Handle with Care
Plymouth Church

The idea of Jason Odell Williams’s play, Handle with Care, is intriguing. How does a DHX delivery guy, living in some remote stretch of Virginia, misplace the corpse of someone’s grandmother? The reasons become clear as the comedy unfolds at Plymouth Church on Milwaukee’s East side. (Plymouth Church has been the temporary roost of Boulevard Theater for its last few productions, after its Bay View home was sold.)

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2015
HIR
Playwrights Horizons

Every now and then a play comes along that’s so specific, people either love it or hate it. This season, we have HIR. Burning topics of the day are pushed to the extreme; the audience either roars with laughter, or sits in bewildered silence.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
November 2015
King Charles III
Music Box Theater

The evening begins with a beautifully sung requiem. Candles are carried in a large brick enclosure, and the mood is decidedly solemn. England’s longest-ruling monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, has died, and it falls to her son, King Charles III (Tim Pigott-Smith), to take her place. He is frightened, full of doubt, and also eager to fulfill his destiny. But a lifetime in the royal family has taught him the art of never showing his emotions.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
November 2015
Toys: A Dark Fairy Tale
Hudson Guild Theater

Toys brings a little taste of mittel-Europe to L.A. Written by a Romanian playwright, Saviana Stanescu (now living in NYC), directed by her fellow emigre, Gabor Tompa, and acted by Julia Ubrankovics and Tunde Skovran (both of Hungarian descent), Toys is the kind of play one might see in an Eastern European avant-garde theater.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2015
Actor's Nightmare, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Within an empty four-walls of a theater stage, once the ghost light goes off, George Spelvin at center stage is told by Meg, probably a stage manager, that he’s about to play the hero in a Noel Coward play. That’s it, and suddenly a scene is erected around him. To say Scott Kulper’s “hero” is perplexed would be the most under of dramatic understatements. But this is a comedy, and so anything--resembling plays of Shakespeare through Samuel Beckett--goes.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2015
Real Inspector Hound, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Except in the hands of its masters, absurdism has become somewhat of a short-lived wonder. Tom Stoppard, of course, is a master, so his absurdist satire on theater critics and a typical murder-mystery melodrama is still playable. The second-year class of FSU/Asolo Conservatory play The Real Inspector Hound to the hilt, yet it’s on a rather blunt--one might say shopworn--sword that thrusts in too many directions, all of them now obvious.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2015
Design for Living
Rivendell Theater

When most people think of Noel Coward's plays, what comes to mind are frothy Jazz Age comedies of rich idlers behaving badly and reveling in witty repartee with the impunity granted them by privilege, their amorality transpiring at a safe remove from our society today.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2015
Sylvia
Cort Theater

Annaleigh Ashford is a golden girl. She won a Tony last year for her role as a ditzy ballerina wannabe in You Can’t Take it With You. She’s totally believable as a former hooker cum lesbian lover receptionist on TV’s “Masters of Sex.” So it’s no wonder that believing she’s a rough-around-the-edges but lovable cur isn’t at all difficult. As Sylvia, a mutt who’s found in the park by a man named Greg (Matthew Broderick), who needs something to hold on to, she’s nothing short of adorable. “My goal in life is to please,” she smiles winningly.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
November 2015
Therese Raquin
Studio 54

It’s almost impossible to make the luminescent Keira Knightley look doughty and unattractive. But garbed in a plain print dress which fits like a wet paper bag, and sporting a parted-in-the-middle, unflattering hairdo, her Therese Raquin nearly succeeds. It doesn’t help that Knightley’s expression remains blank and unwavering through almost the entire first act, and that she rarely speaks. She is a desperate French woman, locked in an arranged marriage to the insufferable Camille (Gabriel Ebert), from which she can’t escape. Or can she?

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
November 2015
Importance of Being Earnest, The
Vaudeville Theater

NOTE: Viewed in Florida via cinema

Oscar Wilde’s most famous play gets an authentic and fresh production which, with its three compact sets in three acts, comes over wonderfully via cameras.

