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
Object Lesson, The
Kirk Douglas Theater

Remember Ionesco’s The Chairs? In that absurdist classic, the stage is stacked high with chairs brought by a mob of people expecting to hear a hired orator deliver a profound speech about the human condition (which turns out to be gibberish). The old folks who have hired the orator top the action by committing suicide.

There are echoes of Ionesco in Geoff Sobelle’s The Object Lesson, the surreal one-man play now on tap at the Kirk Douglas in a southern California premiere.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Dogfight
Next Act Theater

One of Milwaukee’s newest theater companies, All-In Productions, closes its inaugural season with a terrifically entertaining production of Dogfight: The Musical. Diehard musical theater fans may be familiar with this offbeat show, which had its 2012 Off-Broadway premiere at Second Stage Theatre. It received enthusiastic critical response and a cast album was recorded.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Different Perspective, A: An Evening of Short Comedies
Starlite Room

In the one-act evening A Different Perspective, Living Arrangements, by Ron Pantello has Penelope the cat played by Katherine Tye (a last-minute but first-rate replacement) discouraging rambunctious Killarn Tyler Johnson as Prince the dog from trying to move in with his master over her “servant” owner. Director Jamie Lee Butrum stresses irony in Prince’s eagerness to follow all of Penelope’s supposedly positive suggestions. Really positive performances here! Best dog imitation since Sylvia.Kudos, also, to catty Tye!

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Rainmaker, The
The Greenhouse

You know the story, if only from the musical version or the Katharine Hepburn movie: Lizzie Curry is a bookish young woman who thinks herself homely and, therefore, unlikely to ever marry, despite the encouragement of her father and brothers. One day, a handsome stranger arrives promising to bring an end to the drought afflicting the region during what appears to be the 1930s.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Glory Days
The Flatiron

This pocket-sized musical isn't based on a movie but feels as if it was—possibly because regarding the past through a nostalgic haze constitutes a major obsession of post-World War II youth culture. Beginning in 1951 with “Catcher in the Rye,” the artistic refrain of the last 60 years has been beery-teary baby-boom brats howling, "Things is never the same!"

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Delicate Ship, A
Peter Jay Sharp Theater

The most impressive aspect of Anna Ziegler’s intriguing A Delicate Ship, about an ill-fated love triangle is the lyrical flow of the text and the clever way that time is used to explain the past, the present, and the future. The most difficult aspect to embrace are its three mostly irritating if also romantically entangled characters.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
When Stars Align
Odyssey Theater

Credit When Stars Align with being unafraid to dramatize a huge chunk of 19th century American history, specifically the country’s involvement in the slave trade. The racism that permeated not just the ante-bellum south but much of the rest of the country still exists today, as we know from Ferguson and Brooklyn. Slavery may be dead, but prejudice and hostility towards blacks still live in the hearts of many Americans—which is what gives a play like When Stars Alignits relevance.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Jacksonian, The
Profiles Theater - Mainstage

Beth Henley's plays have always hinted at the dark side of the rural/tribal values lingering at the cultural roots of our country's southern regions, but smug Yankee directors and audiences usually prefer to chuckle complacently at the droll antics of their hayseed cousins. This time, however, Henley does not offer them that option. The scenario proposed by her teenage narrator starts with a man wearing bloody clothes fetching ice from a motel dispensary and only gets worse after that.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
After Miss Julie
Strawdog Theater

It was 1945 when England's Labour Party scored a victory over the Conservatives in the general election—translated for Yanks, this meant that the rich lazy aristocrats had been toppled by the poor working blokes, who soon initiated a bevy of government-welfare programs (among them, subsidized housing, unemployment compensation and healthcare).

British playwright Patrick Marber sees parallels between the men and women seeking to escape their birthright at this moment in history and those in August Strindberg's 1888 Swedish shocker, Miss Julie.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The Players Theater

When Elliott Raines founded Two Chairs Theater Company last year, it was to present yearly an outstanding play in a minimalist production stressing its author’s writing. With Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, director Raines brings out both Tennessee Williams’s substance and style, exploring the theme of mendacity in characters who live lies and without a moral center.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
September 2015
Submarine Show, The
Lynn Redgrave Theater

As soon as Jaron Hollander and Slater Penney walk on stage in The Submarine Show, looking goofy in their striped shirts, suspenders and glasses, we can see that the show is going to be fun. It’s an elaborate mime with tumbling and vocalizing. The two nimble performers fill up the stage for 75 minutes as if they were a whole company of actors.

