Taming the Lion
Theater 40 - Reuben Cordova Theater

Poor dramaturgy spoils what might have been a good play. Taming the Lion, now in a world premiere at Theater 40, is based on the true story of William “Billy” Haines, a popular movie star in the 1920s and 30s.  The handsome Billy was openly and defiantly gay, a fact that distressed his boss, Louis B.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
Pershing Square Signature Center - Romulus Linney Courtyard Theater

Surprise of all surprises, the 1969 movie “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” thanks to The New Group and Pershing Square Signature Center, is back in the news again—this time, not as a film but as a play with music. Cleverly directed by Scott Elliott, from a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman, the musical has dialogue and locations nearly identical to those in the film.

Though some fifty years have flown by, I remember seeing Paul Mazursky’s film when it first opened.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Frozen Jr.
Nancy Bock Center

I’m sure I am not alone in recalling the childhood wonder of curling up with a beautifully illustrated book of Grimm’s Fairytales and the like. There was a special enchantment in being transported to magical kingdoms in the far-off lands of our imagination. So it was that last weekend was the perfect opportunity to revisit such mysterious and wondrous places, right on the stage of the Nancy Bock Center for the Performing Arts here in The Woodlands, Texas.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Middle Passage, The
Lifeline Theater

What distinguishes Charles Johnson's approach to Black history from that of the sermons recently churned out by playwriting workshops is that instead of a thesis (or a headline), he starts with a story—not just any story, in this case, but a rip-roaring roller-coaster adventure yarn keeping us so riveted on the progress of the action as to barely notice the massive body of knowledge we are absorbing unawares.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Eclipsed
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse

The saying, “war is hell,” came to mind when witnessing a play that takes place during the 2003 Liberian civil war. Children were recruited as warriors and sent to the front lines of battle. Young women either joined the military or became subjects of the men around them. These women, dragged away from their families and communities, were known as “wives.” They were forced into sex slavery and servitude. That’s pretty grim stuff, even for a war play.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Unsinkable Molly Brown, The
Abrons Arts Center

The new version of Meredith Willson and Richard Morris’s upbeat musical, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, from Transport Group at the Abrons Arts Center, would seem to have little in common with recent Off-Broadway shows about suicide and torture. But it also plays with narrative, in that Dick Scanlan, author of the new book and lyrics, has totally reshaped and offered different perspectives from the 1960 original, which won a Tony for Tammy Grimes and an Oscar nomination for Debbie Reynolds for the 1964 film version.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Cambodian Rock Band
Pershing Square Signature Center

Fractured narratives are featured in two recent Off-Broadway offerings depicting how families of severe trauma victims cope—or don’t—with their personal tragedies. Three generations of suicidal depression play out simultaneously in Alice Birch’s Anatomy of a Suicide, while Laureen Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band, at Signature Theater Company following multiple regional stagings, traces the Khmer Rouge’s brutal legacy on a former rock musician and his daughter.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Anatomy of a Suicide
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

Three generations of suicidal depression play out simultaneously in Alice Birch’s Anatomy of a Suicide at Atlantic Theater Company after a run at London’s Royal Court. The storyline’s fractured narrative twists and turns, sometimes even shatters, occasionally resulting in confusion but mainly inducing the unsettling, disturbing effects of the sources of psychological damage. This is not a comfortable piece of theater, but it is affecting and memorable.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Day of Absence
The Biograph

Circa 1965, Douglas Turner Ward, weary of plays authored by African-Americans dismissed by critics unable to transcend their  cultural myopia, wrote this "reverse minstrel show" based on the precept of mutual dependency articulated in the folk saying "the master is slave to the slave.”

The premise of Day of Absence is simple enough: One day, privileged white citizens awaken to discover their town's non-white citizens missing from their jobs, their homes, even the jails (which are on permanent lockout).