Adrian Noble’s direction of The Importance of Being Earnest is all one could ask for. It keeps the authentic text totally understandable and the characters, even to two butlers, distinct.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2015
Ripcord
City Center - Stage I

David Lindsay-Abaire provides a charming play for Marylouise Burke and Holland Taylor, two engaging talents who bring their depth and humor to the "odd couple" of the Bristol Place Assisted Living Facility for Seniors. Ripcord, in its world premiere by the Manhattan Theater Club, is directed by David Hyde Pierce with the fast-moving pace of a well-done sitcom. The play is an out-and-out crowd-pleaser, providing plenty of laughs over a somber undercurrent.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
November 2015
Shear Madness
New World Stages

Paul Portner’s Shear Madness is a campy romp in a hair salon set on Ninth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. It’s a murder mystery—-explored, and, with the help of the audience—solved. The piece includes topical humor and tries to narrow the Trump jokes to only one.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2015
First Daughter Suite
Public Theater - Anspacher Theater

There is real brilliance in Michael John LaChiusa’s First Daughter Suite, but it’s not always easy to take. For anyone who’s been enmeshed in a difficult mother/daughter scenario, for anyone who shares a sisterhood that teeters between love and rivalry, and for those who have suffered the loss of a loved one, this production is emotional dynamite.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
November 2015
Boogie Stomp!
Electra Theater

Two extraordinary pianists, Bob Baldori and Arthur Migliazza, provide all the jivey music, the snappy commentary and the wonderfully playful fun in their hugely entertaining concert Boogie Stomp! Masters of their brand of keyboard artistry, namely playing/interpreting of boogie woogie, the blues, and ragtime, they notably bring two lifetimes of love and dedication to this totally American genre. Their love for this music is evident in every note they play, every song they sing and every comment they make.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
November 2015
Nat Turner: Following Faith
Theatre/Theater

Playwright Paula Neiman has chosen to tell the whole story of Nat Turner, leader of a daring but doomed slave revolt, from the time of his birth to the date of his death in 1831. Most contemporary playwrights would deal only with a corner of Turner’s life, utilizing (for economic reasons) a cast of, say, six or seven actors. Neiman, obviously, likes to think big. Not only does her new drama span 30 years but it requires a cast of 15 actors, many of whom play multiple parts.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
The Black White Love Play
Black Ensemble

It's not exaggerating to say that the late Roger Ebert changed the profile of film criticism in the United States, chiefly through his introduction of the "generic" approach to film criticism—an innovation today accepted as standard practice—as well as the concept of critics as performers in a televised forum where colleagues exchange opinions with one another.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
R&J: The Vineyard
The Oracle

When combining two plays into one, it behooves the authors to decide first which play can be most readily pared down to make room for the other. In practice, this means that additional material—musical score, satirical parody or whatever—and the original source text must both fit comfortably into a performance time within the limits of modern theatrical practice. This principle is especially important when an adaptation proposes playgoers follow a story—albeit a Shakespeare classic—in four languages simultaneously.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence
Theater Wit

After the medley of ringtones spanning a century that signals the start of Madeleine George's new play, listen closely to the characters' names. It will postpone, if not altogether prevent, your contracting cognitive vertigo later on.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Treasure Island
Water Works

Robert Louis Stevenson's swashbuckling-swabbies yarn is so perfectly suited to the Lookingglass skill set that it's downright shocking to realize they haven't essayed it earlier.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Marvin's Room
Theater Wit

In Marvin's Room, there are these two sisters, you see: Bessie is a fortyish spinster sharing a house with two elderly relatives, one of them bedridden after suffering a stroke 20 years earlier, the other mobile only through the grace of cyborg science. In stark contrast to this selfless nurturer devoted to the welfare of others is younger sibling Lee, who long ago fled the homestead to marry a romantic wastrel proving as deficient in parenting skills as his empathy-impaired wife.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Lawd, The CVS is Burning
The Greenhouse

