Spamalot
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz Theater

Spamalotis both a parody and a send-up of a parody that puts down theatrical versions of the Arthurian legend. Mostly, it comes from Monty Python’s film about the search for the Holy Grail and adds musical trappings that satirize it and musicals per se. From the start, with a historian pointing on a map to medieval England, everything goes wrong. The dancers who come from behind the map are in modern Holland but Disneyish Dutch dress.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2013
Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, A
Walter Kerr Theater

It's hard enough playing one role in a play, but this season Jefferson Mays is entertaining audiences by portraying an entire family. And he does it with resounding success.

Elyse Trevers
Date Reviewed:
November 2013
Andrea Marcovicci: Moonlight Cocktail
Joe's Pub

How perfect that Andrea Marcovicci's 65th birthday celebrates the sophistication of those years when grownups dressed up and went out on the town, dining and dancing in romantic nightclubs. What show fits her better? Marcovicci may be a millennium gal, but her heart beats to the captivating rhythms and sentiments of the '30's, '40's, and '50's music.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
November 2013
Quiet Storm: Marcus Simeone & Tanya Holt
Metropolitan Room

I saw a good-looking, charming singing duo at The Metropolitan Room: Marcus Simeone and Tanya Holt, in what they call “Quiet Storm.” Each is a fine solo singer, which they demonstrate beautifully, and it’s even more exciting when they cross voices in counterpoint or close harmony in a wide range of songs, nicely arranged by music director Tracy Stark, from older works by Bernstein/Sondheim to more contemporary pieces.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2013
Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, A
Walter Kerr Theater

Whoa — another amazing multi-character performance: Jefferson Mays in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, book and lyrics by Robert L. Freedman, music and lyrics by Steven Litvak. Mays plays old, young, male, female, aristocrat and buffoon. There must be quite a crew backstage to achieve the lightning-fast changes of costume.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2013
Murder for Two
New World Stages

Murder for Two, book and music by Joe Kinosian, book and lyrics by Kelllen Blair, directed with zip and panache by Scott Schwartz with choreography by Wendy Seyb, gives us two piano virtuosos, each accompanying the other, in a marvelous musical farce.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2013
Groucho: A Life in Revue
Next Act Theater

Groucho: A Life in Revue is a loving and revealing tribute to the famed entertainer. Written by Groucho’s son, Arthur Marx, the piece is unsurprisingly sympathetic to the star of vaudeville, film and TV’s “You Bet Your Life.”

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2013
Show Boat
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Though it may be trimmed from its Ziegfeld debut, Show Boat, at Asolo Rep, abounds with emotional and comic appeal with heartfelt performances of iconic songs. Offering insights into smooth sailings and turbulences felt living on the Mississippi (and, selectively, its shores) from 1887 to 1927, the score and text focus on the Cotton Blossom family of owners, performers and crew and how they affect and are affected by the variety of folks and happenings ashore.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2013
The Glass Menagerie
Booth Theater

Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie is a gentle, sensitive play about a frustrated family: mother (Cherry Jones) who is delusional about realities as she tries to hold things together and possibly find a husband for her daughter with a bad leg; daughter (Celia Keenan-Bolger), whose delicate shyness is as fragile as her collection of glass animals; and a restless son (Zachary Quinto) who feels trapped.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2013
Black Suits, The: The New Rock Musical
Kirk Douglas Theater

Four high-school kids in Garden City, NY struggle to make a success of their garage band in The Black Suits, the brash new musical now enjoying a world premiere run at the Kirk Douglas Theater in Los Angeles.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2013
Thirty-Nine Steps, The
Geva Theater - Mainstage

This goofy entertainment has had hundreds of productions on top professional, semi-professional, amateur and high-school levels since it began eight years ago in England and then opened on London’s West End, then Boston, Broadway and all over. The 39 Stepsis [and was] Patrick Barlow’s rewriting of a much simpler, Yorkshire-based, small-scale staging by Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon that inventively reworked John Buchan’s 1915 spy novel.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
November 2013
Akers Sings Porter: Anything Goes
Historic Asolo

Unlike most Cole Porter revues, Karen Akers’s invites us to “Come On Down”-- making her introduction to Porter songs depart from the usual “Another Opening, Another Show.” She follows through with many infrequently heard Porter works and others unusual in the context of a sophisticated revue. Her second choice -- after saying she feels like a million (and we know she looks it) is “Don’t Fence Me In.” Her rendition doesn’t need the explanation that “it’s not a cowboy song.”

