Lindiwe
Steppenwolf Theater

Just the name "Ladysmith Black Mambazo" on the marquee would be enough to sell out the run, but Steppenwolf playgoers usually expect a play with their music, so Eric Simonson frames his dazzling vocal score in a Hollywood fairy tale of career-crossed lovers struggling to conduct a long-distance romance (Chicago USA and Johannesburg RSA—is that long-distance enough for you?) with a side trip into mythic underworld realms where they undergo quasi-Orpheus and Eurydice riddles at the behest of a Plutonian wizard lamenting his own broken heart . . .

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Is This a Room
Vineyard Theater

For Tina Satter’s This is a Room at off-Broadway’s Vineyard Theater, the entire text is composed of a transcript of FBI agents questioning a former Air Force linguist named Reality Winner in 2017. She was interrogated in her own home and then charged with leaking classified government information on Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election. In 70 tense minutes, Satter and a quartet of actors transform Parker Lutz’s bare set into a chamber of intimidation and fear.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Tina
Lunt-Fontanne Theater

Adrienne Warren. Remember the name. As Tina Turner in the new jukebox/biographical musical, Tina, she expels enough energy to light the nation’s grid. As rock star Tina Turner, Warren sings to the rafters, dances with pounding rhythm, acts with more subtlety than the script allows, and looks great thrusting arms and legs to the heavens. It’s a star-making performance, surrounded by a formulaic, unmoving show.

Tina, a child prodigy musically, parlayed that tremendous voice into a fiery public career.

David A. Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Jitney
Mark Taper Forum

Jitney, August Wilson’s first play, comes to L.A. after copping best-revival prizes in New York last year.  With Ruben Santiago-Hudson repeating as director and several key actors reprising their roles, the play lights up the Taper’s stage and enthralls from beginning to end.

Set in a gypsy cab office in the black ghetto of Pittsburgh, circa 1977, Jitney works on several different levels. 

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Before
Odyssey Theater

The dynamic Irish actor Pat Kinevane returns to the Odyssey with his latest one-man play, Before. It follows on the heels of such other solo shows as Forgotten, Silent, and Underneath, all of which have been produced by the Odyssey in recent years.  Kinevane, whose home theatre is the Fishamble in Dublin, tells a weird, complex story in Before.

Speaking in the voice of a rough working-class character named Pontius Ross, he announces early on that “I always hated musicals.”  Yet not long after that he interrupts his monologue by suddenly belting

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Outlaws and Angels
Florida Studio Theater - Goldstein Cabaret

Country music had personal and professional “Outlaws” who worked to establish species of the genre that were often previously out of bounds.  “Angels” both helped the art develop and loved the artists.  Florida Studio Theater joyously celebrates the people who took personal hits to make country music the other kind of hit via their standout voices and styles.

Joe Casey, as master of ceremonies for Outlaws and Angels, leads the cast in “Georgia on a Fast Train” and then seemingly pulls into a station to introduce each one individually.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Double V, The
Matrix Theater

The Double V dips into black history to tell its story.

Back in 1941, with the war raging overseas,  a young black man in Witchita, Kansas wrote a letter to The Pittsburgh Courier, pleading for the U.S. military to allow black folks to enlist.  This was a shocking request.  Racism was so widespread and deeply rooted at the time that blacks were treated as an inferior people, unworthy of serving their country.  The letter rejected that kind of prejudicial thinking and called on the military to change its policy.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Salvage
Lounge Theater

Salvage, which takes place in a rundown, out-of-the-way saloon, might have been called "The Second Chance Saloon" because that’s what this terrific little musical is all about, second chances.

The first character we meet is Preacher (David Atkinson), a burnt-out, whiskey-swilling musician who sits hunched over his guitar singing a song called, “I’m So Tired of it All.” It’s a sad song but it quickly and tunefully encapsulates the play’s theme.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Sound Inside, The
Studio 54

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Michaels, The
Public Theater

The kitchen is also a source of drama in Richard Nelson’s The Michaels at the Public. Like his previous cycle of works which premiered at the same theater, four plays that make up “The Apple Family Plays” and the three that comprise “The Gabriels,” The Michaels takes place in a middle-class abode in Rhinebeck, New York where the residents argue, connect, and review their lives as they prepare and eat a meal together in more or less real time. A major difference here is the discussions are not as overtly political as in the previous works.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Seared
MCC Theater at Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space

