St. Jude
Kirk Douglas Theater

Playwright/performer Luis Alfaro's autobiographical solo centers on his bifurcated working-class Latino family: father a devout Catholic, mother a Pentecostal Christian. Alfaro looks back on his childhood with a mixture of amusement and disquiet: the richness and quirkiness of his upbringing was blighted by episodes of emotional and sexual abuse.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
Nerd, The
Texas Repertory Theater

Am I addressing any fans of comedy of the absurd? If so, here are a few notes on Texas Repertory Theater’s current production of the late Larry Shue’s very nutty play, The Nerd.Directed by Steven Fenley and starring wild man James Monaghan in the title role as Rick Steadman, this show has a unique construction because the central character is designed to be endlessly annoying. That can be tough on an audience at times, but if you have an offbeat sense of humor, you may join the many in the audience who find plenty of laughs.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
South Pacific
Owens Theater

Until recently, some important family matters had kept me away from the delights of the Conroe theater scene for over a year. What a pleasure to discover, upon my return, that sold-out houses were becoming more and more common. Such was the case this past Sunday when I discovered the Players Theater Company’s production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacificwas, indeed, sold out at the Owen Theater!

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
Pump Boys and Dinettes
Geva Theater - Mainstage

Geva Theater Center begins its 41st season with a decidedly festive country-opry show about working hard to please an audience. Actually, this is the 30th anniversary of Pump Boys and Dinettes, and the two original female stars, who were also two of the creators (co-authors) of this show – Cass Morgan and Debra Monk – attended Geva’s opening night.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
Grey Gardens
Off the Wall Theater

Off the Wall Theater, one of Milwaukee’s fringe theater companies, earns applause for tackling a project as complicated as Grey Gardens.This quasi-cult musical is based on the true story of two eccentric women who are related to Jackie Kennedy. This production is delivered with polish and enthusiasm by a talented cast. The actors perform on a tiny stage in this 60-seat theater, accompanied only by an upright piano.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
A View from the Bridge
Pacific Resident Theater

Arthur Miller's 1950s play, A View from the Bridge, has been much performed over the years, even as an opera. That presents a predictability problem for anyone who has seen it before, but thanks to Miller's way with drama -- and to the PRT's solid production values -- the play still retains considerable power and import.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
Arsenic and Old Lace
Crighton Theater

Want to have some fun? Want to roll in the aisles with laughter? Stage Right Players may have the answer for you at the Crighton Theater with their uproarious current production of Joseph Kesselring’s comedy romp, Arsenic and Old Lace.Now, mind you, I said “may have the answer.” You must first bring with you a certain set of audience skills, foremost among them the ability to suspend your disbelief of the frantically nutty and highly improbable plot.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
Merchant of Venice, The
Stratford Festival - Festival Theater

Despite a disappointing opening production and serious problems with ailing artists’ requiring replacement, Antoni Cimolino’s first season as Stratford’s Artistic Director has been one of the strongest and most impressive in this great theater center’s history. Having earlier directed a landmark-wonderful revival of Schiller’s Mary Stuart during the opening week, Cimolino ended this season’s new productions with an absolutely splendid revival of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice– smartly designed and lighted and beautifully performed.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
Othello
Stratford Festival - Avon Theater

Shakespeare’s Othellohas been Stratford’s “Scottish Play” – which is to say that it has been bad luck. Illnesses, injuries, a fine actor suddenly addicted and moribund, an English-speaking Israeli actor stunning as Othello in Hebrew but delivering the English speeches in a Yiddish-joke accent that had us straining not to laugh: this great play has seemed cursed!

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
Prometheus Bound
Getty Villa's Barbara & Lawrence Fleischman Theater

Man vs. Power was Aeschylus' theme back in the 5th century B.C., and it's still relevant today in the new production of Prometheus Boundat the Getty Villa. As directed by Travis Preston, dean of the Cal Arts School of Theater, the play looks at the price Prometheus (Ron Cephas Jones) must pay for his crime of having stolen fire -- the divine spark of consciousness, really -- from the God Zeus.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
I Left My Heart: A Salute to the Music of Tony Bennett
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

A 90-minute tribute to singer Tony Bennett must be a difficult thing to craft, given the wealth of material available to creators David Grapes and Todd Olson. They decided to make an interesting choice. Instead of focusing on anecdotes and famous names associated with the 87-year-old singer, this revue is all about the music.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
So Help Me God!
Theatre Three

Theatre Three's production of the obscure Maurine Dallas Watkins play, So Help Me God!is a surefire evening of laughter and mayhem. Broadway bound in 1929, the play was derailed by the stock-market crash and has languished in obscurity ever since.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
Thrill, The
Stratford Festival - Studio Theater

Expect mercurial changes in reacting to this dark, funny, unhappy and uplifting play about disabilities and how radically we are opposed on how to handle them. The ideas, background, and utterly committed work of a number of immensely talented theater artists for this offbeat, intriguing, world-premiere play certainly bring it a richness of ideas and significance beyond its dramatic effect.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
September 2013
Sammy Tonight!

(see listings & reviews under "Sammy" Tonight!")

