Cornelia Street
Atlantic Theater - Studio

Two new Off-Broadway productions on the smaller stages of two major theater companies have large ambitions but offer only tired tropes we’ve seen too many times before: the Roundabout’s The Wanderers and Simon Stephens and Mark Eitzel’s musical Cornelia Street, about a struggling Greenwich Village eatery. The latter piece, at Atlantic Theater Company’s basement studio space, wants to be hip and compassionate but winds up serving us a warmed-over, unsatisfying meal.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Wanderers, The
Roundabout - Laura Pels Theater

Two new Off-Broadway productions on the smaller stages of two major theater companies have large ambitions but offer only tired tropes we’ve seen too many times before: the musical Cornelia Street and Anna Ziegler’s The Wanderers at Roundabout Theater Company’s Laura Pels stage. The latter does have a modicum of genuine emotion and insight, but too much of the plot, acting, and direction are stagey and stilted.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Dreamgirls
West Coast Black Theater Troupe - Donnelly Theater

A simple story set to music with much dancing and other movement becomes an extravaganza in Dreamgirls at Westcoast Black Theater Troupe. It has gone all out technically to present this show, even by employing renowned Asolo Rep Scenic Studios to construct the colorful scenery.  Along with WBTT’s usual sumptuous costuming, designed by Darci Collins, the musical drama couldn’t look any better nor could its cast. And all the sound matches the sight.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Last Match, The
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne's Lab

The Last Match is about more than a semifinal in a career-determining contest. It’s also personally important for its opposing male tennis players. Playwright Anna Ziegler also ensures that the women in their lives completely share in their achievements. Kate Alexander, an eminent director of women but well versed in motivating male actors too, astutely shows how intimate ties to women can work when the men are prominent sports figures.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Inspector Calls, An
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

A night of a successful businessman’s family and a prospective son-in-law celebrating becomes a nightmare of revelations when an Inspector comes with news and questions about a woman’s ghastly suicide. Could the English aristocrats have been involved? If so, how? FSU/Asolo Conservatory’s revival of J. B. Priestley’s early 20th century classic supplies answers within an Edwardian atmosphere. It presents Priestly’s humane socialist philosophy vs. the characters’ greed, self-indulgence, and moralistic vacancy.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Some Like it Hot
Shubert Theater

The new musical version of Some Like It Hot, based on Billy Wilder’s 1959 comic film classic about two musicians disguised in drag, is a delightfully daffy romp, so silly and fun-making that its sometimes heavy-handed political messaging doesn’t get in the way of a Broadway good time. Set in during the depths of the Depression in 1933, this Hot follows the basic outline of Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s original screenplay but makes more than a few significant detours into “woke” territory.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Reel Music
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

Music and movies go together as four singer-dancers summon up memories of favorite viewings and accompanying tunes from silent to recent film classics. By starting with “Hurray for Hollywood” and “That’s Entertainment”, the group previews the script’s organization of songs from earliest films through each decade until the present. So there’s at least some tune for every body of every age in the audience to recall and love, as it will an era’s chief events.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Chicken & Biscuits
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Divided family members interact at a funeral in Chicken & Biscuits. The corpse, a family leader and pastor of a Black Church, will be given “a celebration of life”—but not before his relatives cure what’s been deadly in their relationships. Douglas Lyons says, unlike most other Black playwrights, he’s had a “right to be silly” in this “universal” work. Silly is indeed what this play is. Also, universally stereotypical.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Endgame
Irish Repertory Theater

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame does not show a typical family, but he does write about family dynamics in addition to the larger issue of how man copes with mortality as civilization crumbles. Currently revived Off-Broadway by the Irish Repertory Theater, Beckett’s 1957 one-act depicts a quartet of survivors of an unnamed apocalypse quarreling and coping through one day. Climate change, pandemics, and increasing nuclear tensions make the play more relevant than ever.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Pictures from Home
Studio 54