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Sheepdog
Theater Wit

Have you heard the story about the investigation of a white cop who shot a black suspect? Of course you have—just as you've heard the one about the co-workers on the police force who fall in love and embark on a plan to marry. Oh, and let's not forget the one about the woman torn between her own misgivings and her loyalty to her on-and-off-duty partner. How, then, does Kevin Artigue succeed in generating so much empathy, excitement, and introspection from a collection of literary premises explored to exhaustion in recent years?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Lipstick Lobotomy
Trap Door Theater

Home, goes the adage, is where they have to take you in, but if you're an adult female viewed by your kin as a liability to its tribal aspirations, you might find yourself sequestered under the surveillance of gentle-but-firm warders in some remote retreat providing palliative care to the infirm of mind, body or impulse control—sanitariums having supplanted convents as cloistered residences befitting ladies of sheltered upbringing.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Charley's Aunt
St. Bonaventure Oratory

Scholars may attribute the birth of cross-dressing comedy to Plautus and Shakespeare, but the genre as we know it today traces its origins to Brandon Thomas's record-breaking farce (running for 1,466 performances before closing).

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Broadway at the Box
Music Box Theater

It seems that each year at this time I am confronted with the daunting task of trying to summarize the countless delights of the Music Box Theater’s latest creative tribute to Broadway musical theater. This year’s edition, Broadway at the Box 2020, is perhaps even more difficult to capture in words because the vocal prowess and comedic skill displayed during the two hours of numerous clever sketches seems better than ever. For years I have wondered when this talented little troupe would run out of brilliant ideas, but that just hasn’t happened.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Your Arms Too Short to Box with God
WBTT Theater

With parts of Vinnette Carroll’s original script and director Harry Bryce’s experience with her staging of productions after Broadway’s, WBTT lays claim to an area premiere production true to Carroll’s conception of the drama and how it should be presented.  Your Arms Too Short to Box with God is a serious, if a bit repetitive, yet exuberant creation of Jesus’s path from his Beatitudes Sermon and Palm Sunday to Crucifixion to Resurrection through acting, dance, and singing of gospel music.

A standout in the company, Charles Lattimore Jr.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Barks and Purrs
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne's Lab Theater

A dramatic feature of “The Colette Project” being helmed by New College of Sarasota with its Alliances Francaise U.S.A. producers, three performances of Barks and Purrs appear first at New College and then at Florida Studio Theater. The play bespeaks Colette’s comic talent and love of animals. It amuses as three actors imitate two cats and a dog while occasionally becoming the pets’ owner and her male partner.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Confession of Lily Dare, The
Cherry Lane Theater

In or out of drag, whether on stage or page, the 65-year-old actor playwright Charles Busch, with some forty years of show business under his belt, is a force to be reckoned with. His signature calling card is in his allover inventiveness, his humorous tongue-in-cheek playfulness, looking outrageously spectacular in a gown and wig, and most importantly, a straightforward honesty in everything he touches. In short, Busch is entirely believable even when he is not.

Ed Rubin
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Glance, The
Off the Wall Theater

Milwaukee theatergoers looking for something new, thought-provoking, a bit exotic and a bit erotic can do no better than to head to Off the Wall Theater for the world premiere of The Glance. Artistic director Dale Gutzman has done it again – created a show that gives viewers an inside look at the talent and mind of Caravaggio, now considered one of the greatest artists in history.

The play, which is being performed in a minuscule, 40-seat theater, is so engrossing that it does not allow the audience to look away for even a second of its two-hour running time.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Frankenstein
Wallis Center - Lovelace Studio Theater

Some monsters never die.

Mary Shelley first wrote a novel called Frankenstein (Or the Modern Prometheus) back in 1818, when she was eighteen.  Basically a philosophical novel that was based on the ideas of her famous father, William Godwin, “Frankenstein” took the position that man is a tabula rasa, an unwritten entity shaped by environment.  Doctor Frankenstein, a young student, animates a soulless monster made out of cadavers by means of galvanism. Bad move.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Confessions of Lily Dare, The
Cherry Lane Theater

Charles Busch’s farcical The Confession of Lily Dare, presented by Primary Stages at the Cherry Lane Theater, features a strong female addressing her wrongs with murder. As in his previous satires such as The Lady in Question and Red Scare on Sunset, she is played in drag by the ever-inventive Busch with the aide of Jessica Jahn’s dazzling costumes and Katherine Carr’s wig design. (Rachel Townsend designed the sumptuous costumes for the rest of the company.) This hilarious spoof lampoons Hollywood’s trite attempts at depicting women’s tragedies. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Medea
Brooklyn Academy of Music - Harvey Theater

Euripides’s Medea, the unforgettable story of a scorned woman whose thirst for revenge drives her to slaughter her own children, has reverberated through the ages, transcending time and culture. Along with Hedda Gabler, it is the great role actresses long to play. Judith Anderson, Zoe Caldwell, Diana Rigg, and Fiona Shaw drenched Broadway in blood, with the first three winning Tony Awards. Maria Callas starred in a film edition.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
Pershing Square Signature Center

Quaint and laughable, a new musical version of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, produced by The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center Off-Broadway, shows that, at least in this case, thanks to shifting attitudes on sexuality, unabashed examinations of carnality have passed into the passe.  

