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
Satchmo at the Waldorf
Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts - Lovelace Studio Theater

“The whole history of jazz can be summed up in four words: Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker,” said trumpeter Miles Davis.

Both Parker and Davis figure in Satchmo at the Waldorf, the solo play about Armstrong which is now strutting its stuff at the Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills. Starring as Armstrong is John Douglas Thompson, who was nominated for a Drama Desk award when he did Satchmo at New York City’s Westside Theater last year.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2015
King John
Stratford Festival - Tom Patterson Theater

In conjunction with the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, several companies have revived Shakespeare’s drama about King John, the monarch who signed that momentous document. He was a flawed ruler, and the play is one of Shakespeare’s lesser works, but let’s give him some attention in this multi-centennial year.<

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Antony and Cleopatra
Stratford Festival - Tom Patterson Theater

The Stratford Festival has launched a project to disseminate all of Shakespeare’s plays in high definition to cinemas worldwide. This first offering, recorded last summer, is an odd choice. I think of Antony and Cleopatra as a cross between two earlier Shakespeare dramas. Principal characters are holdovers from Julius Caesar, while the deaths of its lovers are similar to those in Romeo and Juliet. Antony and Cleopatra,however, is a weaker play than either of its antecedents.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Woody Sez
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

David M. Lutken embodies Woody Guthrie joyfully as he passes on the causes and feelings in both Woody’s songs and his life. He’s on a constant journey communicating to and about people, especially the deserving but unheralded common folk, all over the world. His high-stepping and mood are remarkable considering his ballads present so many tragedies from his own life’s start and end, as well as his countryfolks’ political, social, and economic ones.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Belfast Girls
The Den

The Orphan Emigration Scheme probably seemed a good idea when Earl Grey first hatched it in 1848: The predominantly male British colonies in Australia wanted the stabilizing influence of females, so young orphanage-raised women of good character and useful domestic skills were awarded ship's passage, along with room and board, to the land "down under." What could go wrong?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Cagney
York Theater at St. Peter's Church

James Cagney never said, "Mmm, you dirty rat." He quit Warner Brothers because he was tired of playing Hollywood tough guys. While he could be scrappy when he had to be, James Cagney was actually a softie with a spine of steel.

It's all here in Cagney, a sketchy song-and-dance bio-musical currently making its the New York premier at the the York Theater. Librettist Peter Colley does not present a deep character study, but Cagney wins as an entertaining mix of toe-tapping with rat-tat-tat staccato speech of one of the most successful actors in film.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Shining Lives
North Shore Center for the Performing Arts

Audiences subscribing to Edgar Allan Poe's conviction that romance lies in tales of young, beautiful, dead women have enjoyed many a good cry over These Shining Lives, Melanie Marnich's docu-tragedy of industrial technology. The expected weeps are also forthcoming in this musical adaptation featuring a score by Andre Pluess and Amanda Dehnert, with the book and lyrics by Jessica Thebus.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Cowboy versus Samurai
The Den

Volumes have been written about the struggle of young white men to find their own identity, as opposed to that imposed upon them by their families, culture or social position. Non-WASP males in fiction, by contrast, are assumed to be so secure within their communities that even the inevitable adolescent restlessness never disturbs the tribal solidarity.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
On the Twentieth Century
American Airlines Theater

All aboard, lovers of Art Deco and great Broadway musicals! David Rockwell’s magnificent metallic deco drop for On the Twentieth Century is, itself, worth the price of admission for this all-awards-winnable musical revival. But there’s also the dynamite performance of the very blonde Kristin Chenoweth as the Major Hollywood Star, Lily Garland, being wooed and tricked back to the Great White Way by her former lover, Broadway producer, and all-`round Svengali, the currently bankrupt and out of ideas Oscar Jaffee.

Glenn Loney
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Into the Woods
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

Into the Woods, composer Stephen Sondheim’s modern take on Grimm fairy tales, seems especially suited to Milwaukee’s Skylight Music Theater. With previous blockbusters such as Hair, Sunday in the Park with George and In the Heights, expectations were high. And while Into the Woods doesn’t disappoint, it doesn’t completely excel, either. What emerges through the shadowy “woods” of the title is a gorgeous show, complete with a fantastically detailed set, lavish costumes, and elaborate lighting.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Kinky Boots
Auditorium Theater

I saw this national tour of hit Broadway show Kinky Boots on its final performance in Rochester, New York on a Sunday evening; and the biggest surprise for me was that the mostly elderly audience reacted with the screaming enthusiasm of a younger crowd at a rock concert.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Book of Mormon, The
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

It has taken “only” three years for a tour of The Book of Mormon to reach Milwaukee. The tour, now in Milwaukee, started December 2012 in Chicago. The production ran an impressive 10 months before moving to its next stop. While in Chicago, the show broke all box-office records for that particular theater. Alas, it is one of the liabilities of Milwaukee’s proximity to Chicago that shows which have an extended run in the Windy City rarely come straight north to Milwaukee. The Book of Mormon is the latest to follow this trend.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
What I Did Last Summer
Pershing Square Signature Center - Irene Diamond Stage

