Art
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Thanks to Julian Olf, I know why the “Art” he’s so wonderfully directed for Banyan differs some from what I previously knew in French and English in Paris and in English in the U.S. It seems I just attended a newer American--not British-English--adaptation that places action and accents here. Such alchemy turned a philosophical comedy into satirical farce, drawing laughs galore but less afterthought about values except how entertaining an exploration of them can be.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Diary of Anne Frank, The
Stratford Festival - Avon Theater

Of the eight impressive productions I’ve seen thus far in the Stratford Festival of Canada’s 2015 season, the only one I cannot recommend is The Diary of Anne Frank. The play is a deeply moving presentation of the amazing human document saved from the tragic story of a real young victim of the Nazi Holocaust. Stratford’s cast is close to ideally chosen to bring the story and characters to life, and much of their performance is remarkably authentic and affecting.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Porcelain
The Greenhouse

Chay Yew may not be represented in the annals of Gay Theater as prominently as, say, Tony Kushner or Mart Crowley, but hindsight affirms the impact of his 1992 play, Porcelain addressing prejudice—racial, cultural and sexual—in a country where consensual sex between men had been decriminalized only a bare 25 years earlier.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Goldfish
The Greenhouse

Leo Ledger has an addictive gambling habit and a propensity for losing bets. This not-uncommon correlation stems from his conviction that he is unworthy of happiness, so that his efforts to conceal this flaw are orchestrated to ultimately reaffirm his failure. His wife wearied of this game long ago, leaving him with custody of their son Albert, who is now 19 and departing for college, after supplying his father with a semester's worth of latchkey instructions for the maintenance of the household. Will these measures prove successful?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Physicists, The
Stratford Festival - Tom Patterson Theater

I haven’t read or seen The Physicists for a half-century, and this is a new translation into English by the excellent Canadian playwright Michael Healey. But I wasn’t aware of any drastic changes that Healey has made to the Friedrich Durrenmatt play whose American premiere I saw in 1964. It’s a painfully funny, bitterly disturbing play that was admired but ran very briefly in New York in a lustrous production directed by Peter Brook, starring Hume Cronyn, Robert Shaw, and Jessica Tandy.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Karen Mason: Mason at Mama's
Don't Tell Mama

Mason at Mama’s in March has ended, but the memory lingers on. Mason returned to Don't Tell Mama's for two June weekends, and with a bouncy swing, her second song, "Takin' a Chance on Love" promises, "I'm going to give my all again." And she does. With Christopher Denny's perceptive piano accompaniment and Barry Kleinbort's crisp direction highlighting Mason's comedic, sentimental, and dramatic talents, her show reaches beyond a master class in cabaret to a master class in theater. We can't get enough of Mason, and she's worth every minute.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Sound of Music, The
Stratford Festival - Festival Theater

Canada’s Stratford Festival keeps bringing in Broadway pros to stage musicals and several powerhouse directors from the United States to recreate their landmark versions of modern drama classics, but this great classical repertory theater’s recent champions remain Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino’s uniformly superb revivals of classics and resident director/choreographer Donna Feore’s landmark restagings of major musicals.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Karen Mason: Mason at Mama's
Don't Tell Mama

In Karen Mason’s performance at Don’t Tell Mama on West 46th Street, we enjoy a superbly talented singer who gives us all the nuances and dimensions of the songs she sings— all from the highest pop library— from the Gershwins, Lerner & Lowe, Jule Stein/Leo Robin, The Beatles, and a terrific “Over The Rainbow.”