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
West Side Story
Broadway Theater

When it was announced controversial director Ivo van Hove would be staging a revival of  the beloved  West Side Story, you could practically hear the screams of musical-theater purists. While many classic tuners have undergone significant reinterpretation—My Fair Lady and Oklahoma! being the latest—the classic street-gang remake of Romeo and Juliet has never been altered in a major way.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Kunstler
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne's Lab Theater

Into a college lecture hall in 1995 comes famous lawyer William Kunstler accompanied by Kerry,  an exceptional young female law student.  Outside can be heard protests against Kunstler speaking about his career.  Despite Kerry’s first urge to confront him with objections to it and him,  she introduces Kunstler. He takes over the podium and goes over all that made him celebrated, both positively and negatively.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Once on this Island
Hobby Center

I don’t usually assign my readers “homework” in advance of seeing a show, but it seems appropriate in connection with Theater Under the Stars’s current offering of the 1990 Broadway musical, Once on this Island, which is directed by Michael Arden and features the music of Stephen Flaherty, with book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens. I would suggest that prospective audience members prepare a bit before attending this somewhat unusual, one-act production (no intermission).

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Soldier's Play, A
American Airlines Theater

Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 and searingly focuses on the corrosive effect of bigotry in the military and American society at large. After a hit off-Broadway run presented by the Negro Ensemble Company, the suspense drama was adapted into a film called “A Soldier’s Story,” and then revived off-Broadway in 2005. Fuller skillfully wraps his unflinching observations on racial animus and its poisonous influence into a taut murder mystery that still feels shockingly immediate.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
No Wake
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

There was a heightened sense of anticipation as audiences filled into Milwaukee’s Studio Theater, in the city’s Third Ward. Milwaukee Chamber Theater was about to present the world premiere of Wisconsin playwright Erica Berman. The play, No Wake had received an overwhelmingly positive response when it first was presented as a staged reading in Madison, Wis. by Forward Theater. Now it was time to see a fully staged production, complete with sets, props, costumes, and so forth.

Luckily, the Milwaukee audience was not disappointed.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Tu Amaras
Baryshnikov Arts Center - Jerome Robbins Theater

After performing around the world, Bonobo, the internationally acclaimed Chilean experimental theater company, finally made its way to New York City’s Baryshnikov Arts Center, with Tú Amarás (You Shall Love), a socio-political offering with a surreal touch that examines what is an enemy, how do we create one, and how do we connect to others.

Performed for three days (February 13-15, 2020) in Spanish with English subtitles, it played to full houses.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Thoroughly Modern Millie
Crighton Theater

It was not your normal Saturday night at the beautiful Crighton Theater last weekend in downtown Conroe, Texas. As might be expected, the current Broadway musical revival of Thoroughly Modern Millie, from the resident Stage Right Productions Company, was full of many charms from the eager cast of local talent, with lively direction from Manny Cafeo.

That’s the good news, so let me be more specific. The cheerful musical has music by Jeanine Tesori & lyrics by Dick Scanlan (and the latter also collaborated with Richard Morris on the book).

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Book of Mormon, The
Ahmanson Theater

Back in L.A. for the fourth time, The Book of Mormon continues to draw big audiences and big laughs, thanks to its cheeky satirical attack on the Mormon religion and African superstition.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Dead Man's Cell Phone
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

A great deal of life emanates from Dead Man’s Cell Phone as FSU/Asolo Conservatory Actors advance mysteries and romance.  The death of the constantly ringing phone’s owner causes a stranger, at a cafe table next to him, to pick it up and answer it. What will she make of that connection?