The drama of the everyday and the ordinary are given vivid, rich life in Pictures from Home, Sharr White’s stage adaptation of Larry Sultan’s 1992 photo memoir, staged with precision by Bartlett Sher and acted with compassion and depth by three of the strongest actors from Broadway and the West End, Danny Burstein, Nathan Lane, and Zoe Wanamaker. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Collaboration, The
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

I’ve lived in New York City’s East Village for many decades, the very neighborhood where much of the action in Anthony McCarten’s currently running Broadway play, The Collaboration, takes place, and where art-world legends Andy Warhol (1928-1987) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) — here channeled by actors Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope — could frequently be seen roaming the streets. Just reading for weeks on end about McCarten’s drama working its way from London’s Old Vic to Broadway’s Samuel J.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Network
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

Audience members for Lee Hall’s adaptation of Network at Florida Studio Theater see and participate in a mix of the 1970’s TV industry with today’s multi-media usage. The play shows how both have and do affect individual lives. Yesterday’s filmed proclamation that “the media is the message” has grown to become “the message is the media”.  In addition, business and finance combine as message-giver.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

Playwright Edward Albee’s scorching indictment of middle-class marriage, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? comes to life on the Milwaukee stage this winter. Milwaukee Chamber Theatre has dedicated its intimate, “black box” space to one of best American plays of the 20th Century.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Dino: An Evening with Dean Martin
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

The program cover for Dino – An Evening with Dean Martin shows the body of a man, wearing a tuxedo, who is holding his drink in a double old-fashioned glass.

Now, if you have no idea what size of glass this is, you can stop reading right now. It may mean you are from a younger generation that is more apt to order a lemon drop martini from the bar than whiskey on the rocks.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Silent Sky
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Silent Sky is the story of Henrietta Levitt who, hearing musical rhythms in stars and their lights, attained and explained visual and scientific insights about our heavens and beyond. Author Lauren Gunderson also tells of a typical 1900-1920 family and fellow scientific professionals who influenced Henrietta Levitt’s life and work. Most positive were other women, since they shared a difficult struggle to get—as men had—not only opportunity, encouragement, and means to succeed but also recognition if they did.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Babel
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne's Lab

Babel comes to Florida Studio Theater as the last stop in the National New Play Network’s latest Rolling World Premiere program. FST aided the first stages of development through readings. Then the play moved on to allow author Jacqueline Goldfinger to keep or make changes, based on work of four additional creative theater teams. Her probable final script is the one FST is presenting as a dark comedy. But it’s not essentially comedic. It’s like the Biblical place of its title, where those who rule attempt to claim God’s power over it.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Three Musketeers, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

You may have seen “The Three Musketeers” before on stage or screen but most likely not as the scenic extravaganza Asolo Rep is offering. Yet it begins simply with D’Artagnan, son of a famous Musketeer, ready to leave their country home to join Musketeers and serve King Louis XIII in squelching Cardinal Richelieu’s attempts to rule France. In Ken Ludwig’s dramatic version of Alexander Dumas’s famous novel, D’Artagnan himself gets joined by a sister, Sabine.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Flyin' West
Westcoast Black Theater Troupe - Donnelly Theater

As a  black American historical drama, Flyin’ West became a major hit as both a piece of dramatic literature and a true exposition of 1890s black experience, especially in the U.S. West and involving women.  A few decades of developments in black theater and uncovering of much more of black experience in the U.S have made Pearl Cleage’s play no longer novel. It does, though, maintain some power, even in WBTT’s production where it’s like a staged TV movie.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Stick Fly
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theatre

Perhaps the most arresting thing about Stick-Fly is its title. It refers to a stick or the like with sticky stuff on it that entomologists use to catch flying insects so they may be studied.  A main character in the play is such a scientist, but neither she nor others deals with insects in it. 