“People suck. Only food is real,” rails Harry, the temperamental genius chef, in Theresa Rebeck’s riotous comedy  Seared at MCC Theater. Harry is engaged in one of many contentious debates on the purity of his gastronomic art over commercial viability with the more practical Mike, his partner in a small restaurant in trendy Park Slope, Brooklyn. He’s stating his essential dilemma: life would be perfect if he didn’t have to deal with his fellow man and could just be left alone to cook.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Bella Bella
City Center - Stage 1

For an uplifting and true, politically themed story, hightail it over the City Center for Manhattan Theater Club’s intimate production of Bella Bella, written by and starring Harvey Fierstein as the late firebrand Bella Abzug, directed with economy and verve by Kimberly Senior.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Soft Power
Public Theater

Soft Power, the gloriously messy but idea-packed new musical from two of our most vital and prolific theater artists, David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori, is anything but soft. The title refers to countries gaining world dominance through cultural influence rather than military hardware and muscle flexing. Hwang’s hilariously satiric and complex book also addresses the 2016 election, ethnic stereotyping, romantic comedies, musical theater conventions, hate crimes, and China’s relationship with the US.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Nerd, The
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse

In the 1970s, Milwaukee Repertory Theater actor and playwright-in-residence Larry Shue penned a comedy about one of the most obnoxious characters in American theater. Now, the Rep pays tribute to Shue’s brilliance by mounting its fourth production of his play, The Nerd.

The show, which began as a Milwaukee Rep staged reading in the 1979/80 season, was so popular that it had its world premiere the following season. Eventually, the play had a Broadway run (with Mark Hamill in the lead). These days, it is often mounted by regional theater companies nationwide.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow Is enuf
Public Theater

Nowhere is the contrast between today’s Broadway and off-Broadway more sharply defined than in the productions of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical at the Lunt-Fontanne and the revival of Ntozake Shange’s 1976 groundbreaking for colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf, off-Broadway at the Public Theater. Both give glorious voice to African-American women dealing with sexist and racial oppression, but they could not be more different in their production history, form and delivery. Tina is a sleek jukebox musical, spectacularly

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Tina
Lunt-Fontanne Theater

Nowhere is the contrast between today’s Broadway and off-Broadway more sharply defined than in the productions of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical at the Lunt-Fontanne and the revival of Ntozake Shange’s 1976 groundbreaking for colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf, off-Broadway at the Public Theater. Both give glorious voice to African-American women dealing with sexist and racial oppression, but they could not be more different in their production history, form and delivery. Tina is a sleek jukebox musical, spectacularly

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Rutherford & Son
Baird Hall

Theater historians and classroom curricula have long credited Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw as the chief proponents of realism in Western drama for their exploration of domestic injustices rarely examined by the privileged audiences of the period.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Laura and the Sea
Rivendell Theater Ensemble

"The mind is a tricky camera," observes a character in Kate Tarker's dark and quirky comedy receiving its world premiere from Rivendell Theater Ensemble—insight explaining the convoluted progress of memories slow to develop (we’re talking pre-digital photography analogies here) and even slower to arrange into a coherent narrative.

The event precipitating manufacture of such a narrative by the employees of a New York travel agency is the suicide of a co-worker during a company weekend cruise off the coast of Long Island.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Kentucky
Theater Wit

When you think about people who live in rural Kentucky, do you visualize loud, vulgar, brawny, illiterate, bigoted, meth-smoking, moonshine-swilling yokels? When you think about people who live in New York City, is the image that comes to mind one of shallow, materialistic, mercurial, neurotic, pharma-popping, thrill-addicted, fossil fume-huffing urban chauvinists?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Romeo & Juliet
Navy Pier

Although tribal enmity dating from 1957 could, in 2019, plausibly be labeled an "ancient grudge" let's make it clear from the start: The warring Veronese neighbors we meet in this production of Romeo and Juliet are not the descendants of the Jets and Sharks, bent on reviving old quarrels rooted in long-forgotten slights.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Newsies
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

Newsies the musical is making headlines in Milwaukee. Skylight Music Theater has done it again in creating a hit show that’s perfect for family holiday viewing.

The musical is based on a 1992 Disney film that is drawn from a real New York newsboy’s strike in 1899. In the film/musical version, a charismatic newsboy named Jack Kelly organizes a strike after newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer decides to raise the price of newspapers that are sold to the newsboys (and news girls).

