
Geffen Playhouse - Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater

Rainn Wilson (“Six Feet Under,” “The Office”) tackles Thom Pain: based on nothing, a quirky monologue written for him by Will Eno, a highly regarded New York playwright attached to the Signature Theater Company. Actually, the piece was first performed at the 2004 Edinburgh Fringe Festival before it made its way across the pond. Now it has opened for a brief run in L.A., where it is sure to attract much attention.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
1984
The Eli & Edythe Broad Stage

From England’s Nottingham Playhouse and Almeida Theatre comes 1984, a reworking of George Orwell’s famous novel by the London-based Headlong company (whose artistic director is Jeremy Herrin). As adapted and directed by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan, 1984 has been hugely successful at both of the above venues. Now L.A. has the opportunity to see this bold and brave version, which has come to the Broad Stage with its British cast and crew intact.

First published in 1949, Orwell’s novel has not lost its relevance or power.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
Magic Lounge, The
Uptown Underground

The Arabian Nights might chronicle cup-and-ball or pebble-and-shell games promulgated by traveling players in marketplaces, and as a spectacle later migrating to medieval and Renaissance faires throughout Europe. However, in the United States, the birth of so-called "close-up" magic can be traced to 1925, when tavern owner Matt Schulien would amuse his customers with quicker-than-the-eye illusions, performed right at their tables, involving equipment no more complicated than ordinary coins and playing cards.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
Lazarus
New York Theater Workshop

Ever since David Bowie came onto the scene big time, as a quasi-alien rock star with the rock ‘n’ roll game-changing album, “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” in 1972, in which he blurred the lines between man and woman, most everything that he has touched, if not in reality, certainly in perceived memory—has turned to gold. Chalk it up to his chameleon-like ability to successfully ride the ever-changing waves of time.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
All the Way
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Covering November 1967 to November 1968, All the Way gives a history lesson in epic theater style of how “accidental president” Lyndon B. Johnson conducted political power plays to pass the Civil Rights Bill and be re-elected. In the ominous shadow of a foreign war, LBJ wages his personal battle to satisfy his ambitions for himself and his party, only to be ultimately abandoned by his “own” Southern Democrats. In LBJ’s case, biography—as shown by playwright Robert Schenkkan—became history.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
Noises Off
American Airlines Theater

Whether you have or have not seen Michael Frayn’s amusingly crafted farce Noises Off before will likely determine whether Roundabout Theater’s current revival will put a smile or a frown on your face. Be forewarned that more than one encounter with its madcap doings is likely to diminish your appreciation. Therefore my negative response to this production is based largely on seeing an ensemble of expert farceurs led astray by a director who apparently doesn’t believe that less is more.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
Hamilton
Richard Rodgers Theater

What more can possibly be said about Hamilton, the toast of the town? The show has been praised to the heavens, and only the prospect of winning a billion dollars creates more of a frenzy for tickets. It’s original, educational, exhilarating, and acclaimed. It has shattered records for the amount of money it has generated. In the first three months of its run alone, Hamilton raked in $57 million in advance ticket sales.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
Rep Lab: A Short Play Festival
Milwaukee Repertory Theater

For the past six years, Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s acting and directing interns have gotten to show what they’ve learned in an evening of short plays. This year’s Rep Lab showcases eight short plays (each about 10-15 minutes) in a two-hour presentation. Although brief, each play is meticulously selected, fully rehearsed, and accompanied by props, lighting, costumes and sound. The labs always are held in the Rep’s smaller, more intimate Stiemke Theater.

Over the years, the Rep Lab has become so popular that its brief run has been extended to five days.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
Yesterday
Florida Studio Theater - Goldstein Cabaret

The Beatles and their music predominate in a recall of history, especially from the mid-1960s on, but the musical revue Yesterday also highlights them in relation to The Who, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, and even Chuck Berry. It’s a nostalgic look at their times of peak popularity, backed by scripted and projected historical notes.

Though the quartet of singers-musicians don’t look like the ones they’re representing, the men basically try to capture their predecessors’ essence.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
Newsies
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

About a year after the national tour of Disney’s Newsies appeared in Chicago, Milwaukee gets its first look at this dazzling musical. Based on a true story – the newsboys’ strike of 1899 – Newsies demonstrates that historical fact can be entertaining if combined with some strategically inserted fiction.

