Kentucky Cycle, The - Part 1
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

 "Going Over Jordan" the cast sings, against an abstract background of soon-to-be-varying colored sky over barren trees and earth. So opens a tale of intertwining families, beginning with the ruthless Michael Rowen (Patrick J. Clarke, in his fittest Asolo performance to date). He kills an Indian trader and, after trickery, the Indians themselves, sparing only Morning Star, whom he rapes and cripples into subjugation so he'll have a son. (Tessie Hogan gives great intensity to both her hatred of Rowen and her ever-doting love of his child.)

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 1999
Kid-Simple
Actors Theater of Louisville

 What on earth (or any other planet) could Actors Theater of Louisville have been thinking to lead off its prestigious Humana Festival of New American Plays this year with Jordan Harrison's Kid-Simple, a radio play in the flesh? Someone must have thought its derivative pop- culture plot would qualify as a cutting-edge attraction for an MTV-type crowd. But its blade, alas, is decidedly dull and encrusted with juvenile pretension. This frenetic, much-ado-about-nada play is pastiche without panache, a feverish adolescent concoction that one longs to flee after the first 20 minutes.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
March 2004
Killer And The Comic, The
Angel Island

 Paul Zegler as the comic and Andrew Rothenberg as the killer turn in very fine performances in this late-nite show that accompanies the mainstage Mary-Arrchie production of Petrified Forest.

Effie Mihopoulos
Date Reviewed:
November 1995
Killer Joe
Second Stage at the Adrienne

 Other journalists describe Killer Joe as a story of stupid trailer trash, violence and sex . That does this interesting play a disservice. Rather, the drama shows a dysfunctional and uneducated family -- something we all can relate to -- and the story is 99 percent about plotting a crime, rather than showing violence. There is full frontal nudity, male and female, but it is not erotic.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
June 2006
Killing of Sister George, The
Diversionary Theater

 Unpleasant is, perhaps, the kindest comment about June Buckridge (Priscilla Allen), who plays Sister George on a BBC radio drama. She drinks excessively, speaks in angry tones and hasn't a kind word for anyone, including her lover Alice "Childie" McNaught (Laura Bozanich). The domineering, combative and arrogant June is, nonetheless, worried about her job on the sitcom, worried about her relationship, and worried about her life. She's a not-nice person surrounded by much nicer people.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2002
Killjoy
Legler Benbough Theater at USIU

 Killjoy is about the potential joy of killing a miserable scoundrel of a spouse. Thus, a comedy is born and guaranteed to keep you laughing at Scripps Ranch Theater. Jill Drexler is Carol, the former wife of Victor, played by Allan Salkin. She has direct ethereal communication with a priest advisor. She's a Jew but seeks counseling wherever she can find it. After 24 years, her totally rotten husband dropped her for a trophy-wife in her mid-twenties.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2004
Kilt
Visual Studies Workshop Auditorium

 A Canadian play that should have been a hit Off-Broadway, Jonathan Wilson's Kilt moves from a Scottish unit in Tobruk in 1942 to a gay bar in Toronto in the 1990s, and finally Glascow for a funeral. The title item ties this unlikely progression together as we observe a young soldier on duty in North Africa and clad in a traditional kilt into his lookalike grandson dancing on a tabletop in the same kilt to entice male customers.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
November 2005
Kindertransport
Bath House Cultural Center

 Echo Theater's production of Kindertransport by Diane Samuels opened at the Bath House Cultural Center November 6, 2003. Six talented actors did a fine job with a convoluted, obtuse script that leaves much to be desired.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
November 2003
King And I, The
New Jersey Performing Arts Center - Prudential Hall

 When the curtain goes up on this touring production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I to reveal the teeming port of Bangkok against a twinkling backdrop of stars, one is simultaneously transported back almost fifty years to its legendary Broadway opening and to the l850s when a young English school teacher, Anna Leonowens, arrived to teach the 67 children of the King of Siam.