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2013
School for Lies, The
Florida State Univerity Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Paris, 1666 — a place and time of political and social abuses and even philosophical/religious hypocrisy. This could not be more so than in the drawing room of Celimene (the clever, captivating Olivia Williamson). The widow seems trapped by her society's preoccupation with gossip and scandal-mongering, corruption and bribes, romantic rivalries, interference with true love, theft, and perversion of secular and religious morality. Society's School for Lies is teaching lessons as fauxas her salon's “marble” floor.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2013
Betrayal
Ethel Barrymore Theater

Harold Pinter’s Betrayalis a fascinating play, and with three Brits who know how to articulate in the roles of the participants in a love triangle, Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz and Rafe Spall, we catch every word. In a subtle play like this, every word is important.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Creditors
Odyssey Theater

The prolific Scottish playwright David Grieg has taken Strindberg's 1889 play, Creditors, and turned it into a mordant and modern-feeling psychological thriller. As directed by David Trainer and acted with Swiss watch-like precision by Burt Grinstead, Heather Anne Prete and Jack Stehlin, Creditorsdeals with the fight between evil and innocence in the lounge of a Swedish seaside hotel.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Snow Geese, The
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

The simmering Russian melancholy in The Snow Geese is something like Chekhov might have written, but this play is not by Chekhov. The Snow Geese, a Manhattan Theatre Club world premiere production, is by playwright Sharr White, acclaimed for The Other Place. While stylishly directed by Daniel Sullivan, the troubled Gaesling family lacks the depth to garner much sympathy.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Fiddler on the Roof
freeFall Studio Theater

The freeFall production of Fiddler on the Roofis so inventive that it startles. Recalling troupes of players traveling through Eastern Europe as 19th joined 20th centuries, the play is compressed to seem a “trunk show” (using many carts, some as stages for action by puppets) both telling and acting out the story. It is, of course, that of the tiny village of Anatevka’s Jewish community and especially poor milkman Tevye and his wife and three girls.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Snow Geese, The
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Sharr White’s The Snow Geese, tightly directed by Daniel Sullivan, is a very engaging family drama set in 1917, as America was entering World War I. The radiant Mary Louise Parker gives a complex, muti-emotional performance as the disturbed, widowed mother of two sons: Evan Jonigkeit, who has joined an elite outfit in the army, and Brian Cross, who has ideas, doubts, and insights as he explores the family’s fall from wealth.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Time to Kill, A
John Golden Theater

John Grisham’s “A Time to Kill,” stage adaption by Rupert Holmes, directed with strength and energy by Ethan McSweeny, is a powerful, riveting courtroom drama with a dynamite cast. It addresses the biblical question in its title: Two white men rape and kill a ten-year-old black girl. Her father (John Douglas Thompson) kills them. The defense attorney (Sebastian Arcelus) and the district attorney (Patrick Page) battle it out. All three are strong, clear and tap deep into their psyches.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Prima Donnettes, The
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

Four women and a mellow male pianist bring us back to the singing, swaying, swinging and sweet-girls-to-sassy ladies Gal Groups from their high school days in the 1960s through to the revolutionary '70s into the '80s. They make the journey with style and syncopation.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
After Midnight
Brooks Atkinson Theater

In a season rife with the cerebral pleasures of Shakespeare, Pinter and Beckett, its time to get visceral. As Dulé Hill advises, drawing on Langston Hughes for narrative touches throughout: after midnight in Harlem your heartbeat is a drum beat. And indeed, the first drumbeat laid out by the 16 musicians hand-picked by artistic director Wynton Marsalis, called The Jazz at Lincoln Center All-Stars, launches you on a magical musical carpet ride that will eventually carry you on out to the street.