Newsies began as a 1992 Disney film of the same title. Although the movie was a financial flop, it managed to create a cult following. The musical version opened on Broadway in 2012.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
Louis & Keely: Live at the Sahara
Geffen Playhouse

Louis & Keely is the pride and joy of L.A.’s small-theater world. The musical, about Louis Prima and Keely Smith, started life in 2008 at Sacred Fools, an Equity-waiver company based in East Hollywood. Written and performed by Vanessa Claire Stewart and Jake Broder, the show caught on and had a sold-out run which attracted the attention of Taylor Hackford. The Academy Award-winning filmmaker (“An Officer and a Gentleman”), who had long been a Louis & Keely fan, saw the commercial potential of the Sacred Fools production and helped with changes and financing.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
Dynamite Divas
Black Ensemble Theater

After our brains and cardio-respiratory functions have absorbed the news that those four fine women sitting in a room that looks like a cross between a television talk-show studio and the bridge of the starship Enterprise are Roberta Flack, Gladys Knight, Nancy Wilson and Aretha Franklin, only then do we begin to wonder what brings these luminaries together.

There's the money, of course—a can't-refuse sum for one night's work—but also the curiosity factor.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2016
How to Get Into Buildings
The Brick

Trish Harnetiaux’s play How to Get into Buildings jumps around in time – backward and forward (of course). New Georges produced it recently at The Brick in Brooklyn.

The main story – it’s not a plot, really – concerns a motivational speaker, Roger, who meets a woman, Lucy, at a convention center where he’s speaking. Her distinguishing characteristic is that she gets call-back phone calls from a new age-psychic. The second story is even more insubstantial, merely a portrait of a couple who end up, for some reason, in a duel with each other, pistols in hand.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
Liar, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

How can exploits and love expressed by a liar be believed? Can friendship survive false impressions? When is the awful truth awe-full and even artificial but socially necessary? David Ives takes us to Paris, 1643, to explore answers given by a great French writer of Baroque plays and tests them in Ives’s own style through to our time. And a funny journey it is!

The titular hero Dorante (Scott Kulper’s fully formed dandy) postures back to his home bragging of supposed exploits in war and womanizing.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
Incident at Vichy
Redtwist Theater

Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy might be set in 1942 France, but with our own would-be leaders in 2015 testing the boundaries of Godwin's Law, it's high time we were reminded of the wisdom in setting aside personal prejudices to unite with our fellow citizens—a major literary theme in the years following World War Two, before falling out of fashion in the wake of the 1960s' emphasis on ancestral ethnicity. As Martin Neimoller once famously warned, if we do not defend one another, who will defend us?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
Drink! Sketch Comedy Drinking Game: Wasted Edition
The Cornservatory

In cultures embracing the consumption of intoxicating beverages as a socially beneficial activity, citizens rarely need an authority figure granting them permission to participate. However, when informality or sheer numbers preclude individual toasts, drinking games serve to lend structure to an evening of bending elbows.

The concept behind these revels designates certain words, signs and/or occurrences to serve as commands for the assemblage to suck firewater (or, for thirsty teetotalers, a Sharps or Red Bull).

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
Good Family, A
Lounge Theater

Did he or didn’t he? That’s the question lying at the heart of A Good Family, Marja-Lewis Ryan’s world-premiere one-act play at The Lounge Theater. Ryan, who won the 2014 L.A. Drama Critics Circle award for her family drama One in the Chamber,deals with another domestic scene in her new work, which is set in Fulton, Missouri on Christmas eve.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2015
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Christmas Goose
Raven Theater

It's Christmas day in 1890, and the London police have apprehended a suspect in the theft of a precious brooch from a guest in a Mayfair hotel. The stolen property falls into the hands of Sherlock Holmes when it is discovered stuffed down the craw of a goose destined for the dinner table, sending the detective and his colleague Dr. Watson on a search for the real culprit—a chase leading them from scholarly watering-holes in Bloomsbury to cottage-industry livestock farms in Brixton.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2014
Dames at Sea
Helen Hayes Theater

Let's pretend it is 1933 and you are sitting in your neighborhood theater or better yet, in a grand old move palace. The house lights dim, the traveler curtains part and the movie begins flashing the Warner Brothers studio's logo. Then the credits appear on the screen with the names and faces of the film's stars, in black and white of course. But now we switch to color. That's the way the glorious, glittering and colorful revival of Dames at Sea begins.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
View from the Bridge, A
Lyceum Theater

Even if you have seen other versions of A View From the Bridge, including the excellent 2011 Broadway production, you will leave the Lyceum Theater feeling as if you have never seen this American classic before. London's Young Vic production is re-visited by Belgian director, Ivo Van Hove, stripping away the extraneous and leaving playwright Arthur Miller's 1956 slice of naturalism tense with stunning suspense.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
Domesticated
Steppenwolf Theater

One advertising campaign promotes Bruce Norris's new play as nudge-nudge-wink-wink political satire and another attempts to sell it as a battle-of-the-sexes romp. Don't believe either one. The dramatic premise might have its real-life counterparts, and it might have been Norris's intent to capitalize on the tabloid factor, but both representations are as fraudulent as a diamond mine in Dolton.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
Baritones Unbound: Uncommon Voices of the Common Man
Royal George Theater