"Sammy" Tonight!
WBBT Theater

In this repeat of a popular earlier show, De’Zhon Fields essentially imitates Sammy Davis, Jr. doing a typical solo nightclub act. Both the imitator and the one imitated radiate talent at singing, banter (in this case, introductions for each of the songs or sets to be performed), and footwork.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2013
Secret Agent, The
Traverse Theater

In the preface to the published playscript of The Secret Agent, Matthew Hurt, the playwright who adapted Joseph Conrad's 1903 novel for the stage, asserts “his moral rights” to the work. What about Conrad's moral rights? is my question to Hurt and the five “devisers and performers” who have had their merry way with The Secret Agent.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2013
Let it Be: A Celebration of the Music of the Beatles
St. James Theater

I loved the Beatles. I was a sucker for Beatlemania and would give any tribute to the Liverpool lads a try. Until now. With the current 50th anniversary show at Broadway’s St. James Theater, I feel maybe it's time to Let It Be. Rain, a similar (and for me a more enjoyable) Broadway tribute to the Fab Four, ran two years ago, and there are always groups regularly circling the globe with Beatles salutes.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
August 2013
Histoire d'Amour
King's Theater

The theme of the 2013 Edinburgh International Festival is “The way technology seizes and shifts our perceptions.” This is explored excitingly by Teatrocinema, a collective Chilean theater company which specializes in the melding of theater and cinema.

In its third go-round at the EIF, Theatrocinema has mounted a lavish production of Histoire d’Amour (“Love Story”), which is based on a 1999 French novel by Regis Jauffret, as adapted by Monserrat Quezada and Juan Carlos Zagal (one of the co-founders of the company).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2013
Ciara
Traverse Theater

As playwright David Harrower confides in a program note, Ciarais a play about "Glasgow and its mythic, proud, scarred history. I've written a woman at the center of it; silent witness to a changing cityscape finally telling it as she sees it.”

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2013
Sloans Project, The
Sloans Bar

The Argyll Arcade in “the beltin' heart” of downtown Glasgow is lined with expensive jewelry stores but the brightest gem on display there recently was The Sloans Project, a mini-opera by two gifted artists, Gareth Williams and David Brock. Teaming up with director James R. Carson, they have devised a site-specific work that uses every nook and cranny in Sloans, the oldest bar and restaurant in Glasgow, to tell its anthology of stories.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2013
Home Fires Burning: Everlasting Moon & Paradise Whiskey
Home Resource Center

Call me academic, but I don’t understand why performed narratives keep being called plays. It takes nothing from the worth of the Home Fires Burningto say this program is made up of two related stories, told in first person in chamber-theater style. The narrator in each case is a woman -- costumed, made up, using props, and acting as an interpreter of what happened and is happening to her.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2013
Thousand Oaks
The Players

From the start, Thousand Oaksappears to be a weird place. At least the one home there that’s the scene of Sylvia Reed’s play seems weird -- bars on the windows and something unidentifiable in a corner upstage and two black leather sofas on separate sides of the stage. Not surprisingly, no set designer is mentioned in the program. The lack typifies this premiere production.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2013
Time Stands Still
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

At the moment a photo is taken, time stands still for its subject and its taker. Writing about that takes longer to “capture.” To dramatize the subject of the progress of relationship of a couple -- a photographer and writer -- takes Donald Margulies two effective acts of Time Stands Still that shoot past and present toward their future.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2013
Art
Milwaukee Chamber Theater

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre opens its 2013-14 season with Yasmina Reza’s Art.The play captures the nuances of friendship – the ties that bind and, perhaps, the ones no longer worth maintaining – through the lens of fine art. Specifically, it examines the 15-year friendship of three middle-aged men. One of them unknowingly strains the relationship between them when he purchases an expensive painting.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2013
Taking Shakespeare
Stratford Festival of Canada - Studio Theater

This surprisingly engrossing two-person interaction is mostly a series of meetings and lessons between a rebellious, young male graduate student and an aging, unpopular female professor of Shakespeare studies. The meetings take place in the book-cluttered first-floor apartment that “Prof” lives in – mostly in her combination living room and office, where she sometimes eats and often sleeps on the divan.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
August 2013
Tigers Be Still
Boulevard Theater

Can a show about depression be funny? Even if all of the characters in the show suffer from depression? The answer is resoundingly “yes” if one is talking about Tigers Be Stillby playwright Kim Rosenstock.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2013
Motown: The Musical
Lunt-Fontanne Theater

Motown the Musicalis an encapsulated “juke-box” musical about the origins of Motown Records and Berry Gordy, the man who created it. It is told as a flashback from the planning for Motown’s 25th Anniversary Show to the first moment Berry Gordy started to get interested in music. The plot leads inexorably to the formation of Hitsville USA and the creation of Motown and shows the people who made it happen and the bumps along the way.

