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
Freud's Last Session
Eastbrook Church

Locally well-known, Christian-based Acacia Theater has teamed up with Morning Star Productions to present Freud’s Last Session. The play is being presented at Morning Star’s regular performance space at Milwaukee’s Eastbrook Church. Acacia Theatre’s artistic director, Elaine Wyler, directs.

The play is set in Freud’s London study, where the father of psychoanalysis is awaiting the arrival of a guest, noted professor and author CS Lewis. The ever-inquisitive Freud is eager to discover why this formerly devout atheist has converted to a belief in God.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Back of the Throat
Next Act Theater

It has been more than a decade since the 9/11 attacks, but Seattle playwright Yussef El Guindi brings the audience right back to those chilling days. In Back of the Throat, he re-creates an atmosphere of uncertainty, fear, tension, suspicion, and grief. In the wake of that terrifying attack, Americans were unsure of many things, including its Middle Eastern-raised citizens. Guindi begs the question: what civil liberties are being lost at the price of security?

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Fool for Love
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Sam Shepard appeals to a finite element of theatergoers. Perhaps his playwriting style is an acquired taste. Maybe some of us just don’t recognize the significance of his work. If you enjoy Fool For Love, then you’ll probably appreciate his entire canon. After all, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for the equally grim Buried Child, so he certainly has gained the approbation of the theater intelligentsia.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Tell Mr. Poulos
Dorrie Theater

In Tell Mr. Poulos, Donald Wollner’s clever domestic dramedy, husband and wife Jimmy and Lisa (Beresford Bennett and Yetta Gottesman, respectively) are struggling to survive in a hostile world. Lisa works part-time as a nurse, but he just lost his accountancy job at an upscale firm, making it hard for them to raise a kid and pay the rent. To stay afloat financially, they decide to rent out one of their rooms to a large, elderly Greek-American gentleman named Mr Poulos (Greek for chicken, by the way).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Old Times
American Airlines

There are not three finer actors on Broadway today than Clive Owen, Eve Best, and Kelly Reilly. Won’t someone please give these splendid performers a play that’s vibrant and interesting? Even with the best efforts of director Douglas Hodge to liven things up, Old Times is deathly boring. Although it’s only 65 minutes long, like so many plays by the venerated Harold Pinter, it seems to go on for hours.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
East of Eden
Steppenwolf Theater

John Steinbeck's novel, “East of Eden,” reads like classical tragedy, its sweeping narrative arc spanning multiple generations suffering under nemesis of uncertain origin. Their trials are not the handiwork of the gods, though—our setting is the midland region of California in 1900, after all, where destinies are shaped by biological imperative and psychological compulsion more than divine whim.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Sucker Punch
The Biograph

What distinguishes professional athletes from others who make a living doing work most folks consider to be play is not merely the brevity of their careers—bodies wear out sooner than brains—but the difficulty of knowing when to quit. Some contenders invest their money wisely in anticipation of a long and quiet retirement, but too many spend their youth pursuing immediate goals, only to be confronted with the realization that glory is fleeting in this transitory world.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Disgraced
Goodman Theater

Immigrants arriving in the United States are usually eager to embrace the reinvention promised those seeking to make our country their home. When this goal is not quickly achieved, the tendency is for their children—lacking first-hand memories of their former society and why their parents left it—to romanticize the old customs. A few more generations are necessary to render families comfortable with hyphenated ethnic designations, celebrations of ancient holidays and vacations (safely protected by North American passports) in the land of their ancestors.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Miss Buncle's Book
Lifeline Theater

Once upon a time—1932, to be specific—in a quiet village located "a short train ride" from London, middle-aged spinster Barbara Buncle finds her income sharply reduced by falling interest rates. To stave off penury, she proposes to write a novel, basing its characters on her neighbors (with all names changed, of course, including her own) whom she portrays as they are—or in some cases, as they could be.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Appropriate
Mark Taper Forum

Family dysfunction meets racial amnesia in Appropriate, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ savage drama, now on tap at the Taper after runs in Louisville, Sundance and New York. The three-act play is set in a plantation house in southeast Arkansas where the Lafayette family has gathered to divvy up what’s left of the long-squandered estate.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Dirty Dancing
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

For fans of the 1987 low-budget film, “Dirty Dancing,” now there’s a musical to recreate all those glorious scenes of love in the Catskills. Actually, the musical has been kicking its way around the globe for decades. It has played in Los Angeles and Chicago in addition to long runs in Australia, London and throughout the UK. What theatergoers will find is that very little has been added to the musical from what the film had to offer.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Twelfth Night
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

For the last few years, Asolo Rep New Stages Tour has been bringing abbreviated Shakespeare mainly to middle and high schools. Each time the effort’s been greater, and so have its results. It will be hard to beat this year’s adaptation of Twelfth Night that takes place in a typical summer camp of today and employs the entire FSU/Asolo Conservatory students in their third, final year.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Money Fish, The: Death on the Bering Sea
Hudson Theater

Move over, Jack London and Eugene O’Neill. Writing about the sea helped make you famous, but now you will need to make room for John Cox, whose first play, The Money Fish, is in its world-premiere run at a small theater in Hollywood.