The traveling theater companies of antiquity typically numbered seven actors: leading man and woman for the raisonneur roles, juvenile and ingenue for the youthful ones, "character" man and woman to play villains, elders or eccentrics—and a lone player called the "utility man" capable of stepping into any part as needed.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
Heir Apparent, The
Navy Pier

Have you heard the one about the rich old man who wants a young wife to share his bed and nurse his ailments? Sure you have—every culture since antiquity boasts at least one story with this premise. Instead of laying false claim to its invention, however, playwrights nowadays freely admit to recycling dusty (and safely uncopyrighted) potboilers for their own purposes.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
Bernarda Alba and her House
Redtwist Theater

There's this twice-married widow with five daughters, you see. The girls are all of an age to marry—indeed, some well past their prime childbearing years—but their proud mother refuses to consider an alliance with a family of inferior station. Instead, she keeps her offspring under vigilance as strict as that of a convent.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
Color Purple, The
Bernard B. Jacobs Theater

“If God ever listened to a poor colored woman, the world would be a different place,” Celie declares. There’s no doubt that everyone in the audience hears and appreciates the heroine of The Color Purple. Cheers ring through the house, and a standing ovation is given to her final, powerful song “I’m Here,” Cynthia Erivo may have gone on stage as a Broadway unknown, but she’s now a bona fide star.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
Marjorie Prime
Playwrights Horizons - Mainstage

Lois Smith should be declared a National Treasure. Anyone with doubts need only experience her performance in Marjorie Prime at Playwrights Horizons. But hurry; the run will end soon. Ephemeral memories are at the heart of this reflective play. What do we lose? What do we retain? And at the end of it all, what’s true, and what’s made up? How can it be that members of a family invariably have different recollections of the same relatives and events?

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
Going Dark: Short Plays of Samuel Beckett
Pius XI Catholic High School Black Box Theater

In a Milwaukee High School’s black-box theater, World Stage Theater invites high school students as well as audiences to get a glimpse into the world of Samuel Beckett, one of the 20th century’s most influential writers.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
Butler
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

Major General Benjamin Butler, having left his legal practice, within a few weeks takes over his Union post at Fort Monroe. It’s 1861, just after Virginia has seceded from the U.S., so Butler finds himself in the thick of war. Faced with escaped Negro slaves seeking sanctuary and a law forbidding it, Butler will have to fight to square legal obligations with moral ones. He wages a battle of words that could have great repercussions. To delight audiences, playwright Richard Strand has fortified Butler with hilarious comedy, certainly more than typical in a “history play.”

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
Christians, The
Mark Taper Forum

It was hard for this non-believer to get deeply involved in Lucas Hnath’s theological drama, The Christians, which just opened at the Mark Taper Forum after runs at Playwrights Horizons (NY) and at the 2014 Humana Festival (Louisville). All the endless arguments over the existence of heaven and hell, the true meaning of the scriptures, and so forth, left me cold. And when the characters began to bicker over the ramifications of faith, I couldn’t help but think of what H.L.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
Robin Hood and Maid Marian
Strawdog Theater

When poets attempt to cross over into other literary genres, their craft may not immediately adapt to the unfamiliar configurations of their new endeavor. Even as accomplished a versifier as Alfred, Lord Tennyson—England's Poet Laureate from 1850 to 1892 and author of the seminal epic, "Idylls of the King" chronicling the Arthurian Cycle—can emerge a thorough amateur at recounting the adventures of another English hero for the stage.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
Fallen Angels
The Greenhouse

Where would Victorian melodrama, retro soap operas and contemporary advice columns be without otherwise contented spouses occasionally wondering about "the one that got away?" In conventional fiction, such antisocial fantasies usually conclude in females confessing their shame and males forgiving them their weaknesses. In 1923, however, an irreverent young Noel Coward defended the right of women to engage in guilt-free frolics before settling down with suitors patiently waiting for them to weary of fun and excitement.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
School of Rock
Winter Garden

This is it. This is that $16 million Broadway show for the whole family, with something for everyone. One caveat: those with sensitive ears, bring your earplugs. This opus is loud.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
December 2015
If/Then
Hollywood Pantages Theater

The largely youthful audience at the Pantages cheered wildly for Idina Menzel as the stage lights went up for If/Then, the split-personality Broadway musical now making a pit stop in L.A. No doubt the kids had loved Menzel’s work in such earlier shows as Rent and Wicked--or had swooned when she sang “Let It Go” in Disney’s “Frozen.”

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
December 2015

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