This top-level cabaret act is totally engaging, with a strong comic undertone, and it’s a treat. Her clear strong voice takes us to the land of exquisite music performance.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Ubu in Chains
Medicine Show Theater

In 1888 a French schoolboy, Alfred Jarry, wrote a puppet play to lampoon his physics teacher and created the character Pere Ubu. He would later rework the script into the play Ubu Roi. It’s one of the seminal plays of modern drama, and Jarry wrote three more plays around the character Pere Ubu. The plays broke the conventions of drama and prepared the way for the absurdists to come decades later. The third play was Ubu in Chains. Like Ubu Roi, it’s a preposterous, iconoclastic, very funny play.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Reborning
Urbanite Theater

Kelly shares with lover Daizy an apartment she’s half converted into a doll house. Atop her work-table are parts of bodies, heads, faces, hair of dolls, painting paraphenalia, a projector, lamp, ashtray, bottles of beer. Baskets underneath hold baby-like limbs and torsos. Against the brick back wall, shelves hold molded heads--some with hair, some on baby doll bodies in various stages of dress. Kelly is a reborner.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Smile, Baby
Dorie Theater at the Complex

Smile, Baby is the ironic title of one of the most provocative comedy shows at the 2015 Hollywood Fringe Festival. In it, five actresses take turns in poking wicked fun at male entitlement. In a series of black-out sketches, the actresses play a wide range of women who are constantly being hit on by vain and boastful men. But instead of reacting in traditional fashion by being flattered and impressed, these 21st-century females not only see through the con but find ways to satirize it.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Catalyst
Dorie Theater at the Complex

The life-and-death struggle to overcome an addiction–in this case, an eating disorder–is powerfully dramatized in Catalyst, a new play by April Morrow which is on tap at the 2015 Hollywood Fringe Festival. Morrow, who not only wrote and directed Catalyst but stars in it, was anorexic and suicidal at fifteen. She was sent to a Christian psychiatric institution whose doctors, therapists and, above all, fellow addicts, helped her to realize that recovery was possible. As she says in the play, “No one said it was easy; they said it was worth it!”

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Carousel
Stratford Festival - Avon Theater

Carousel is such a beautiful, well-known show that Stratford’s recent trend of topping even the famous originals and legendary remembered productions of great musicals in dazzling, flawless revivals was unlikely here. Broadway pros, director Susan H. Schulman and choreographer Michael Lichtefeld, instead offer a loving tribute to the beloved original by doing full justice to the four-handkerchief weeper that boasts perhaps the most beautiful and flawless score outside of grand opera.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Tempest, The
Delacorte Theater

It was only fitting that the sky was threatening; it had been raining hard all day, and everyone wondered if the show would go on. It did, of course; Shakespeare in the Park never cancels until show time, and then, only very rarely.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Halfwits' Last Hurrah, The
Lillian Theater

A hit at just about every previous Hollywood Fringe Festival, the Four Clowns troupe returns to the 2015 HFF with its latest production, The Halfwits’ Last Hurrah (a world premiere). Featuring a 12-person cast plus pianist Wayne H. Holland, the show (written by Jamie Franta and Don Colliver) tells the semi-demented story of a vainglorious showman (Colliver) and his goofy cohorts as they battle to keep a jealous ghost from thwarting their creative efforts.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Adventures of Pericles, The

(see reviews under Pericles)

Pericles (The Adventures of)
Stratford Festival - Tom Patterson Theater

As far as I’m concerned, The Adventures of Pericles is two hours of terrible playwriting, ending with the touching story of Pericles’s lost daughter, Marina. A younger, cuter, infinitely less interesting version of Odysseus, this Pericles wanders through eight plots, each elaborately introduced by a long-winded narrator named Gower (the name of the earlier poet whose story Shakespeare appropriated and messed with).

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Taming of the Shrew, The
Stratford Festival - Festival Theater

This showy production of Shakespeare’s beloved comedy of the battle of the sexes is mostly a romp for Stratford’s star couple: Ben Carlson [also playing Captain von Trapp this season in The Sound of Music and an internationally renowned Hamlet] and Deborah Hay [luminous star of Cabaret and Born Yesterday at Shaw Festival and seven Shakespearean plays at Stratford]. They are undeniably great actors, a treat to see anywhere in any roles.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Central Square Theater

I'd like to take this opportunity to appreciate the Garden Rose production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at the Central Square Theater and to reflect about the meaning of the play. And since I believe one of the tasks of art is to help the audience improve our world, I would also like to discuss how this play can help us be better people and create a better society.

