Country House, The
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Think Chekhov-lite as you watch the comings and goings of this elite thespian family led by its formidable matriarch, Anna Patterson. Donald Margulies's new play, The Country House,now at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, has evident Chekhovian influences. However, once the ambiance of John Lee Beatty's casually comfy country escape in the Berkshires, the bright witticisms, and the promise of the intriguing, complicated characters wears thin, blandness sets in.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
October 2014
Country House, The
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Whatever happened to the Straw Hat Circuit, where star vehicles lured in local audiences to bask in the glow of name performers they would otherwise never glimpse in the flesh? The genre is alive and okay, if not really well, in The Country House. The eternally divine Blythe Danner is Anna Patterson, an actress who’s respected, and even famous, but no longer in real demand. She has found it difficult to be comfortable in the Williamstown home where her daughter, the beautiful Kathy, lived and, just last year, died of cancer.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2014
South Pacific
Westchester Broadway Theater

The sun is so huge and bright; the whole sky seems to be “a bright canary yellow.” The ocean is “beautiful and still”; it’s the perfect setting for a couple to fall in love at first glance, “across a crowded room.” In fact, it’s paradise, even if it does get awfully hot, and malaria is endemic.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2014
This is Our Youth
Cort Theater

There is not much plot but a lot of talk in Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth, a character study of disenchanted New York dropouts in a provocative revival directed by Anna D. Shapiro at the Cort Theater. The play, which opened in 1996, still delivers the humanity of the stoned, dissatisfied Dennis and Warren in 1982, portrayed with humor and energy by Kieran Culkin and Michael Cera in memorable Broadway debuts.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
October 2014
This is Our Youth
Cort Theater

Kenneth Lonergan’s This is Our Youth is billed as a comedy, but the premise is a long way from funny. The plot centers on a trio of alienated young adults in Reagan-era 1982. Warren Straub (Michael Cera) has been thrown out of his house by his father, an abusive lingerie magnate with criminal ties. Before he leaves, Warren steals $15,000 from his father’s bedroom. He then heads over to the Upper West Side studio apartment of his friend, Dennis Ziegler (Kieran Culkin).

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
My Name is Asher Lev
Stage 773

To be a member of Brooklyn's Ladover Hassidic Jewish settlement in the 1940s and '50s was to occupy—take a deep breath, now—a subsect of a subsect of yet another subsect of a religious minority whose numbers recently suffered a severe reduction at the hands of first, the Germans, then the Russians. Combine these factors with the Biblical proscription against the forging of graven images, and there can be no unlikelier spawning ground for a genius whose compulsive response to the chaos of his surroundings is to draw pictures of it.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
This is Our Youth
Cort Theater

Kenneth Lonergan's play This is Our Youth garnered enthusiastic reviews during its original limited run Off Broadway in 1996. A revival two years later, again Off Broadway, affirmed it as an insightful, gutsy, street-smart contemporary drama. It isn't a surprise that the recent Steppenwolf production with its starry cast would provide reason enough for a Broadway production.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Marjorie Prime
Mark Taper Forum

With the population aging – think baby boomers, as well as their parents and grandparents – Alzheimer, dementia, and loss of memory are among the hottest of hot-button topics around. (Well, if you push aside the daily barrage of updates on Ebola, ISIS, terrorism, as well as older articles on the spread of AIDS, the two Gulf Wars and 9/11.) Everybody that I speak with knows somebody suffering from Alzheimer’s or some sort of dementia. It seems to be an epidemic.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Wittenberg
F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater

Of course the title of David Davalos's play rings a bell. But if you are thinking of the University in Springfield, Ohio you are a little off the mark—although it is the American cousin of Wittenberg University in Germany that is famous as Professor/Theologian Martin Luther's bully pulpit for his Ninety-Five Theses and principally the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Color Purple, The
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse Theater

Hope, faith, redemption and courage, set in rural Georgia in 1911, are themes at the heart of The Color Purple.A Milwaukee Repertory Theater production of this 2005 musical, based on the 1982 novel by Alice Walker and the movie that followed it, marks the unofficial opening of the city’s theater season.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Cock
Rogue Machine

Cock, by the much-lauded British playwright Mike Bartlett, is a prolonged lovers’ spat, a battle between M (Matthew Elkins) and W (Rebecca Mozo) for the affections of a young stud named John (Patrick Stafford).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Glass Menagerie, The
Tenth Street Theater

Tennessee Williams’s enduring family drama, The Glass Menagerie, is an older play with new life breathed into it by a sparkling cast for Milwaukee’s In Tandem Theater. Set in St. Louis in the 1930s, Glass Menagerieis, as a narrator tells us, a “memory play.” As such, he tells us, it is not fully illuminated but exists in a twilight world. He cautions that the action may not be naturalistic.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Stupid Fucking Bird
The Biograph

Don't be fooled by the publicity promoting this adaptation of The Seagull as a deconstructive farce on the order of Inspecting Carol. Aaron Posner's surprisingly smart gloss on Anton Chekhov's seminal 19th-century Russian drama reads more as live-action script analysis, tracking its source's subtextual dynamics unencumbered by period social and environmental factors.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
My Manana Comes