Ex-army ranger Cox spent three years aboard a fishing boat in the Bering Sea, braving some of the roughest waters in the world to make a living, first as a fish-sorter, then as a deck-hand and, finally, as an able-bodied seaman.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Show Boat
Westchester Broadway Theater

Show Boat has been a much-loved musical since it first opened on Broadway at the Ziegfeld Theater on December 27, 1927. A critical as well as popular success, the show ran for 572 performances over a year and a half. Hal Prince successfully revived it in 1994.

The material was also well received twice in movie versions from MGM. Irene Dunne starred in the 1936 version; in 1951, Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner and Howard Keel played the lead roles, in glorious Technicolor.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2015
Miracle of Long Johns, The
First United Methodist Church

The Miracle of Long Johns is a hilarious and kind of deep tale of a professional appreciator. Theater critics (and critics in general) can be pretty nasty. I'm sure a bunch of them are just nasty to be nasty, but the really great critics, i.e. Lefkowitz, adore the theater to no end. They're like parents who practice tough love. If something stinks, they say it does and why. Likewise, if something is lovely, they say so and why. Like Lefkowitz says, they're on a quest to find the one magic play out of 600 that electrifies, that is sublime.

Gail Kuroda
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Fun Home
Circle in the Square

With a title like Fun Home, one might imagine that this new musical is set in a carnival (i.e., “Fun House”). Well, in a way, it does resemble the otherworldliness of a carnival, especially if one considers the fun-house mirrors one finds at such attractions. The distorted mirrors and their odd refractions are not unlike one might find in a memory play like this.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Daddy Long Legs
Davenport Theater

One thing’s for sure; if you put on a play with only two actors, they better be really good. Daddy Long Legs is most fortunate in having Megan McGinnis as the orphan Jerusha, and Paul Alexander Nolan as her benefactor, Jervis. Nolan is handsome, earnest, altogether dreamy. And McGinnis is absolutely glorious.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Canciones de Tennessee Williams
Crown and Anchor

A mandate of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival is to explore all aspects of the playwright including staging new works inspired by his short stories and poetry. It was in this spirit of invention that we settled in for an evening of cabaret at the Crown and Anchor.

Having endured the amateurish The Liberation of Colette Simple, and by then getting past our normal bed time, we debated leaving. The second performance was to be more song-based on Williams.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Liberation of Colette Simple, The
Crown and Anchor

A mandate of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival is to explore all aspects of the playwright including staging new works inspired by his short stories and poetry. It was in this spirit of invention that we settled in for an evening of cabaret at the Crown and Anchor.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Parade, The: Approaching the End of Summer
Provincetown Beach (outdoors)

From September 24-27 during the recent tenth annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival we attended nine performances. That included all of the featured events minus a production of Suddenly Last Summer which we saw during the New Orleans Williams festival in April.

There were some other events and parties which we opted to pass up in an effort to conserve energy. The pace started with two shows on Thursday, three each on Friday and Saturday, winding down with a staged reading of a developing John Guare play on Sunday morning.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Dreamgirls
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse

Whenever this reviewer sees a production of Dreamgirls, currently being staged by Milwaukee Repertory Theater, one of the many images that lingers is the sight of three beautiful young women onstage. They are wearing elegant, matching gowns and coiffed wigs. The trio moves and croons in unison as they sing, “we’re your dream girls.” In essence, that image sums up the entire show. Dreamgirls is all about dreams, and the price of fame as showbiz dreams come true.

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

I think I've seen this musical before, the one about a hopeful girl who gets off the bus in New York City with stardust in her eyes and a dream in her heart. Yes, it's stereotyped, hokey and dated. However, Dames at Sea has a small but mighty crackerjack cast of six, and they put on a darned swell send-up of those hopeful innocents who capture the brass ring with convincing affection.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Revel, The
Chopin Theater

Audiences at the premiere of The Bacchae in 405 B.C. were well aware that the myth providing Euripides his source material hearkened to an age safely removed from their own society, and that the charismatic spiritual leader depicted therein wasn't merely preaching the Divine Word, but was himself, Divine, rendering his exhortations to drink up and submit to his whim, however violent its expression, holy commandments to be obeyed without equivocation.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Dogfight
Theater Wit

Soldiers preparing to ship out overseas from San Francisco typically spend their last 24 hours drinking and whoring, not wasting time on a Frat-house stalk-and-snare mission—especially when it's 1963 and the fresh-out-of-boot-camp corpsmen are bound for a tiny Southeast Asian patch called Viet Nam. Credibility, however, wasn't the goal of the 1991 film, Dogfight, nor of the 2012 musical adaptation, so much as the attempt to replicate the tone of a mid-1940s song-and-dance G.I. comedy within the hindsight context of a war not yet begun.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Tempest, The
Navy Pier

Picture playwright-adapter Aaron Posner sitting around a table over beers with the magician known today as Teller, beat-blues songwriters Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, and Pilobolus dance choreographer Matt Kent, all planning to put on a show together. When somebody suggests that a framing story might be useful, Posner remembers one by William Shakespeare that might serve.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
How the World Began
Rivendell Theater