Adam Frost
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Saint Joan of the Stockyards
Irondale Center

We rarely get to see Brechtian theater, less often to see it done well. So much more terrific to find The Irondale Ensemble Project’s (off-off-Broadway, Brooklyn) excellent production of Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards.

Director Peter Kleinert includes so many verfremdungseffekt techniques in this production that it reads like a catalogue from Brecht himself. There’s a whiteboard at the back of the stage area, and actors write on it as the play proceeds. Props and costumes are visible when not being used. The audience is often in the light.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Liberty City
ETA Creative Arts Center

The entire world looks different to a child—psychologically, of course, with its array of new creatures and concepts, but physically, too. Everything is bigger, for one thing. Adults appear initially, not as faces, but as buttocks and bellies, sternums and shoulder blades. To be a child in the midst of a crowd is to be invisible, an encumbrance tripped over, stepped on, or kicked aside by swarms of pedestrians. In order to avoid being sucked into the chaos, a child must focus exclusively on escape to the shelter of familiar surroundings.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Love and Human Remains
Rivendell Theater

Brad Fraser's group portrait of young Canadians embracing the sunset of nihilistic hedonism—before the fallout from the AIDS epidemic registered across all segments of society—was a lot more shocking in 1991. The danger of libidinal license is a theme long exploited in films but rarely depicted in live performance with the take-no-prisoners vigor of the sensation-seeking singles of Edmonton.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Introduction to Heat Transfer, An
Full Circle Theater

Keep an eye on the gifted young people behind An Introduction to Heat Transfer: playwright Haley Jakobson and actors Matisse Haddad and Kaela Shaw. During their time at Boston University, they worked on the piece together, putting it up as a student project and then refining text and performance as they got feedback from mentors and audience. The positive response encouraged them to keep the play alive after graduation.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Hamlet
Stratford Festival - Festival Theater

Short of doing a tedious textual exegesis or a pedantic comparison of specific lines and scenes, it’s difficult to review another Hamlet after seeing so many of them. We need and want to see more performances of great classic works like Hamlet or “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” or “The Sleeping Beauty” ballet; they should be kept alive. But way past the twentieth one, I tend to give up on ranking the performance and try to describe its virtues and compare its parts to the same parts in previous interpretations.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
New Country
Cherry Lane Theater

Every once in a while, a small play–let’s say in this case a trifle, or is it truffle? – ensconced in an intimate, somewhat out-of-the-way theater, makes a big noise. New Country,written by Mark Roberts, is one of these plays.

Ed Rubin
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Six Guitars
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

On opening night of Six Guitars, Chase Padgett and the six guitar-playing characters he’s created found a mostly adoring cabaret audience at Florida Studio Theater. Some, though, left at intermission, and I confess I wish I could have too. Why? I’d have preferred Chase Padgett just exhibiting his considerable talent for illustrating different styles of music and playing it on his guitar. Instead he acts six characters who do so.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
stop. reset.
Goodman Theater

The written word's Armageddon has long been a topic for speculative fiction, ranging from Ray Bradbury's “Fahrenheit 451” to Anne Washburn's Mister Burns: A Post-Electric Play. Faced with the Four Horsemen of the Internet heralding the extinction of their earthly mission, as well as the multitude of seductive toys threatening to sway them from their purpose, writers today are easily propelled by the urgency of rescuing their craft into employing extravagant plot devices straining both credibility and coherence.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Stick Fly
Windy City Playhouse

Twenty years ago, Lydia R. Diamond set out to write a "well-made" family drama in the style of mid-20th-century authors like Lillian Hellman—a genre that Horton Foote, Lorraine Hansberry and Tracy Letts have since invoked. The venerable conference-round-the-couch or midnight-in-the-kitchen polemics take on new resonance in 2015, however.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Forbidden Broadway's Greatest Hits
Act II Playhouse

Gerard Alessandrini has been writing and producing parodies of Broadway and imitations of Broadway singers at small Manhattan clubs since 1982. The entertainers have been relatively unknown youngsters; the most familiar name to come out of Forbidden Broadway is Jason Alexander who, of course, is famed more as a television actor than a theater singer.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Ever After
Paper Mill Playhouse