Kathryn Wylie-Marques
Date Reviewed:
March 2000
King And I, The
Marcus Center For The Performing Arts

 Few American musicals retain their ability to enchant over the years, and even fewer of these "classics" actually improve with age. Since I wasn't born in 1951, when The King and I first took Broadway by storm, I cannot compare the original's impact to the current production now touring the United States. I can only marvel at how well The King and I has survived over the years.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2000
King Hedley II
Mark Taper Forum

 Can a three-hour drama with no story be successful? Unfortunately not, not even if the playwright is August Wilson, a master of the black vernacular. King Hedley II abounds in inspired speeches (some of which will be used by actors in monologue auditions for decades to come) and bursts of pungent, heady dialogue, but they don't add up to anything like a narrative which will keep you at the edge of your seat, breathless to know what happens next.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2000
King Lear
Studio 102

 King Lear is one of the supreme challenges for any company, and the professional Actors' Shakespeare Project, in kicking off its second season, has courageously stepped up to the plate. Boston has not been lucky in its recent Lears: F. Murray Abraham played it with the American Repertory Theatre in 1991, and Austin Pendleton with the New Repertory Theatre in 2000. Both were failures. For impressive enactments, one would have to go back to Harold Scott in 1958 and Paul Scofield in 1964.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
October 2005
King Lear
Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival

 Many critics call King Lear Shakespeare's tragic masterpiece, but the public has never ratified that judgment. Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet have more mass appeal. Maybe the reason people don't love Lear as much as the others is because it has a major problem with plausibility.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
King Lear
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse Theater

 Staging a production of King Lear has sometimes been compared to scaling a mountain. The play is considered (by some) to be the playwright's finest work, and it is often treated with reverence and, perhaps, terror. The Milwaukee Repertory Company opened its fall season with this powerful work. What they have achieved is a production that is both riveting and accessible. While this won't be the Lear to suit everyone's taste, it certainly does an exemplary job of highlighting the themes of Shakespeare's work.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2006
King Of The Moon
Seven Angels Theater

 Conflict between two brothers, debate over the war in Vietnam, and a discussion of the rules of the Catholic Church, all set in the tumultuous 60s, could be an interesting play. Last year, a new autobiographical play by Tom Dudzick, Over the Tavern, set in the 50's, won us over with its tasty concoction of tartness and sweetness of spirit. It was all about the Pazinski family from the East Side of Buffalo.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
October 1999
Kinks, Shrinks And Red Inks!
MeX Theater

 Jefferson Ensemble, formed less than two years ago in Louisville, is currently presenting three one-act plays under the Kinks, Shrinks and Red Inks! title. With these three shows tailored to their particular talents, the group's fine actors can really strut their stuff. Local playwright Elaine T. Hackett's A Clash of Invitations is the lengthiest and most satisfying of the three.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
January 2000
Kiss At City Hall, The
Pasadena Playhouse

 Why doesn't romance last? asks Joe DiPietro in this "relationship" comedy, which comes off as a slightly-better-than-average TV sitcom in its West Coast premiere production. Inspired by French photographer Robert Doisneau's snapshot of a man and woman exchanging a passionate public kiss, Di Pietro gives us two New York couples grappling with issues of commitment, unwanted pregnancy, infidelity and neurotic behavior, against a backdrop of the idealized romance embodied in the controversial snapshot (which may or may not have been staged).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2000
Kiss Me, Kate
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

 Hugs and kisses to the wonderful pair (Lillie played by Angela Bond and Fred by David Engel) who rediscover their love through sparring and starring in a musical version of Taming of the Shrew. There may be Sharon Scott's rousing "Another Opening, [but it's not just]Another Show" as director Will Mackenzie uses all his TV expertise fitting onto a relatively small stage the excitement of a Broadway extravaganza. Oh, yes, he uses the whole theater, too (so nicely for "We Open in Venice") and has more than the doublings called for by the script.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2003
Kiss Me, Tony
Patio Playhouse

 Deborah Ann Zimmer's homage to 27 years of Tony-winning Broadway musicals, Kiss Me, Tony, is just plain fun. Starting with Kiss Me Kate and closing with The Producers, the selections make a virtual history of contemporary musicals.

She stages each number with just enough action to set the scene for the selection from the show. Musical Director Ann Savage, aided by April Haarz's vocal direction, brings panache to each song. Choreographer Dawn Marie Himlin adds to the evening's polished, theatrical style.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2002
Kiss Of The Spider Woman
Ahmanson Theater

 [Reviewed at Orange County Performing Arts Center, Dec. 1996] To make a musical of Manuel Puig's novel, "Kiss of the Spider Woman," Terrence McNally, John Kander and Fred Ebb simply put Puig's story on stage as a play, then superimposed on it 20-some musical numbers, most of which have nothing to do with the plot but feature a dazzling performance by Chita Rivera.