We follow their story as they crash in their submarine, surface to the jungle, machete their way through the brush, hunt, fly and have a series other adventures. One of them even has an out-of-body experience.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Shake the Earth
Spectrum

Nothing’s more interesting than a dramatic juxtaposition. One of the best sorts is the abutment of the personal and the historical. It can put our lives in perspective. It throws the ordinary into a sort of dramatic relief.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Intolerant Vaudeville, An
The Secret Theater

An Intolerant Vaudeville is a variety show exploring stereotypes and prejudices. It has jugglers and singers and a one-act play, among other acts. They all make for an interesting show.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Patchwork Drifter
City Lit

Wyoming granted women the right to vote and to serve as court officers more than 50 years before the 19th Amendment was ratified, so it's appropriate that Patchwork Drifter,Jennifer L. Mickelson's Sergio Leone-tinged yarn of how the west was won should highlight the historical contributions of enterprising females during the years before the opening of travel routes across the Rocky Mountains brought with them the "civilizing" influences of sexism, bigotry and social injustice.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Chicago's Role in the Crime of the Century
The Museum of Broadcast Communications

Even with the current fashion for talking-heads symposiums posing as docudramas (but leaving out the drama), Hillel Levin's decision to present his journalist's investigation of the role played by organized crime in the 1963 assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy as a play—rather than as a book, film, graphic novel or television miniseries—is a curious one. At one time, when literacy was less widespread in the general population, disseminating news through live performance may have been necessary, but why choose this old-school medium in 2015?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Swingaroos, The: Swing-Era Territory Band
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

As a sort of plot, The Swingaroos go musically around the country from the Midwest as a small combo until they become “New York City’s underground jazz band.” They seem to be condescending to perform above ground in Sarasota, where they don’t get introduced until the end of their show. That was supposed to be after 75 minutes on the evening I attended, but they started late and ended early--to the audience’s hearty approval.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Cafe Society
Odyssey Theater

The play’s title, Café Society, is ironic. The five inhabitants of the café–a Starbucks on the West side of L.A.–certainly do not comprise a society. On the contrary, each is locked into his own little world, typing away on computers and tablets, pretty much oblivious to the other.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Misalliance
F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater

The capacity opening night audience at the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey responded with well-deserved enthusiasm to George Bernard Shaw's Misalliance. Although my own experience with this brilliantly witty farcical comedy includes a memory of a very fine Roundabout Theater production in the early 1980s, I know that I wasn't quite prepared to laugh so unashamedly aloud as I did watching this first-rate company go through their humorously executed pretentions and paces under the direction of STNJ's Artistic Associate Stephen Brown-Fried.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Nobody's Girl
New Jersey Repertory

Seriously unhinged in the way it veers from melodramatic excess into the blackest comedy, Australian writer Rick Viede play Nobody's Girl nevertheless had me in its severely schizophrenic grip. Apparently re-written for the U.S. to change the play's lead character from an Australian Aborigine to an Iranian Muslim woman, the play revolves around the attempt by Anthony Donnally (Jacob A.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Boeing Boeing
Milwaukee Chamber Theater - Cabot Theater

From the first glance, audiences at the Chamber Theater production of Boeing, Boeing are transported back to the swinging 1960s. Lighting a-go-go decorates the stage with an assorted bunch of daisies, reminiscent of the old TV show, “Laugh In.” One recalls the TV show’s set of myriad windows that pop open just long enough for a character to deliver a laugh line. However, the set of Boeing, Boeingis dotted with a row identical doors, not windows. As one soon finds out, it’s the perfect set-up for farce.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Art
Gorilla Tango

Seldom has the adage about beauty and the eye of the beholder been illustrated more often, or in as many ways, as it has since Yasmina Reza wrote her deceptively simple little play, Art, in 1994. Her characters have their analogs in every culture the world over, transcending differences in ethnicity, nationality, religious belief, age, gender and social station. Her source of conflict is likewise interchangeable with any property, physical or spiritual, thought to reflect upon the owner.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Dueling Gentlemen, The
The Athenaeum

Theater companies founded on a narrow repertory—Commedia, Operetta, the collected works of Shakespeare/Shaw/Sondheim—might survive for a time on their appeal to a select audience but, sooner or later, will find it necessary to deviate from their initial mission. Silent theater, by contrast, has remained faithful to its goal of replicating, through live-action performance, the aesthetic of pre-sound motion pictures.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Encounter, The
Edinburgh International Conference Center

I'd go into the jungle with him any time.

Simon McBurney, the actor/director and head honcho of the theater company Complicite, has been to the jungle and back. After having been given a copy of “Amazon Beaming,” Petru Popescu's 1991 account of National Geographic photo-journalist Loren McIntyre's 1969 trip into the heart of the Amazon, McBurney visited the jungle, as well, to interview some of the indigenous “cat people” known as the Mayoruna.

Mavis Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
887

(see reviews under Eight Hundred and Eighty Seven)

Eight Hundred and Eighty Seven
Edinburgh International Conference Center

Robert Lepage's multi-disciplinary memory play, 887, premiered earlier this year at the Toronto Pan Am Games. Now, thanks to the Edinburgh International Festival, European theatergoers have a chance to catch up with the Canadian actor/director's latest creative endeavour.