See review(s) under: My Mañana Comes

My Mañana Comes
Peter Jay Sharp Theater

Perhaps as important as is my positive response to Elizabeth Irwin's play My Mañana Comes — super charged with the chaos, conflicts and camaraderie among the busboys at an upscale, upper East Side French restaurant— is acknowledging the commendable on-going mission of an organization called The Playwrights Realm. Irwin is this year's recipient of their Page One Program, dedicated to supporting an up and coming playwright for one year with "a sweep of services to aid in the advancement of their career.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Icebound
Metropolitan Playhouse

A family of selfish, greedy, mean-spirited rural New Englanders are the core of Icebound the play by Owen Gould Davis, Jr. that received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1923. It is a fine if not extraordinary play, in which dissension is created among the family awaiting the impending death of the matriarch and dealing with the unexpected and unwelcome return of the estranged black sheep.

This play was another leg up for Davis following his 1921 success on Broadway with The Detour which was revived two years ago by the Metropolitan Playhouse).

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Love Letters
Brooks Atkinson Theater

Can a bare-bones Off-Broadway show, which features only two characters, a table and two chairs, no scenery, no costumes, and no action, make it on The Great White Way? Add to these limitations the fact that the actors are reading their lines from looseleaf notebooks, and they never make direct eye contact. Doesn’t sound promising, but this production of Love Letters keeps the interest of the audience throughout, and with Brian Dennehy and Mia Farrow as the authors of the title missives, no other cast is needed to fill the stage.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Janice Underwater
Kean University - Zella Fry Theater

Janice (Amy Staats) is a single, 32-year-old visual artist who has just lost her job and may not be able to continue paying the rent on her apartment. But that's not the real reason she feels she is not only underwater but also under siege. Tormented by the fear she may have inherited the genes that bring on mental illness, she finds herself recklessly testing the boundaries of rational behavior.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Witch Slap!
Raven Theater

The annual Joining Sword and Pen competition challenges its contestants to write a play based on a specified graphic image of women portrayed in a martial context. Last year's chosen visual, however, was Gabriella Boros's grotesque painting of two masked and hooded figures engaging in a brand of surgery resembling a Three Stooges stunt gone Jacobean. In Witch Slap!, prize winner Jeff Goode attempts to salvage a reading on this cryptic situation rendering its gruesome content palatable to modern audiences, and for the most part, he succeeds.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Antony and Cleopatra
McCarter Theater Center - Berlind Theater

Cleopatra was, to put it kindly, not especially well-known for her deeds but rather for being simply well-known (in the biblical sense). Even if we don't see her "doing it" or even talking about "doing it," she is the embodiment of physical love and desire in Shakespeare’s  Antony and Cleopatra. Funnily, there are no passionate love scenes, save a kiss and a little cuddling in this somewhat action-less play about love. As such, it puts unusual demands upon the two actors who share title billing.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Ecstasy
A Red Orchid Theater

In 1979 England, 19 pounds (about $31 U.S.) a week rents a petrol-station cashier an SRO with a calico curtain hanging below the sink, a folding tray doubling as a liquor table, a kitchen chair for seating guests, and a bed pushed against the bricked-up fireplace. This being the outskirts of London, the residents also enjoy such post-WWII amenities as coin-meter electricity, a bathroom down the hall with an audible dripping pipe and a pay telephone on the sidewalk outside.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Morning's at Seven
Manatee Performing Arts Center - Bradenton Kiwanis Theater

Set in an American town in 1938, Morning’s at Seven, Paul Osborn’s nostalgic story of four mature sisters at a turning point in their lives, seems to strike audiences as either classic or creaky. Strong performances make a big difference to the play’s reception, and director Pam Wiley has elicited a number of them.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter
Next Act Theater

Milwaukee’s Next Act Theatre makes its season debut with Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter, a play about a female Marine who returns home from duty in Iraq. Not quite ready to reconnect with her mother and two young daughters, Jenny (in a nicely nuanced performance by newcomer Chelsea D. Harrison) interrupts her journey in a rundown bus station. Jenny struggles to find out who she has become in a play aimed at building an understanding of US veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
This is Our Youth
Cort Theater

The revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s 1996 play, This is our Youth, by the Steppenwolf Company, now on Broadway, starts, pre-curtain, with some awful moaning music (a term I use advisedly) as an intro to this exposition of the lives of drug-infested, drop-out losers, supposedly in 1982, but to me it felt more like 70s.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Dinner with the Boys
New Jersey Repertory

In Dan Lauria's Grand Guignol-ish comedy Dinner with the Boys a pair of Brooklyn-based professional hit-men — Charlie (Dan Lauria) and Dominic (Richard Zavaglia) — have been sequestered by their mob boss Big Anthony, Jr. (Ray Abruzzo) to remain in semi-seclusion in a house somewhere in the wilds of New Jersey.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Downpour, The
The Greenhouse

In olden days, they were called "family insanities"—mental disorders seemingly handed down through generations like physical characteristics. Nowadays such fears are no longer as prevalent, but if your mother suffered postpartum psychosis so severe as to compel her to inflict harm upon herself and her progeny, wouldn't you think twice before deciding to have a child? And if you were the sister of the optimistic mommy-to-be, wouldn't you keep a watchful eye for signs of erratic behavior?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Good Father, The
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