It's a long hot summer in 1945 and, with his father sent off to war, a restless 14-year-old boy cooped up in a lakeside house with his stressed mother and a prissy older sister, and well, things are bound to happen. More important, a few lessons are learned in What I Did Last Summer as playwright A.R Gurney looks back at his own coming-of-age summer of '45.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Karen Jacobsen
Stage 72 at The Triad

The Triad on West 72nd St. has done it again -- a super musical performance: Karen Jacobsen, in a spectacular gown, is beautiful, funny, a lovely light-fingered pianist, and a terrific singer with a fine clear voice who writes melodically original personal songs giving glimpses of her life and relationships (breaking up and one with ironic humor: “Your Body Over Mine,” etc.). Some are gifts to friends, to husband, and most recently to her mother.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Inana
Timeline Theater

Technically, the McGuffin driving our plot is a graven idol, but this is no Maltese falcon, coveted by its pursuers solely for its material value. Instead, Michele Lowe's Inana opens in 2003, in a London hotel room where Mosul museum curator Yasin Shalid and his new spouse have arrived for their honeymoon.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Little Foxes, The
Goodman Theater

Lillian Hellman never pulled her punches, instead calling out advocates of injustice and inhumanity with a ferocity that made producers nervous, hence the frequent bowdlerization of her more candid dramatic themes (e.g., lesbianism in The Children's Hour).The standard formula for rendering "safe" her microcosmic excoriation of post-bellum morality and greed has been to reduce its heroine to a fairy-tale wicked queen, or to muffle its ethical arguments under a haze of Chekhovian nostalgia.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Little Wars
Clarion Theater

Gertrude Stein said, "...for every story worth telling, there’s a dozen secrets worth keeping."

Any gabfest should be so lucky as to unearth the secrets of the literati gathered one evening at Gertrude Stein's country home in France. Then again, few gabfests would include such a coterie of intriguing talented women as playwright Steven Carl McCasland's Little Wars. During one evening in 1940, just before France fell to Germany, the stories that emerge are personal, universal, often heart-rending and even horrifying.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Driving Miss Daisy
Queensland Performing Arts Center

Note: This production was reviewed via pre-recorded video streaming (of a taped 2013 performance) to a movie theater and not in person.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Suddenly Last Summer
Next Act Theater

After six years of producing plays with non-traditional casting (which, in this case, means all African-American casts), UPROOTED Theater bids farewell with its stinging production of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer. Although the company hadn’t planned on staging a Williams trilogy during its brief duration, co-founder Dennis Johnson notes that “it seems to have worked out that way.” In any case, the theater is definitely going out with a bang, not a whimper.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
To the Moon
Christ Church Neighborhood House

One of Philadelphia’s leading actors happens to resemble Jackie Gleason (and also Orson Welles in his mature years). Scott Greer uses that coincidence to portray an overweight working-class guy who idolizes Gleason and concocts a scheme to get rich, much like the designs of Gleason’s character on “The Honeymooners.”

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
White Road, The
The Den

Prevailing commercial practice dictates that stories set in exotic climes still revolve on human relationships—falling in love, coming of age, settling old scores—with their environment relegated to background decoration or propulsive coincidences. Karen Tarjen's account of Ernest Shackleton's attempt to navigate the Antarctic Circle in 1912 rejects this approach, however.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Bad Jews
Theater Wit

A chai is a kind of Jewish medallion, belonging, in this case, to a recently deceased clan patriarch and thus coveted by two of his grandchildren, not for its material value, but for what it symbolizes—and therein lies the source of the conflict in Joshua Harmon's Bad Jews. Since hostilities commence mere seconds after the curtain rises and proceed to swiftly escalate at full-out take-no-prisoners volume, any personal information about the combatants soon becomes lost in the flying verbiage.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Visit, The
Lyceum Theater

A long time ago, Friedrich Durrenmatt wrote a play, The Visit, which was adapted by Maurice Valency, and then re-adapted into a musical with book by Terrence McNally, music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb. It’s now playing on Broadway with the live wire Chita Rivera and Roger Rees in the leads and a large, very strong cast, including a vivid Mary Beth Peil.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
It Shoulda Been You
Brooks Atkinson Theater

With the cleverest lyrics since Moss Hart or Oscar Hammerstein, the lively, zippy It Shoulda Been You, book and lyrics by Brian Hargrove, music by Barbara Anselmi, is the funniest show in town. Director David Hyde Pierce has put together a gang of comedians, each a comic personality with a good voice.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Immediate Family
Mark Taper Forum

There’s good news and bad news about Immediate Family, the new play at the Mark Taper Forum. Written by Paul Oakley Stovall, the ironically-titled dramedy deals with an all-too-familiar set-up: the coming out of a gay son to his straight, conventional family. The wrinkle is that the family is black and the son’s lover is white (and Swedish to boot).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Three Sisters
The Den - Mainstage