Instead of the phone isolating Jean, she becomes involved with the family of the dead man (Christopher Hayhurst’s impressively immoral Gordon). There’s his pseudo-religious Mother, Mrs.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Soldier's Play, A
American Airlines Theater

Who shot Sergeant Vernon C. Waters?

Suspects were plentiful at Fort Neal, a segregated Army camp in 1944 rural Louisiana. Did the blame go to bigoted white officers? Someone in Waters’s unit? The big money pointed to the local the Ku Klux Klan, but underneath, The Soldier’s Play proves it was Waters’s heavy drinking and corrosive racial hatred that led to his murder.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Roan @ the Gates
Stage 773

Have you heard the story of the woman who put duty to country and truth above her own happiness? Uh-huh—didn't think so.

This is because accounts of extraordinary females are likely to be framed in circumstantial speculation attributing their subject's courageous deeds to the influence of mentorly father-figures or, at the least, maternal impulses rooted in nesting behavior—motives distinct from those of men, whose achievements are more often assumed to be based in matters of principle.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Revenge Song
Geffen Playhouse - Gil Cates Theater

Revenge Song is a campy, bawdy musical about a real character, a bad-ass woman named Julie d’Aubigny, who lived in 17th century France and was openly bi-sexual.  Played by the fiery, multi-talented Margaret Odette, Julie had affairs with both men and women, loved to fight duels, beat a murder rap, and became a famous singer, star of the Paris Opera.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Into the Breeches
Florida Studio Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Set in a modest community theater in 1942, Into the Breeches involves women taking Shakespearean roles traditionally played by men. Why?  Like those characters, suitable townsmen are off fighting a real war.  The play is supposed to be funny—but it’s not funny-peculiar, only partly funny-ha-ha, and mostly funny-silly-stupid.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Grand Horizons
Helen Hayes Theater

With a wild dive into one family’s love and marriage, Beth Wohl’s promising new play, Grand Horizons, makes its Broadway debut at Second Stage’s Helen Hayes Theater. An accomplished cast explores a family relationship with poignancy and stabs of sit-com humor, unearthing staleness and random impulsiveness, wacky consequences and endurance.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Grand Horizons
Hayes Theater

Bess Wohl’s cheerful, vigorous new play, Grand Horizons has a lot on its mind. True, it trades in humor that would be at home in TV sitcom territory with its tale of a dysfunctional family in which everyone is a comedian. But also true, it says several pertinent things about marriage, parent-child relationships and, of course, love. The Second Stage production is also slickly acted and directed on an attractive, purposefully generic set.

It begins with a bang.

David A. Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Lion King, The
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

No musical has weathered the past two decades as well as The Lion King , which brings its 2020 North American Tour to Milwaukee. And no musical can rival Lion King in its grandeur, its creativity or its financial impact (see below).

The North American Tour alone has been seen by 20 million theatergoers. Globally, the show has been seen by more than 100 million people. The Broadway production is still going strong, and the show is also doing well in London’s West End, Hamburg, Tokyo and Madrid.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Light My Fire
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

A thorough journey through ‘60s and ‘70s music, Light My Fire indeed rekindles memories for the majority of Florida Studio Theater audiences and enlightens those younger. All seem to respond to a trio who act out lyrics while singing in the styles of major performers of the times and sometimes even kidding them.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Bug
Steppenwolf Theater

Sure, Steppenwolf now occupies an auditorium as big as an auto showroom, the play's seedy Oklahoma motel room now looks more like a Coachella Valley efficiency-condo, and playgoers who know Tracy Letts only as the Pulitzer-winning playwright of August: Osage County are seeing a considerably milder version of Bug, the 1996 drama noir that ensured its author was no one-hit wonder—but there’s nothing we can do about that, and David Cromer can still make a helluva mickey-finn lemonade out of big-budget lemons.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Small Fire, A
Next Act Theater

For better or worse, a debilitating illness can change a long-term marriage in myriad ways. That’s the focus of Obie Award-winning Adam Bock’s A Small Fire , in a production by Next Act Theatre. Emily Bridges, a hard-driving business owner in her 50s, must come to terms with “a new normal” after being inexplicably robbed of her senses in this thought-provoking and well-acted play.

A Small Fire was first produced in 2011 Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. Since then, it has been produced at several regional theaters across the country.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2020

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