T.E. Foreman
Date Reviewed:
December 1996
Kiss Of The Spider Woman
Rudyard Kipling

 In its various formats -- novel, play, film, musical -- Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman evokes powerful emotions as two male cellmates jailed in a totalitarian country (Argentina) lay bare the politics of seduction. Who could be more different than Molina (Michael Drury), a flamboyant homosexual window dresser charged with "gross indecency," and Valentin (Andrew Pyle), a dedicated humorless Marxist whose zeal for social revolution excludes pleasure from his life?

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
January 2000
Krapp's Last Tape & Not I
New World Stage

 "Ion Theater's new space, World Stage, on 9th, puts them almost back-to-back with 10th Avenue Theater. A new downtown theater district? World Stage is a very welcoming facility complete with a roomy lobby and a modest-sized theater space with tiered seating providing great sight lines. Their opening offerings are definitely for the serious theater patron. A Tuesday-through- Sunday performance schedule alternates between two Samuel Beckett plays and one Ionesco play. There are a variety of curtain times, varying from 2:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2006
Kwaidan
Albert Simons Center, College of Charleston

 Normally, I despise puppets, marionettes, and their wooden brethren. But the artistry of director/adapter Ping Chong, production designer Mitsuru Ishii, and the puppeteers from the Center of Puppetry Arts is so exquisitely hypnotic, I surrendered to Chong's charms. And the trio of Japanese ghost stories adapted from the 1904 work by Lafcadio Hearn glow with a quiet intensity that I found quite unique. "Jhininiki" was a weird, ghoulish beginning.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
June 1999
Desire Under the Elms
San Diego State University - Experimental Stage

 Eugene O'Neill gave birth to Desire Under the Elms in 1924, placing it in rural New England. The 1958 film version starred Sophia Loren, Anthony Perkins, and Burl Ives. Under director Randy Reinholz, the San Diego State University version, currently in the Experimental Theater, moves the action to rural Ozark Mountains and adds some excellent, story-telling guitar music.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
September 2008
Gathering, The
Cort Theater

 Playwright Arje Shaw tries to spice up this box of stale matzoh with some funny/insightful one-liners and the occasional gripping moment (a Holocaust survivor dancing on the grave of a Nazi soldier and later goading a young German guard), but he's undone by TV-level phoniness, overwrought melodrama and preposterous plotting. Director Rebecca Taylor makes matters worse by having everyone scream and overact. Hal Linden manages to stay engaging throughout, but the young kid is unwatchable.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Gem of the Ocean
Walter Kerr Theater

 August Wilson's remarkable play, Gem of the Ocean, part of his cycle of plays about the black experience in Pittsburgh, gives us a working-class family in 1904, not all that long after slavery was ended. Starting with flavorful ordinary conversation, like Horton Foote, the play grows and expands into real theater with unforgettable characters. There is lots of exposition, but it's grand, and the stories are vivid, with a sprinkling of folk humor.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
December 2004
Gem of the Ocean
Walter Kerr Theater

 August Wilson's mighty ambition, stretching across a decade-by-decade, ten-play cycle of compassionate, poetically engaged playwriting, doesn't really stop at showing us the black experience in the 20th Century. No, Wilson is concerned with the full cargo of the African Diaspora, the history of suffering, the heritage of achievement, and the demons hatched in steerage and slavery that bedevil the race from within.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
George Gershwin Alone
Helen Hayes Theater

 It's tricky putting someone's life on stage. Especially if they're quite famous, because growling watchdogs of accuracy will leap on your presentation of the facts, which almost always have to be fudged a little for the sake of drama. In the case of George Gershwin Alone, Hershey Felder's solo, 90-minute excursion through the life of the composer of the title, who died at a very young 38, you almost wish there were more created drama.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
July 2001
George Gershwin Alone
Helen Hayes Theater

 Hershey Felder makes but two mistakes in his solo tribute to George Gershwin: 1) he tends to crash-bang the piano keys a little too hard and a little too often; 2) he sings. Now as the show's narration (and, one assumes, history) tells us, GG was no warbler, but when Felder bellows, the results are painful to the point of embarrassment. That's a shame, because the show is otherwise a touching, amusing bio, with some fast if sloppy work on the keyboard.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 2001
Glass Menagerie, The
Ethel Barrymore Theater