Like his other solo shows, The Far Side of the Moon, The Anderson Project and Needles and Opium, 887 is a one-man odyssey that combines his twin gifts for storytelling and visionary stagecraft.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Oak Tree, An
Traverse Theater

Ten minutes into An Oak Tree, I realized I had seen it before, at the Odyssey Theatre in L.A., back in 2010. No matter. The play, written and performed by Tim Crouch, is not only a powerful work but one that has a fresh angle each time it is performed. Crouch, as he explains in introductory remarks, works with a different co-star every night. He meets with that person—tonight it's the actress Lucy Ellinson, a member of the UK's Third Angel company—about an hour before curtain.

Mavis Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Seeds of Banquo, The
Soulstice Theater

Angela Iannone, one of the most widely respected Milwaukee-based theater artists, demonstrates a new facet of her talent in the world premiere of The Seeds of Banquo. Iannone wrote and directed this smartly crafted show, which intertwines the text of Shakespeare’s Macbethwith the story of real-life actor Edwin Booth. This is the fourth of Iannone’s scheduled five-part play series on Edwin Booth, who was a key figure in nineteenth-century theater.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
This Isn't What I Expected: An Evening of Short Comedies
Upstairs, The Starlite Room

At Sarasota’s Starlite Theater, four sparkling short comedies drew sellout crowds for evenings and an over half-full audience for a specially called Sunday matinee to accommodate people who don’t drive at night or do but couldn’t get into the sellout eves.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Electric Dreams
Pleasance Dome, Potterow

The new show by critically acclaimed Dumbshow is based on the ideas in Naomi Klein's book, “Shock and Awe.” As Dumbshow explains in a program note, the book “challenges the myth that over the past 70 years, free-market capitalism triumphed across the globe democratically and posits that often, its advancements have been forced on populations unwittingly when they were too shocked or distracted to realize what was happening.”

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Tomorrow
Traverse Theater

On a bare stage, in a haze of smoke, three spooky figures in black stand touching up latex masks with aged features. Three young people enter and take the masks from them. Fade to an old man shuffling and groaning. He's holding a bunch of flowers. A young man then enters and tries to help him but is held in the tight grasp of the old man. Then the largely silent action shifts to a home for the elderly where the three young people are now residing (and wearing those grotesque masks).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Walking the Tightrope: The Tension Between Art and Politics
Underbelly Potterow, Topside

Last year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival was marred by loud, angry protests against any show perceived to have an Israeli connection. Led by pro-Palestinian leftists, the demonstrations forced the closure of numerous productions deemed to be political incorrect. Today amends are being made.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Backwards in High Heels
Westchester Broadway Theater

I thought I’d heard of every show, but Backwards In High Heels was new to me. As it turns out, this is a production which is jobbed in at Westchester Broadway Theater. It been seen around the country; Florida was a recent venue.

This musical takes its title from a quote from a 1982 “Frank & Ernest” cartoon about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: “Sure he was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did—backwards and in high heels.”

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Isaac's Eye
Urbanite Theater

Noted director and critic Harold Clurman maintained that theater essentially “tells lies like truth.” That’s certainly what writer Lucas Hnath does a lot of in Isaac’s Eye. He has Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke as the scientist equivalents of the antagonistic music composers in Amadeus.

Using literary components made popular by Brecht and production devices by his director Erwin Piscator, Hnath accomplishes epic theater’s purpose: to make us think. But are we led mainly to consider the workings and conclusions of science or mainly of ambitious men?

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
We Gotta Bingo!
Chicago Theater Works

The notion of audiences at a play sitting still and attending to every minute of the onstage agenda is a relatively new practice, as accounts of theatrical performance in, say, Cyrano de Bergerac, or The Knight of the Burning Pestleamply illustrate. Nobody is suggesting a return to strolling vendors or shell-gamers, but the entertainment genre dubbed "interactive theater" can be said to trace its origins to this venerable tradition.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Boy from Oz, The
Stage 773

Few would argue Australian-born singer/songwriter Peter Allen's inclusion in the pantheon of American pop music, so why does Martin Sherman's adaptation of Nick Enright's original biodrama seem to refute that assessment?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
My Old Lady
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Israel Horovitz has written several versions of My Old Lady. He even sent The Banyan Theater revised elements of this very year’s latest version. Not having seen or read what came before, including a movie, I feel it still needs work to be a better play. A light comedy that gets darker, more melodramatic, as cultures and their representative characters clash, it uncovers a chain of mysteries. Most--but, importantly, not all--are family secrets.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2015
Kings of Country
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

If you love country music, you’ll love Kings of Country. If you don’t love country music, “Kings of Country” may well change your mind. It’s a wonderful, popular selection of songs from the beginnings of country to today as their most talented male singers and instrumentalists made the genre evolve. And there’s a number of places where a gal joins them. So what’s not to like?

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2015

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