The biggest obstacle to modern audience comprehension of Chekhov's pre-revolutionary Russian society is not the frequently over-academic translations of his texts, nor the nostalgic distractions of samovars and bell-skirted gowns, but our unfamiliarity with the infrastructure of its dramatic universe. Substituting "Hollywood" for "Moscow," or an overseas U.S. military base for a remote small-town army garrison—as a few theater companies have—goes only so far in closing the cultural gap to the extent necessary to promote identification with its inhabitants.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Side Man
The Greenhouse

Once upon a time, there was a musician who loved music more than anything in the world, and a woman, who also loved the music, and the man who made it, as well. Along with their likewise muse-worshipping companions, they lived happy and contented—until the music began to die out, compelling them to adopt "adult" responsibilities, as defined by mainstream society. Like any endangered species, some adapted, and some didn't.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
All's Well That Ends Well
Theater Wit

If our story's premise was that of a maiden forced into a marriage against her wishes, we'd be in her corner immediately, but when a young bachelor is bestowed in matrimony by his king as a reward to the prospective bride, the tale is labeled a "problem play" and its dynamic reduced to a case study in misogynistic codependency. To be sure, the reluctant groom protests his duty most unceremoniously, but Shakespeare scholars might recall that Katherine the Shrew was hardly a compliant newlywed, either.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Big Fish
Marcus Center - Todd Wehr Theater

Ask any seven-year-old what kind of characters should be in a play, and you might get the following answer: a circus performer, a giant, a witch, a mermaid and a cowboy. Believe it or not, all of these characters appear in a world-premiere version of the Broadway musical, Big Fish. This remarkable production was created by John August for Milwaukee’s First Stage.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike
Geva Theater Center

Whatever little criticisms I may apply to it, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is a Tony Award-winning “Best New Play” in a handsome co-production by two top regional theaters, Cleveland Playhouse and Geva Theatre Center. It has an attractive, able cast, directed by a master of stage hilarity. So it is pretty much guaranteed to provide a laugh-filled, enjoyable evening.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Little By Little
Tenth Street Theater

There’s much to like in the musical Little by Little, a show of modest proportions and ambitions. Three characters – who are identified only by their genders (Man, Woman #1 and Woman #2) – go through the “pains” of childhood, adolescence and early adulthood together. As they sing in one of the songs, the show is about the “trouble of mixing friendship and love.” And do make note that singing is all they do; the show has no dialogue.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
City of Angels
Village Church Arts

Milwaukee’s Windfall Theater closes its current season with a stunning production of the musical, City of Angels. Surprisingly, this is the first time the decades-old musical has had a local production.

City of Angels opened on Broadway in 1989 at the Virginia Theater. It was nominated for 10 1990 Tony Awards, and won six of them, including the award for Best Musical. The original cast included Gregg Edelman (1776, Into the Woods) as a detective novelist and James Naughton (Chicago, Our Town) as his onscreen alter ego.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Luck Be a Lady: The Iconic Music of Frank Loesser
Asolo Repertory Theater

It has the music and lyrics of a true American poet-composer of theater and film. It has a cast of Broadway-quality actor-singers-dancers. It has a spirited band plus conductor doing music that’s often arranged with originality, always with verve. What it doesn’t have is the continuity and class of a Frank Loesser show.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
King and I, The
Vivian Beaumont Theater

A hush comes over the house. This is the moment we’ve been waiting for, and we’re not disappointed. In the middle of the friendly dance, the King tells Mrs. Anna that holding two hands is not how the dance is done. She agrees, and as he places his hand firmly around her waist, there’s a slight gasp from the audience. This is where the respect, friction, and friendship of two people from vastly different worlds reveals the sexual attraction beneath the surface.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Mass
Verizon Hall

When Leonard Bernstein unveiled Mass, a “Theatere Piece for Singers, Players & Dancers” in 1971, many critics derided its amalgamation of the diverse forms of Broadway, gospel music, symphony, ballet and rock ‘n’ roll. Lenny already was known for juggling careers as conductor, TV host, serious composer and Broadway songwriter.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
May 2015
Spunk
Westcoast Black Theater Troupe Theater

It isn’t your usual musical theater. It’s three slices of life as lived in the 1920s-’30s in a small African-American town in central Florida with a side trip to Harlem. And its characters talk the talk of time and places.

Exploring relationships between the sexes, all come to us via Guitar Man, a guru who strums up a storm or more subtly suggests how we should think and feel. Blues Speak Woman often helps him or joins five other actors in narrating to commenting on to propelling the action.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2015
Pompie's Place
Don't Tell Mama

The new Pompie’s Place, part of the show center at Don’t Tell Mama on West 46th St. gives us first-class musical entertainment and first-class food--a great combo. The three talented, accomplished singers, Hilary Gardner, Brianna Thomas and Lezlie Harrison, take us on a thrilling jazz/blues trip from St. Louis to Creole-land to Broadway. When Ms. Harrison sang “Ten Cents a Dance,” I really wanted to dance with her.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2015

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