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Lone Star Lyric: `Round Midnight
Ovations Night Club

No, it wasn’t a Christmas show. Not yet. That treat is just around the corner for Houston’s popular Lone Star Lyric cabaret, and more about that later. This month’s offering, titled “‘Round Midnight,” was a lush showcase of classic standards from the American Songbook, paired with some of the finest vocal and instrumental talent ever to set foot on the stage at Houston’s chic and cozy nightclub, Ovations.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Sound of Music, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Asolo Rep shows all its considerable production abilities onstage in The Sound of Music for a glorious holidays treat. Director-Choreographer Josh Rhodes has wanted not to duplicate the movie or the original stage production but rather look anew at both book and music anew. How he’s handled them and made movement  important imparts a fine, fresh appeal.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Soft Power
Public Theater

On the night of Nov. 29, 2015, playwright David Henry Hwang, author of the Tony-winning M. Butterfly, was stabbed in the neck while walking from a grocery store to his Brooklyn home. What seemed to be “a random act of violence that happens all the time” might possibly have been a hate crime (Hwang is Asian-American). Managing, somehow, to get to a nearby hospital, he learned his vertebral artery had been severed, a near-fatal wound eventually repaired in an hours-long operation.

David Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Fifteen Men in a Smoke-Filled Room
Reuben Cordova Theater

Warren G. Harding becomes a sympathetic figure in Fifteen Men in a Smoke-Filled Room, Colin Speer Crowley’s political drama, which is now running at Theatre 40, directed by Jules Aaron. Although history has always treated Harding cruelly, owing to the scandals that marred his term as 29th president, Crowley believes that he was essentially a decent, honest chap who was betrayed by his closest friends and confidants.  Not only that, he didn’t even want to be president, preferring instead to run off with his mistress and put the world of politics far behind him.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Richard III
John Jay College - Gerald W. Lynch Theater

Richard III has never been my favorite Shakespeare, but the current production in Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, produced by Druid, a theater from Ireland, has shown me how great this unwieldy work can be. Druid Shakespeare: Richard III is brilliant, bordering on expressionism, directed meticulously by Druid’s Artistic Director, Garry Hynes.

Queen Margaret skulks across stage before Richard enters, looking like a ghost in diaphanous gauze, in the play’s most surreal moment. Only then does Richard enter from the floor with the famous soliloquy.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Tuesdays with Morrie
St. Christopher's Church

Acacia Theater, Milwaukee’s faith-based theater company, reaches a new level of professionalism with its production of Tuesdays with Morrie, a play based on the New York Times’s best-selling memoir by Mitch Albom.

Tuesdays with Morrie opened in 2002 Off-Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theater. The play’s co-author is Minneapolis-based playwright Jeffrey Hatcher. Readers may also be familiar with the TV movie starring Jack Lemmon.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Department of Dreams
City Garage

City Garage has gone all out to introduce the work of the Kosovo-based playwright Jeton Neziraj to Los Angeles.

The avant-garde company headed by Frederique Michel and Charles A. Dumcombe  honored Neziraj with a champagne reception, a book signing, and a guest panel discussion on the weekend of Nov. 8-10, 2019.  And of course City Garage also mounted the world premiere of Neziraj’s latest play, Department of Dreams, which will run locally until December 8.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Thanksgiving Play, The
Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater

Like all good satire, The Thanksgiving Family destroys all its targets:  the holiday of Thanksgiving itself, children’s theater, American history, veganism, spirituality, racism, and progressive education. The play by Larissa Fasthorse gleefully stays on the comic attack for 90 swift minutes, demolishing everything in its path, leaving bodies on the ground and blood on the walls.

Logan (Samantha Sloyan) is a much-harried elementary school teacher who, because of her theater background—six weeks in L.A.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Bright Star
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

With double authors and protagonists, Bright Star also manages to portray two different eras (1923 and 1940s) in bluegrass country and in the big city. As a musical and melodrama loosely based on a true story, it’s winning applause for its sentimental, romantic treatment of people and times that appeal to typical FST audiences.  Banjos, guitars, fiddle, upright bass, and piano music become a melding force.

As middle-aged Alice Murphy,  Meredith Jones strongly enlists listeners to be interested in her (“If You Knew My Story*).

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Heroes of the Fourth Turning
Playwrights Horizons - Mainstage

Will Arbery’s latest play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, having been extended three times by popular demand, is now running Off-Broadway through Sunday, November 17 at Playwrights Horizons. With more religious, personal, and political exposition (read talk) than many a mind can absorb at one sitting, Heroes of the Fourth Turning is essentially a snapshot of the current divisive state of affairs in this country.