The irreverent humor in Carla Stillwell's comedy comes at us quickly and loudly, but that's the point of this satire on the pitfalls inherent in the modern practice of delivering news in non-stop, 24-hour multiple-channel telecasts. When every talking head confronted with empty air-time strives to fill it first with the most, what soon emerges is a morass of misinformation.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Boogie Stomp
Elektra Theater

Boogie Stomp, written by John Campana, is one of the best, most entertaining shows in town. Two virtuoso pianists, Arthur Migliazza and Bob Baldori, take us on a musical trip through the past 90 years of American music, showing us, in brilliant duo-piano renditions, the influence boogie woogie has played in rock and roll, rhythm and blues, jazz, pop music, and even big band music.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
A, My Name is Alice
Texas Repertory Theater

I always enjoy when my trips to Texas coincide with scheduled productions of the Texas Repertory Theater. The company’s current, cheerful offering of Joan Micklin Silver & Julianne Boyd’s 1983 musical revue, A, My Name is Alice, while not without occasional flaws, has plenty of abundant delights, as well. Ably directed here by Troy Scheid, the show boasts a bubbly cast of five talented and energetic gals that include Agnes “Aggie B” Balka, Amy Garner Buchanan, Katie Harrison, Crystal Rae and Maryann Williams.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Miracle of Long Johns, The
Theater Row - Studio Theater

Three years ago, ex-New Yorker David Lefkowitz, now a Colorado-based actor, writer, playwright, and popular radio personality, brought his one-man show, Shalom Dammit! An Evening with Rabbi Sol Solomon, to New York City. The overall thrust of the evening, wildly performed by the playwright himself, was what it is to be a Jew in the 21st Century.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Freak
Urbanite Theater

In Anna Jordan’s play, who are the freaks of the title? Are they the two characters who tell what women like or (mostly) don’t about their sexual experience and men? Or are they the talked-about men who have pressured and exploited the women? Director V Craig Heidenreich helps the latter indulge in an exploration that they seem to find necessary to share with us. Perhaps, in doing so, they gain some of the control that, we find out, the women lost.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
My Son, Pinocchio, Jr.
Crighton Theater

It was arguably the most dismal, rainy, and dreary weekend in recent Montgomery County memory, but on the stage of the Crighton Theater in Conroe, Texas, the angelic voices and beaming faces of more than sixty young Houston area thespians were bringing more light into the world than sunshine could have ever provided. It was the latest production of Christian Youth Theater Houston as the talented youngsters performed Disney’s My Son, Pinocchio, Jr. to the delight of the large crowd in attendance. It would be a fun-filled afternoon.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Need to Know
Theatre Theater

An unusual triangle lies at the heart of Need to Know, Jonathan Caren’s dramedy, now in a world-premiere run directed by Bart DeLorenzo at Rogue Machine. Steven (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe) and Lilly (Corryn Cummins) are struggling young artists who have just moved into an apartment “somewhere between Harlem and the Upper West Side.” Their next-door neighbor is young-adult novelist Mark (Tim Cummings) who quickly insinuates himself into their lives.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Ballad of Emmett Till, The
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

Drawn from the headlines of 1955, The Ballad of Emmett Till does far more than recreate the facts of how an innocent young boy died and possibly ignited America’s civil rights movement. Playwright Ifa Bayeza uses creative, storytelling techniques (hence the term “Ballad” in the show’s title) to describe the horrifying murder of Emmett Till.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Dames at Sea
Helen Hayes Theater

We’ve all heard the story more times than we can count: plucky girl from the provinces comes to the Big City, and immediately lands in a Broadway show. Hey, didn’t Betty Buckley step off the bus from Big Spring, Texas and waltz right into 1776?It may be only a legend, but it’s the stuff dreams are made of.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
My Mañana Comes
The Biograph