Scott Bennett
Date Reviewed:
July 2013
H2O
Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherdstown University

Well, H20 is a completely grabbing and affecting new play: this playwright and director always function skillfully. One of my friends at its performance was left sobbing uncontrollably by the finale. And both its acting roles are demanding showcases. But I don’t know how many observers or performers will want to return to it.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
July 2013
South Beach Babylon
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz Theater

Cast members start building this South Beach Babylon by bowing, scraping waving to the audience. They disappear as Jonas Blodgen, down center, imitates flying into Miami. Fresh out of Pratt Institute, he’s a narrator who descends naively (well exemplified by Matt DeCapua) into a job and relation to the big South Beach Art Basel event that makes and breaks artists.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2013
Lonesome West, The
Shimberg Playhouse

Jobsite’s performers and direction are so strong that the bleakness of the house, characters, and situations in The Lonesome West town of Leenane make laughter at them seem uncharitable. Martin McDonagh may have been inspired by Sam Shepard’s True Weststory of two brothers’ rivalry, but the Irishman puts his tragicomedy in the context of greater spiritual as well as temporal degradation and losses.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2013
Cirque du Soleil: Quidam
Barclays Center

Six years ago, the American Theater Critics Association (ATCA), held one of their two yearly conferences in Las Vegas. As part of the package, members and their guests were wined and dined by the entire city. Steve Wynn feted us at supper. The Mirage cut their rates in half.

Ed Rubin
Date Reviewed:
July 2013
Heroes
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Three old men living in a veterans’ retirement home plot an escape to what French playwright Gerald Sibleyras called “Le Vent des Peupliers”or “The Wind of the Poplars.” So why has Tom Stoppard termed the men “Heroes”?

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2013
Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World, A
Contemporary American Theater Festival

With a world premiere of A Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World (a quote from the preaching of Cotton Mather), Liz Duffy Adams has undertaken the daunting task of progressing from the Salem Witch trials, as established by Arthur Miller’s masterpiece The Crucible,to imagine the fate of two of the hysterical young women a decade later.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
July 2013
Cannibal Women of Mars
Tron Theater

Cannibal Women of Marsis a rude, bawdy rock musical about two hapless and unemployed earthlings, Jaxxon McGhee and Largs Lido (Mark Prendergast and Darren Brownlie), who are conned into taking a trip to Mars by the evil “President of Earth” (Gavin Mitchell). The virginal 21-year-olds have been promised sexual bliss on all-female Mars, only to discover on arrival that the supposedly horny natives are really men-eating viragos.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2013
Far from Heaven
Playwrights Horizons

Far From Heaven at Playwrights Horizon is a weak musical adaptation of a 2002 Todd Haynes movie starring Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, and Dennis Haysbert. The film deals with the emotional repression of suburban life complicated by homosexuality, adultery and racism. Julianne Moore’s portrayal in the film was a tour de force of control to convey suppression without becoming satirical. The film is an homage to Douglas Sirk’s melodramas made in the 1950s and which are now considered masterpieces of irony.

Scott Bennett
Date Reviewed:
July 2013
Waiting for Godot
Stratford Festival - Tom Patterson Theater

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot is now established as a classic contemporary drama, even called “the most significant drama in English in the 20th century.” Yet it was decades after its first appearance before leading critics stopped declaring it “totally incomprehensible” and yet simultaneously “obscene,” “subversive,” and “an attack on our basic values.” One inexplicably self-assured woman famously described the two-act play as one where “nothing happens, twice.” And yet it offended her without doing anything.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
July 2013
Improvised Shakespeare: Gabriel's Adventures
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz Theater

A full play ending Florida Studio Theater’s weekend Sarasota Improv Festival, “Gabriel’s Adventures” was created by The Improvised Shakespeare Company of Chicago from the suggested name of a hero and an action involving that hero. As company creator, director and actor Blaine Swen explained, the show is unwritten -- and not being planned or rehearsed, played completely spontaneously for one time only.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2013
Blithe Spirit
Stratford Festival - Avon Theater

It’s odd, but this beloved 1941 comedy seems older than this season’s very much older plays by Shakespeare, Dumas and Schiller, because it has a packaged- entertainment quality that seems to be presented, not happening. This Blithe Spiritis impeccably directed by Brian Bedford, a master of such “high comedy” – which is to say comedy of verbal wit more than provocative or physically amusing action. We do get a laugh out of the ghost of Elvira moving a vase of flowers past the terrified Ruth, who supposedly can see the flowers but not Elvira.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
July 2013
The Three Musketeers
Stratford Shakespeare Festival - Festival Theater

Everyone seems to have enjoyed at least one example of this immensely popular swash-buckler. It would be hard to get an accurate count of all the written, comic book, film, television, and even radio and recorded versions of Alexandre Dumas’ adventurous tale. This rich, affecting stage adaptation by Peter Raby now has had four productions at Stratford since 1968. It’s a sure-fire crowd-pleaser, and the current elaborate production, slickly directed by old pro Miles Potter with a large, sterling cast, is sure to be extended and come close to selling out.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
July 2013
Assassination of Leon Trotsky, The
Odyssey Theater

The gifted comic writer, Peter Lefcourt (Mutually Assured Destruction, Showtime's “Beggars & Choosers”), returns with The Assassination of Leon Trotsky, a new play about a theatrical troupe making whoopee with the drama they have been hired to perform.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2013

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