Jeannie Lieberman
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Bus Stop
Owen Theater

I had to be in a good mood last Friday night after a dear friend treated me to dinner at Perry’s Grill where the salmon was divine and the service from our waiter, Joe, was first-class. Then it was time to go to “work” at the Owen Theater and view The Players Theater Company’s production of William Inge’s Bus Stop.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Time to Kill, A
John Golden Theater

You won't find any big-name Hollywood celebs in A Time to Kill.John Grisham is the marquee name at Broadway’s Golden Theater. Under the sharp direction of Ethan McSweeny, this Rupert Holmes stage adaptation of Grisham's novel and the popular film that followed centers on some notable stage performances reacting to the drama of a horrific crime.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Big Fish
Neil Simon Theater

Big Fish, book by John August, music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa, which might have been called “Life of a Salesman,” is the most entertaining show in town at this time. Director/choreographer Susan Stroman fills the tall tales of salesman Edward Bloom (a powerful, moving Norbert Leo Butz) with brilliant innovation as she brings to life the mythical characters he describes to his son (such as an amusing giant, played by Ryan Andes) and gives us folk-based dances like The Alabama Strut that expand dance vocabulary to new imaginative heights.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Jersey Boys
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

The phenomenal Jersey Boys continues to swing in this latest tour by Dodger Theatricals. As most of America knows by now, a talented cast of four male singers bring to life the story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons. Born to blue-collar families in a sooty part of New Jersey, they rise, against-all-odds, to fame and fortune.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
After Midnight
Brooks Atkinson Theater

To celebrate jazz great Duke Ellington and his orchestra, as well as the 1923-heyday of the Cotton Club, Wynton Marsalis has handpicked a 17-piece big band and 25 performers to recreate the era in After Midnightat the Brooks Atkinson Theater.

TV’s Dule Hill (“Psych,” “The West Wing”) serves as emcee and quotes poetry from Langston Hughes. Sometimes he is the transition from one act into the next with his pleasant manner, smiling face and tap dancing.

Elyse Trevers
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Romeo and Juliet
Florida State University - Cook Theater

As the headstrong young men of the Capulet and Montague enemy families snarl and face each other while straining in back-to-back chairs, this Romeo and Juliet looks to be like the West Side Story from which the start of this production takes inspiration. But the Montagues get short shrift poetically (Mercutio is cut more than one way in this adaptation), and with Lucy Lavely’s Juliet taking over while Jefferson McDonald’s Romeo stays just a pretty good-natured guy, the play becomes a rushed romance gone wrong.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Night with Janis Joplin, A
Lyceum Theater

At A Night with Janis Joplin, written and directed by Randy Johnson, I sat down in the theater and was immediately repelled by a loud, noisy soundtrack that almost drove me out of the place. This was followed by lights flashing into our eyes, and then another sound assault from the musicians on the stage playing and singing at high decibels.

Janis enters, played by a powerful singer, Mary Bridget Davies, and her considerable talent is drowned out by the underscoring, which makes her words undecipherable. As my friend put it, “It’s too loud to hear.”

RIchmond Shepari
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Goddess, The
Richmond Shepard Theater

The Goddess, by married couple Justine Lambert and Kenneth Nowell, is the funniest sex comedy I’ve ever seen -- an intriguing, well-written play about a couple (Tricia Alexandro and Richard Busser) who, nudged by a Goddess figure (Claudia Mason), decide to try an open marriage -- yield to all temptations and have sexual adventures. It’s a jump back to the pre-AIDS 1970’s when many people in the big cities gave “Free Love” a shot.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Falling
Rogue Machine

Some families live in a war zone. A case in point are the Martins, the Midwestern suburban family depicted in Falling,the powerful new play by Deanna Jent which is now in a West-Coast premiere at Rogue Machine.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Burying the Bones
Tenth Street Theater