The play's setting is a Kansas town rebuilding in the aftermath of a tornado leaving widespread destruction and seventeen dead in its path, but this is not another of the eyewitness-interview docudramas proliferating this season.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Jamaica, Farewell
Royal George Theater

Every coming-to-America story is unique, whether accomplished by crawling through rat-infested tunnels or embarking under the protection of powerful allies, whether its mileage encompasses continents or a 30-minute puddle-jump, whether fueled by the conditions of its departure or those of its destination. Our narrator may smile as she recounts the "mostly true" tale of her own migration from her Caribbean island home to the Florida coast, but don't make the mistake of thinking her ordeal any less fraught with risk than what we see today.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Awake and Sing
Odyssey Theater

Time has turned some of the characters in Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing into Jewish-family-play cliches. There’s Bessie, the interfering, smothering matriarch; Myron, the nebbishy failure of a father; Jacob, the burnt-out radical grandfather; and Ralph, the rebellious representative of the next generation. It must be remembered, though, that the play was first produced in 1935, when such characters weren’t all that familiar (except when already encountered in the Yiddish theater).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Breathe
Greenway Court Theater

A truly good play is one that puts society on trial, said Kenneth Tynan. If only for that reason, Tynan would have admired Breathe, Javon Johnson’s family play which just opened in a West Coast premiere at Greenway Court Theater.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Dear Elizabeth
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

A carefully selected collection of letters between two of America’s well-known poets opens the fall theater season at Milwaukee Chamber Theater. Staged in the intimate, 99-seat Studio Theater, Dear Elizabeth gives audiences an up-close look at the lives of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Daddy Long Legs
Davenport Theater

Welcome to a precious little jewel of a musical, Daddy Long Legs. Here is an intimate, sweet and sentimental two-hander that puts no demands on its intended audience other than to believe in an improbable romance. Without being cloying and, surprisingly, without ever being boring during its somewhat lengthy running time of two hours and twenty minutes including an intermission, this wholesome almost-to-a-fault musical is the work of creative team John Caird (writer and director) and Paul Gordon (score).

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Once Upon a Mattress
Abrons Arts Center

For anybody hell-bent o ringing in the New Year in the most joyous way, I suggest that you hop over to the Abrons Arts Center in lower Manhattan where the always-hilarious and over-the-top comedic Jackie Hoffman as Princess Winifred and gender bender performance artist John “Lypsinka” Epperson, as the long-nailed Queen Aggravian – channeling shades of Joan Crawford and Gloria Swanson with a wee bit of his own lip-synching thrown in – are camping it up to a faretheewell in the musical Once Upon A Mattress.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Amazing Grace
Nederlander Theater

Amazing Grace, music and lyrics by Christopher Smith, book by Christopher Smith and Arthur Giron, is a totally engaging Broadway musical about the life and times (mid 1700’s) of an English song writer who becomes involved in the slave trade and, ultimately, following his sweetie, becomes an abolitionist. The romantic leads, Vince Oddo and Erin Mackey, are good to look at and great to hear sing. They both are top-level performers with charm and charisma.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Christians, The
Playwrights Horizons

What a joy it is to experience a play that forces us to think about what we really believe. I challenge any intelligent theater-goes to see The Christians, and then not want to discuss it at length. Is there a heaven and a hell? Is there room for the faithful to question? How much of the Bible is the Word of God, and how much is mistranslation?

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Spamalot
Geva Theater Center - Mainstage

It’s been eight years since I saw this calculated madness in a gaudy Las Vegas production, and memory won’t let me accurately compare this latest revival. The cult Monty Python-infection of our Broadway musical comedy is certainly intact.  But Vegas shows are all cut down in length (90 minutes, no intermissions) and expanded in size and glitz.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Back Home Again: On the Road with John Denver
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

Unlike most biographical musical revues, Back Home Again: On the Road with John Denver doesn’t include an actor who takes on the role of John Denver. As one discovers during the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s world premiere of the show, its unique approach doesn’t need to.

The show – set in the Rep’s intimate Stackner Cabaret—opens with a tape of Denver singing one of his songs. The darkened stage lightens to reveal two actors—one male, one female—who begin to hum along.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Love and Money
Pershing Square Signature Center

Lately, New York has enjoyed a revival of octogenarian A.R. Gurney's popular Love Letters and anticipates an upcoming revival of Sylvia. The Signature Theater recently produced What I Did Last Summer and The Wayside Motor Inn. It's often fascinating peeking at the inside lives of the rich and social. That's what makes Gurney's plays so popular. However, his latest at Signature Theater, Love and Money,while showing sparks of humor and elements of truth, turns contrived and disappointing.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles
Getty Villa - Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater

When the need arises to update Greek classical drama, L.A. playwright Luis Alfaro is your go-to guy. Past assignments include Electricidad and Oedipus el Rey. Now Alfaro returns to the outdoor arena at the Getty Villa with Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles,directed by Jessica Kubzansky, co-artistic director of the Pasadena-based Boston Court theater.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2015

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