We know, because the playbill tells us, that we are in the prep room of a swanky midtown-Manhattan restaurant (66th and Madison, to be exact) where the bussers fold napkins, polish silverware, fill bread baskets, chop herbs and slice fruit. Since the four men who toil therein discuss their personal business with the intimacy born of male bonding, we also soon know their backstories, their hopes and their aspirations. What we don't know is that we are about to get a lesson in the inhumane ethical compromises that trickle-down economics engender.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Gin Game, The
John Golden Theater

Wasn't it Bette Davis who was quoted as saying, "Growing old ain't for sissies?" James Earl Jones (You Can't Take it With You) and Cicely Tyson (The Trip to Bountiful) prove they're no sissies as they face the burdens and inequities of growing old in The Gin Game at Broadway’s John Golden Theater.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Red
Geva Theater Center

As if to emphasize the variety of its 43rd season, Geva Theater Center follows its raucous season opener, Spamalot, with a Tony Award-winning drama of artistic struggle and aesthetic conflict, John Logan’s Red.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Fool for Love
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Love is "the absolute hell," says Sam Shepard, whose revival of Fool for Love brings in the combative lovers to battle their demons and desires on the stage of the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. Apparently, the heightened passion of Shepard's 1983 play was inspired by his own marital situation when he left his wife for an affair with Jessica Lange.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Trip of Love
Stage 42

Trip of Love is a recreation, through music, of a particular moment in the history of our country. When the audience enters the theater, the very walls throb with psychedelic images of mushrooms and ephemera, all done in neon shades of blue, purple, red, and pink. The heroine of the hour is Alice, who falls through the looking glass of the 1960s, into what is alternately a drug induced dream, a Vegas floor show, and a candy-sweet romance.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Guards at the Taj
Geffen Playhouse

The Indian imperial guards in Rajiv Joseph’s bold new play Guards at the Taj, are Humayan (Raffi Barsoumian) and Babur (Ramiz Monsef), two friends assigned to watch over the entrance to the newly constructed Taj Mahal. The time is 1648. The emperor, who took sixteen years to build a temple which would be more beautiful than anything in nature, is himself an ugly and despicable human being, one who rules with a wrathful, brutal hand.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Color Purple, The
WBTT Theater

In The Color Purple, the success of the story of Celie and her struggles in trials that bring her to independence and restore her faith in God depends to a large extent on the actress in that role. At WBTT, Alpphia Campbell endows it with all the inner strength the heroine possesses and how she uses it to achieve outer strength, as well. Her major co-stars also score, both dramatically and musically in the sometimes difficult music based on Alice Walker’s important novel.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Old Times
American Airlines Theater

When the committee for Nobel Prize for Literature awarded Harold Pinter the prize, they pointed out that he "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." If you are looking for a play with a beginning, middle and end? Harold Pinter's Old Times is not for you.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Soul Mates: A Journey to Hitsville
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

In one of the most technically elaborate FST Cabaret shows to date, four guys and a pianist bring Hitsville, U.S.A. and Motown artistry to Sarasota—especially its now midlife adult fans. “Get Ready” they sing jubilantly, starting with a solo and zooming into a vigorous backup both musically and in movement.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Dear Liar
BathHouse Cultural Center

WingSpan Theater Company opened the rarely produced, delightful comedy, Dear Liar, the two-character play/reading enacting the 40-year correspondence between Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw and his dramatic muse, then well-known English actress, Mrs.Patrick Campbell. Shaw wrote the role of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion specifically for Mrs. Campbell, although she was adamant that, at age 49, she was much too old to play the role of the teen-age cockney flower girl.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Barbecue
The Public Theater - Newman Theater

No matter how confused you may be, do not leave Barbecue after the first act. All will be explained in Act Two, even if the explanation may be a little far out. Scenes intercut between two families of siblings, one black, the other white. The names of the characters are the same, as is the cheap, colorful clothing they wear (although I will admit a certain longing for a pair of those spangled sneakers).

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2015

Pages