Dramatist Lydia Diamond “sticks” attention on members—and possibly future ones—of a well-to-do black family during a crucial weekend at a long-owned beach home in upscale Martha’s Vineyard.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Downstate
Playwrights Horizons

Bruce Norris has already won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for Clybourne Park, his clever contemporary twist on race derived from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. He is in line for more accolades for his latest searing and insightful play, Downstate, now at Playwrights Horizons after runs at London’s National Theater and Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company. The subject matter is off-putting and challenging to say the least. But this skilled dramatist finds displays incredible compassion for his deeply troubled characters. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2022
Leopoldstadt
Longacre Theater

The character list to Tom Stoppard’s latest work, Leopoldstadt, is certainly intimidating. Multiple generations of a Jewish Viennese family, played by a small army of actors, sprawl across two pages. “How will I ever keep all these characters straight,?” I mused as scanned the program. Yes, the relationships and plotlines are incredibly intricate and difficult to follow, but that doesn’t matter.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2022
Ohio State Murders
James Earl Jones Theater

The celebrated African-American playwright Adrienne Kennedy makes her belated Broadway debut with a mystifying, powerful production of her 1991 work, Ohio State Murders, featuring a stellar turn from six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald. Unfortunately, there is no mystery as to why it took so long for the 91-year-old author, the winner of several Obie Awards, to have a production on the Main Stem and why it’s closing earlier than its original limited run.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2022
Underneath the Skin
La MaMa

Billed as “A Penetrating Portrayal of A Queer Giant,” performance artist John Kelly’s explosive gay-themed show, Underneath The Skin, bolstered by actor/dancers Hucklefaery aka Ken Mechler, Estado Flotante, and John Williams Watkins, each playing multiple characters, a slew of videos (one featuring Lola as Gertrude Stein), lots of song and dance, oodles of simulated male to male sex, and a cornucopia of informative lecture-like projections, all centering around the life and work of little known historical footnote Samuel Steward (1909-1993) (as played by Kelly), is c

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
December 2022
Becky Nurse of Salem
Lincoln Center - Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

Rebecca Nurse is a minor character in The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s harrowing dramatization of the witch-hunt hysteria which gripped colonial America. But she is the center of Becky Nurse of Salem, Sarah Ruhl’s jagged new play set in contemporary times with a brief trip into the past. Well, not the Rebecca of Miller’s play, but an imagined descendent beset with just about every possible calamity associated with 21st century working-class society.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2022
Death of a Salesman
Hudson Theater

In its last Broadway incarnation in 2012, Death of a Salesman was so close to the 1949 original that director Mike Nichols employed the same skeletal set design by Jo Mielziner. Willy Loman’s middle-class tragedy was as powerful as ever, proving the steely endurability of Arthur Miller’s timeless rendering of the hollow American Dream.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2022
What the Constitution Means to Me
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

Should the U.S. Constitution be abolished or otherwise modified? Author Heidi Schreck debated the subject when she was only 15. Her experiences across the country won her scholarship money for college. Then in 2019 she won national acclaim dramatizing What the Constitution Means to Me, repeating her debate points and also how they affected her personal and family life. Florida Studio Theater stages all in a small-town American Legion Post.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2022
Christmas Carol, A
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Pabst Theater

The timeless tale of a miserly old moneylender returned to Milwaukee’s historic Pabst Theater in November, to the delight of large crowds who are coming to experience this Victorian-era show within a Victorian-era theater. A Christmas Carol returns in full force after its two-year absence during the start of the pandemic, and its reboot in 2021. This is the production’s 47th year by the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
December 2022
Little Theater
Matrix Theater

Justin Tanner’s latest comedy, Little Theater, is an autobiographical tale dealing with the unique world of Los Angeles theater. Its time-span is late 1980s-early 1990s, when L.A. had two theater planets orbiting round each other. One planet was composed of a handful of large venues–-The Taper, Ahmanson, Geffen, etc.–-that concentrated on mounting plays which had achieved success in either Chicago or New York.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
December 2022
Black Nativity
West Coast Black Theater Troupe - Donnelly Theater

A favorite Holidays-Holidays show since Nate Jacobs founded Westcoast Black Theater Troupe, Black Nativity plays for the first time 2022 in the Troupe’s new theater of its own. The musical play, in its present form, will undoubtedly be a permanent, popular treat in years to come. 