Nicely balanced at about half side-splitting comedy and half heart-breaking tragedy, The Good Father is an impressive effort by playwright Christian O’Reilly. His professional background as a screenwriter no doubt honed his keen gift for dialogue displayed in this two-character play. This production by Milwaukee Chamber Theater is the play’s Midwest premiere.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
My Mañana Comes
Peter Jay Sharp Theater

In My Mañana Comes, playwright Elizabeth Irwin puts a face on the hidden world of restaurant kitchen workers. During long days of routine tasks and nonstop motion, four busboys at this upscale Madison Avenue eatery face perpetual problems of illegal immigration, poverty, cultural discrimination, and unequal pay scales. Director Chay Yew does an admirable job of keeping the characters vivid, their peppery humor underscored with apprehension even as they dream of something better and collecting small stipends for shift labor.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Wait Until Dark
Geva Theater - Mainstage

As far as I can remember about Frederick Knott’s thriller, Wait Until Dark, in its earlier, exciting play, film and TV versions, Jeffrey Hatcher’s new, 2013 changes to the script seem fairly minimal. The time is now 1944, not 1966; Mike is now a former Marine friend who served in Italy with the husband instead of just a former buddy; the hidden loot everyone is looking for is diamonds, not heroin, etc. But I can’t remember much of the original dialogue, and I’d like to think that the older versions made the characters more involving and entertaining.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Fabulous! The Queen of New Musical Comedies
Times Square Arts Center

In this corny, campy comedy, loose with double-entendres, Laura Lee Handle and Jane Mann, two female impersonators in Paris, spot a diamond necklace heist. Out of work and almost pawning their glitter and boas, the pair receive a a telegram: the once-glamorous cruise ship, "The Queen Ethel May," needs two showgirls for its upcoming crossing to New York. What a break! One catch: the new showgirls have to convince everyone they are really girls.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Animals Out of Paper
David Henry Hwang Theater

Although Rajiv Joseph’s Animals Out of Paper doesn’t have the originality and power of his 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, the play is a worthy addition to his repertoire.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Race
Kirk Douglas Theater

Race, David Mamet’s legal drama, flopped on Broadway in 2009, but that hasn’t kept the Center Theater Group from mounting its own production of the play, this one starring Chris Bauer, kingpin of the HBO series “True Blood.”

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Doyle and Debbie Show, The
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

A mainstay in Nashville, Tenn., The Doyle and Debbie Show is now entertaining Milwaukee audiences with its honky-tonk hijinks. Billed in its promotional materials as “a perfect blend of comedy and country music,” the show lives up to its hype with side-splitting lyrics to the songs sung by country-western duo Doyle and Debbie.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Wayside Motor Inn
Pershing Square Signature Center - Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theater

An empty generic hotel room -- a blank canvas for countless probabilities. Guests register into the hotel with personal dramas, filling the empty room with tears, laughs, fear and joy. However, Signature Theater Company's production of A.R. Gurney's The Wayside Motor Innbrings a creative twist to the hotel. Gradually the room becomes a busy hive with an aggregate of ten characters’ individual stories and conversations, crisscrossing each other as they move around the room to the beds, the balcony or bathroom.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Bauer
59E59 Theaters

Influenced by non-traditionalists Chagall, Miro, and particularly Wassily Kandinsky, German-born Rudolf Bauer (1889-1953) helped pioneer the international avant-garde art world in the first half of the 20th century. He was devoted to free forms and an inspiration to the emerging American abstract artists. A consummate artist, Bauer worked relentlessly even after the Gestapo arrested him in 1938 for his "degenerate" art. In prison, he sketched on bits of paper with pencils.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Antony and Cleopatra
Tom Patterson Theater

Stratford’s latest Antony and Cleopatra is their usual first-rate reading of a Shakespearean classic with a cast of superbly trained classical actors and an elegant-looking production. But I was still less than thrilled by the experience; and, in fact, I’m beginning to think that despite all its great moments and beloved dialogue, I just don’t like the play.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
September 2014
Some Men
Rivendell Theater

Until 1900, there was no recognition of men who love men as a distinct subculture. The responsibility of male children was to ensure continuance of the family name; procreative duties, once discharged, allowed those preferring the off-duty company of their own sex to pursue their own interests outside of the female-centered domestic sphere. This is why Some Men, Terrence McNally's Dickensian account of gays in the United States, can tie together three generations by lineage, despite wedlock and parenthood existing only as wistful fantasies until very recently.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2014
Hushabye
Steppenwolf Theater

see review under Steppenwolf First Look Repertory of New Work: https://www.totaltheater.com/?q=node/6447.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2014
Okay, Bye
Steppenwolf Theater

see review under Steppenwolf First Look Repertory of New Work: https://www.totaltheater.com/?q=node/6447.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2014
Ironbound
Steppenwolf Theater

see review under Steppenwolf First Look Repertory of New Work: https://www.totaltheater.com/?q=node/6447.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2014

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