In the heart-wrenching wake of post-Apartheid South Africa, a young woman yearns to know the truth about her husband. He is a school teacher who disappeared two years ago and has not been seen since. Mae, the wife, is afraid that her husband has been killed. His “ghost” revisits her in dreams even now because he wants her to find the truth. Such is the basic story behind Burying the Bonesby Chicago-based playwright M.E.H. Lewis. Milwaukee’s In Tandem Theater is staging the play’s Wisconsin premiere.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Glass Menagerie, The
Booth Theater

In his opening monologue in The Glass Menagerie, Tom says, “This play is memory...I give you truth in the pleasant guise of illusion.” Keep that in mind.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Sunshine Boys, The
Contemporary Theater of Dallas

Neil Simon's 1972 chestnut, The Sunshine Boys,opened a three-week run at Contemporary Theater of Dallas on September 20, 2013. Garnering Tonys for Simon for best play and Alan Arkin for best direction, the play revolves around two aging vaudevillians, Al Lewis (Don Alan Croll) and Willie Clark (R. Bruce Elliott) whose top-billed act of Lewis and Clark, The Sunshine Boys, wowed audiences for 43 years.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Sunshine Boys, The
Ahmanson Theater

Fresh from a successful run in London -- and poised to open soon on Broadway -- CTG's production of Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boysseems like a surefire L.A. hit. With Danny DeVito and Judd Hirsch playing the cranky ex-vaudevillians who are persuaded to reunite for a TV special, Simon's 1972 comedy is in good hands. DeVito and Hirsch worked for years together on “Taxi,” and their chemistry helps them create in convincing turns as the battling duo, Lewis and Clark.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2013
Venus in Fur
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stiemke Studio Theater

Milwaukee Repertory Theater joins the ranks of dozens of other regional theaters across the country as it stages, Venus in Fur, David Ives’ dark sex comedy. According to American Theater magazine, Venusis the most-performed play in American theaters this season. A whopping 22 productions will be staged in 2013, according to the magazine’s survey.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
Stones in her Mouth
Palace Theater

Radar L.A., the international festival of contemporary theater (sponsored by Redcat, CalArts and Center Theatre Group), recently invited Lemi Ponifasio, artistic director of the New Zealand-based Mau company, to bring his latest work to Los Angeles.

Stones in her Mouth is still in its workshop stage (it will have its world premiere in December 2013), but its eerie power and beauty come across nonetheless.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
Ragtime
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse Theater

The colorful, fast-paced and engaging Ragtime succeeds on every level at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. So it’s no wonder that this musical of many wonders has become the theater company’s best-selling musical of all time.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
Player King, The
Met Theater

Darin Dahms, one of the unsung heroes of the L.A. theater scene, has remounted The Player King, his one-man show about the Booth family which won critical acclaim in its introductory run last August at Son of Semele Theater. Dahms, a brilliant actor/director, portrays three famous 19th century actors in the piece: patriarch Junius Brutus Booth and his two sons, Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth, the notorious assassin of Abraham Lincoln.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
Old Friends, The
Pershing Square Signature Center - Irene Diamond Stage

It does not take much to throw Horton Foote's sparring troupe of Old Friends into a whole lot of crazy; they are halfway there anyway. In a full-stage premiere at the Signature Theater, The Old Friends, by the esteemed playwright, is a work that has been in progress for decades. Foote, who died at age 93 in 2009, wrote his first version 48 years ago and reworked it off and on over the following decades.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
Humor Abuse
Mark Taper Forum

Lorenzo Pisoni didn't have to run away to join the circus; he simply was born into one. His parents, Larry Pisoni and Peggy Snider, were the co-founders of Pickle Family Circus, a San Francisco-based group of jugglers, clowns, musicians and acrobats. Lorenzo made his stage debut at six with PFC and stayed with it from 1975 to 1987, when he left to go to college. After graduation, he joined Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil, then moved to New York and became a stage actor.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2013

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