This world premiere of Ever After has all the glamour and pizzazz we associate with Paper Mill Playhouse. The star performances are outstanding. Its subject, however, has competition from numerous other versions of the Cinderella story— in two Disney incarnations, in an updated Rodgers & Hammerstein production, and in the Sondheim spoof of Into the Woods.This new human back-story originated in the 1998 non-musical movie of the same name.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Something Rotten!
St. James Theater

Some theater-loving friends refused to buy tickets for this show because they couldn’t bear to see Shakespeare ridiculed. Never fear. The thrust of Something Rotten! is a celebration of the American musical, not a tearing down of the Bard.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
11th Annual One-Act Festival: Superheroes
Arcade Theater

Americans’ adulation of the rich and famous – Hollywood celebrities, A-listers, sports stars, etc. – takes a quirky turn in Milwaukee’s Pink Banana Theater Co.’s one-act play festival. In the five productions that run a total of about two hours, audiences are allowed to see the risks, as well as the rewards, that celebrities face.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Fantasticks, The
Snapple Theater Center - Jerry Orbach Theater

Q: What’s the only Off Broadway show to have ever won a Tony Award?
A: The Fantasticks, in 1992.

After a brief scare that the production would close in May, this most delightful of little musicals has gotten a reprieve. Two devoted fans, who insisted on anonymity, vowed to contribute the money that’s necessary to keep The Fantasticks open. A thousand blessings on their hearts and wallets.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Permanent Image, A
Rogue Machine

A screwball comedy about euthanasia? That’s the unlikely combination playwright Samuel D. Hunter tinkers with in A Permanent Image, now in its West Coast premiere at Rogue Machine. Does it come off? Well, yes and no is the equivocal answer.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Act of God, An
Studio 54

"Why, God, Why?" "Why is there suffering?" Since Creation, so many questions for the Supreme Being.

Well, God listened and, in An Act of God, a sort of celestial Q-and-A, He explains all, the mysteries (and exaggerations) of the Bible, the miracles (and misinterpretations), and He's here to set things straight.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Inspired Lunacy
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz Theater

In Inspired Lunacy, a wealth of talented performers merits the descriptive first word of the title. The “Lunacy” is in the lyrics by comedy writers of the last century for whom composers provided amusing novelty songs. An in-house creation, culling subjects and substance from previous FST shows, the show is full of extraordinary verve.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Mamma Mia!
Broadhurst

If you have out-of-town visitors this summer, take them to see Mamma Mia! At the performance I attended, the audience was filled with foreign tourists, many of them Asian, and they were having a ball.

Let’s face it, the plot is simple, and the language is easy to understand for anyone with a working knowledge of English. Several of the people with whom I spoke had seen the movie dubbed into their native tongue. So what were they doing there? Rocking out to the good old music. There was a group of school kids in the balcony; they were having a great time, too.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Act of God, An
Studio 54

Q: Why would the wildly popular, highest-paid actor on TV take the time to appear on Broadway in what is essentially an hour-and- a half monologue which has every chance of offending a wide percentage of the population? A: Because when he’s Jim Parsons, he can.

Parsons has an effortless delivery of even the most outrageous material. He’s likable and funny spouting lines that would make the audience think twice if said by a lesser comic genius.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Raven Complex

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, is nowadays associated with a high-calorie costume romp featuring a pair of rich, sexy, incorrigible villains: the preening Marquise de Merteuil, whose pique at being dumped by her boyfriend leads her to transform his convent-raised fiancée into a wanton slut, abetted by the priapal Vicompte de Valmont, currently preoccupied with luring a young matron renowned for her fidelity into adultery.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
December Man, The
Angel Island

The mistake that amateur shooters make, according to novelist Thomas Perry, is that they don't think beyond the moment of the kill, so that often they find suicide to be their sole escape from the chaos and confusion of deciding what to do next. The perpetrator of the 1989 "Montreal Massacre" embarked on his deadly rampage as a protest against feminism—separating a classroom of engineering students by gender, before executing the women—leaving him with no further ideological directive following his initial attack but to discharge his firearm upon himself.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2015

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