It is a play that not only digs deep but demands one’s fullest attention.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Stranger in the Attic
Off the Wall Theater

Just in time for Halloween, Off the Wall Theatre presents the Milwaukee premiere of a new thriller, Stranger in the Attic, by John Kaasik. Clues abound throughout this chilling, suspenseful narrative – right down to the very last second, when a major plot twist is revealed. According to director and company founder Dale Gutzman, Stranger reminds him of the psychological movie thrillers of yesteryear, including “Vertigo” (1958), “Rear Window” (1954) and “Dial ‘M’ for Murder” (1954). He’s right on the money about that.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Bakersfield Mist
Plymouth Church

Among the highlights of the current theater season is a concert presentation of Bakersfield Mist, by Los Angeles-based playwright Stephen Sachs. The play brings up issues of class, education and aesthetic training – all key to the notion of “what is art?”

The show is the fall opener of 35-year-old Boulevard Theatre, which has persevered largely on the dedication of founder and artistic director Mark Bucher.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Sound Inside, The
Studio 54

Although David Cromer is listed as director of Adam Rapp’s mesmerizing The Sound Inside, he might just as well be credited with co-authorship. His staging is so incisive, so provocative that the drama, which stars a radiant Mary-Louise Parker, benefits mightily from his work.

This is a mysterious play, not in the sense of a crime story, but because it probes the deep, unknowable insides of mind and heart that don’t cohere with what’s outside. “Listen to the sound inside” says Bella (Parker) over and over as she puzzles out thoughts and feelings she’s repressed.

David Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Antigone
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

This Antigone is not a standard translation from the Greek but rather one by Irish poet Seamus Heaney, originally published as what is here named the play’s subtitle.  The text comes from two writers, eras, and places.  This makes all the difference in the production, especially by relatively young FSU Conservatory students.

Because Antigone is a straightforward play, it goes right into the dramatic situation.  Creon has taken over Thebes after civil war.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
American Utopia
Hudson Theater

David Byrne’s American Utopia is another celebratory theater event unusual for Broadway. The former front man for the Talking Heads and a genius-level solo artist, Byrne presents an intoxicating hybrid of rock concert, dance program, and howlingly fun party. Audience members at the performance attended had no hesitation to stand and dance in the aisles to “The Road to Nowhere,” “Once in a Lifetime,” and the ultimate shake-your-booty inducer “Burning Down the House.” 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Christmas Carol, A
Lyceum Theater

The holiday cheer begins at the Lyceum Theater before the latest incarnation of Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol even commences. The holiday outing arrives on Broadway after a hit run in London. Lighting designer Hugh Vanstone has created a warm 19th century glow aided by lit candles throughout the theater. Patrons are greeted by cheerful staffers dressed in period costumes offering free cookies and clementine oranges. Cast members and musicians stroll onstage and play traditional yuletide favorites.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Wrong Man, The
Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space

A basic plot synopsis of Ross Golan’s musical The Wrong Man—no relation to the 1956 Hitchcock classic with Henry Fonda—might lead you think it deals with racial tensions in contemporary America. In Reno, Nevada, an African-American young man with a troubled past named Duran (dynamic Joshua Henry) is framed for the murder of his pregnant girlfriend Marianna (passionate Ciara Renee), also a victim of unfortunate choices. The crime was actually committed by the woman’s psycho ex who quickly disappears in Mexico.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Scotland, PA
Steinberg Center - Laura Pels Theater

In Scotland, PA, Roundabout’s jaunty, festive, but bifurcated new off-Broadway musical, signs inform us that there’s no gas at the gas station and the Points of Interest location is closed. Based on the 2002 cult film which was, in turn, based loosely on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the show strains to unite what starts as comic parody with what turns into grisly tragedy. Unlike, say, Little Shop of Horrors, it doesn’t maintain an engaging tone nor involve us with the characters.

David A. Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Mamma Mia!
Venice Theater

To celebrate the opening of its 70th season, Venice Theater creates a lavish  370th MainStage area premiere production. Though geared to the tastes of VT’s predominantly senior fans, its Mamma Mia! uses plenty of young performers to perform energetically, especially in abundant dances and mimes to 23 ageless ABBA songs.

The plot of Mamma Mia! is an extended but simple device to hang music on.  Sophie, about to marry Sky, finds her mother Donna’s 21-year-old diary, proving her father must be one of three men.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2019

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