The piece is a reverent Black African portrayal of the Christmas story, followed by a contemporary parallel one with joyful meaning for all people today and always.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2022
You Will Get Sick
Steinberg Center - Laura Pels Theater

You Will Get Sick, playing Off Broadway at the Laura Pels Theater through Sunday, December 11, is the most riveting, and mind-stretching play that I have seen this season because you must pay close attention to know where you are at any given moment. There are more twists and turns than a frog in a blender. Blink, and you are in another world.

Ed Rubin
Date Reviewed:
November 2022
& Juliet

See review(s) under:
And Juliet: http://totaltheater.com/?q=node/8957

And Juliet
Stephen Sondheim Theater

Do you yearn for the Good Old Days of rock musicals? Do you wish you could go to the theater and scream and stomp your feet? Then, & Juliet is the show for you. It’s loud (very), fast, and extremely colorful. For the most part, the cast is young (they’d have to be to keep up the breakneck pace), engaging, and extremely talented.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
November 2022
Clyde's
Mark Taper Forum

Clyde’s is a slight but highly entertaining play about “a bunch of felons making sandwiches.” The quote is from the lips of Clyde (Tamberla Perry), the woman who runs the eponymous truck stop where the sandwich-making takes place. An ex-felon herself, Clyde likes to employ recently released prisoners, if only because she can lord it over them in cruel and devilish fashion, knowing that they are fearful of being fired and ending up on the street.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2022
Mindplay
Geffen Playhouse - Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater

Vinny DePonto uses all the tricks of his mentalist trade in Mindplay, his solo show running through the holidays at the Geffen. He calls up audience members and reads their minds in a number of astounding ways; how did he know that one woman was craving a dish of mint-chocolate ice-cream or that another was remembering an idyllic moment from her childhood? Tricks of the trade, of course.  Those tricks included using a large amount of hypnotism in order to open up and manipulate people’s long-buried thoughts.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2022
Cabaret
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

If you “come to the ”Cabaret” at Asolo Rep, you won’t find it the seedy spot usually depicted in stagings of the musical.  You will be in the full-theater cabaret that extends from a two-level main mid-stage down to dining tables and seating in what’s usually the orchestra pit. Further out to a main center and side seats with aisles, performers will sometimes pass you from or en route up to the main stage. You will be in Berlin in 1931 with thriving new arts and culture trying to lead Germans out of post-WWI depression. 

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2022
Penelopiad, The
City Garage

Margaret (“The Handmaid’s Tale”) Atwood turns Homer’s “The Iliad” inside out in The Penelopiad, now on tap at at City Garage, directed by Frederique Michel and designed by Charles A. Duncombe.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2022
Place in the Sun, A
Florida Studio Theater - Goldstein Cabaret

One-of-a-kind musician and composer Stevie Wonder gets a bio-musical cabaret treatment that’s become typical at Florida Studio Theater. A narrative of Wonder’s life punctuates a revue of his prodigious achievements in creating and performing modern music. All lead to his meriting “A Place in the Sun” of undeniable artistry. 

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2022
Beehive
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

The Milwaukee Repertory Theater takes its audience for a nostalgic spin into the past with Beehive: The 60s Musical. As its light-hearted title suggests, this show is much more about teen romance than it is about the decade’s more tumultuous aspects. The show is being staged in the theater complex’s intimate cabaret, which enhances this bill of fare.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2022
Something Rotten
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

From the moment we get a musical “Welcome to the Renaissance” to danced “Bows” at the end, we know we’re seeing and hearing a modern take on a different theatrical era.  At Florida Studio Theater, it’s going to be Something Rotten in reverse of what that title usually designates. On a smaller stage in a more intimate theater than the one that housed a big Broadway hit, director Ellie Mooney gives us a really tasty treat.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2022
Sense and Sensibility
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Underneath a wealth of cross-gendering, social ritual-ribbing, exploring of mixtures of realism, non-realism, and theatrical performance “isms,” Sense and Sensibility has a basic story. Two sisters in a family being displaced from their home by their father’s death must cope with a society stratified through wealth, status, and sexual/gender roles.  This story keeps FSU/Asolo Conservatory’s production in the realm of Jane Austen’s novel, even though audiences may find unlikeable distractions from the narrative basics.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2022

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