 The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams is a good show. Really. Quite good. Despite a total misconception in the production by director David Leveaux, and some of the worst lighting I've ever seen on Broadway (by Natasha Katz - who is usually one of the best). The play itself and most of the cast provide us with a satisfying, moving evening of theater.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Glengarry Glen Ross
Bernard B. Jacobs

 Oh Boy! Want to see a demonstration of how good, how vivid real acting can be? Check out Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet's dazzling drama now revived on Broadway. It's the most exciting acting ensemble in town. Alan Alda will give you a lesson on how to do a nuanced monologue - his encounters as a nervous, failing, older salesman with the very controlled Frederick Weller as his supervisor are like a mongoose darting at a cobra. The nervous energy Gordon Clapp exudes as he tries to con the stolid Jeffrey Tambor into a crime is full pf prickly tingles.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Goat, The
John Golden Theater

 It's as if producer Max Bialystock is back in business, trying to mount a comedy about a subject so gross, the play will have to close after one performance. Credit Edward Albee for choosing an inconceivable plot, writing about a man who has sex with a goat and making us care about him. Not only that; Albee has written perhaps the wittiest of all his plays. Bill Pullman and Mercedes Ruehl are an apparently-happy married couple with a relatively normal gay son. Pullman is a world-famous architect, on top of the world at age 50.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Goat, The
John Golden Theater

If you know the play's big secret, that spares you watching the first half hour, so here it is: the lead character, a successful architect and family man, confesses to a friend he's in love with a goat. The next hour shows his wife and gay son screaming at and insulting him while he tries to explain why. The last twenty minutes features a father-son reconciliation of sorts, and a wife who exacts revenge.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Goat, The
John Golden Theater

 What can you say about a play that makes you feel sympathy with a goatfucker? If you're offended by that word, don't go to the Golden and watch a brilliantly funny, deadly serious play that so provokes the audience to genuine moral reflection that, night after night, much of the crowd lingers under the marquee for a long, long time -- just talking it over. The Goat is that good.

David Steinhardt
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Good Body, The
Booth Theater

 Eve Ensler is funny as a writer, performer, and philosopher, with universal deeply felt insights that go beyond comedy. She's sometimes hilarious but with depths that plumb the heart and consciousness. The Good Body explores being overweight -- with a Southern fat woman - and she gives us an 80-year-old Cosmo woman, a pierced lesbian, a Puerto Rican girl, a wife with an unsatisfactory sex life getting her vagina tightened, a high-fashion model, Botox, and a coda with an Indian summing up her "You're Okay!" philosophy.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
December 2004
Good Vibrations
Eugene O'Neill Theater

 A quick view of Act One of Good Vibrations, the Beach Boys musical on Broadway: shallow, inane book by Richard Dresser; great set by Heidi Ettinger; some good singing voices; boring, unengaging. Director/choreographer John Carrafa's work had no dynamic in it. We escaped at intermission.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Gore Vidal's The Best Man

 (see Criticopia review(s) under "Best Man, The")

Graduate, The
Plymouth Theater

 Okay, regarding what all you've heard about The Graduate: it's only half-true. Yes, Kathleen Turner bares all. Yes, the show often bastardizes Mike Nichols' benchmark counterculture motion picture. And yes, the cast is wildly uneven and, in one case, downright awful. But it seems to me the shuddering cold response by critics operates on a decidedly pro-American bias, almost as if to say, "How on earth could this be a hit in (gasp!) London!" (Let's also not forget that many American productions are now heading there, not vice versa lately).

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Graduate, The
Plymouth Theater

 Though not the disaster most critics have tagged it, this is still a curious production, one that retains some of the classic film's humor but feels utterly divorced from context or meaning, despite the between-scene snippets of `60s pop.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Graduate, The
Plymouth Theater

 The Graduate is a hoot. Kathleen Turner's star turn is in the best Bankhead mode, and her impeccable timing brings a heartfelt laugh to every punchline in this fun-from-start-to-finish comedy. We know what's going to happen in this tale of seduction and first love, and this play's success is all in the telling. Adapted and directed by Terry Johnson, with a brilliant sense of what real comedy is, and long knowledge of whom to cast in the leads, the show totally succeeds.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2002

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