Between Riverside and Crazy
Fountain Theater

Somewhere early in the second act of Between Riverside and Crazy, the Stephen Adly Guirgis play now running at the Fountain, I realized what a bad play it was.  Until then I had gone along with its over-cooked, banal dialogue and melodramatic story, thinking the playwright would somehow overcome the play’s weaknesses and redeem what had gone before.  Instead, with the appearance of a Church Lady (Liza Fernandez), a cross between a Catholic lay worker (pun intended), a Santeria witch, and a hooker, the piece collapsed completely.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Height of the Storm, The
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Jonathan Pryce gives a titanic, King Lear-level performance in Florian Zeller’s  soulful The Height of the Storm, translated from the French by Christopher Hampton. Co-starring another great British actor, Eileen Atkins, this is an enigmatic mystery wrapped in an eternal love story.

We first see Pryce immobile in a chair, his face ghostly, staring into some unknown abyss. He’s André, recently widowed. Or is he? Soon, Madeleine, his supposedly deceased wife, enters. Is it he who has died?

David Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Gravity & Other Myths: Backbone
The Broad Stage

In Gravity & Other Myths: Backbone, eleven amazing acrobats not only toss each other around but walk on each other’s heads, fly through the air, build and climb human towers, prance, dance, do flips and flops---all to Elliott Zoerner and Shenton Gregory’s wild, pulsating musical score.  And that’s just for starters!

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Slave Play
Booth Theater

Race relations are examined at a much deeper and more complex level in Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, now on Broadway at the Golden. The play opens on Clint Ramos’ mirrored set, reflecting images of an antebellum Southern plantation. Three interracial couples, each a variation on the slave and master set-up and dressed by Dede Ayite in character-defining 19th century costumes, engage in power dynamics which quickly become sexual.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Great Society, The
Lincoln Center - Vivian Beaumont Theater

 Robert Schenkkan provided a brilliant example of political theater with his Tony winning All the Way, which played Broadway in 2014 after premiering at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The epic drama’s trajectory concerned President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s efforts to push the Civil Rights Act through Congress and ended with his election in 1964.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Caesar and Cleopatra
Theater Row Theater

Julius Caesar’s best qualities—lauded, in the Shakespeare play that bears his name, by Marc Antony—apparently made an impression on a later playwright, too: George Bernard Shaw. The Caesar of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra proves patient, war weary, bemused (rather than enraged) by the the foolishness of mankind, and merciful insofar as it aligns with his stratagems. This is the world leader who, while on a stroll near the Sphinx, meets a capricious 16-year-old who just so happens to be the Queen of Egypt.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Heroes of the Fourth Turning
Playwrights Horizons

Will Arbery depicts yet another group of teary-eyed souls dealing with loss and doubt in Heroes of the Fourth Turning at Playwrights Horizons. This Chekhovian bunch has gathered together to mourn the absence of a cherished past but feel powerless to move forward, sorta like the folks in The Cherry Orchard. They are recent graduates of a conservative Catholic university in Wyoming attending a celebration of their former professor’s promotion to president.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
New Englanders, The
City Center - Stage II

The unhappy characters in Jeff Augustin’s The New Englanders, from Manhattan Theater Club at City Center Stage II, whine about their comfortable misery. Interracial gay couple Aaron (dignified but yearning Teagle F. Bougere) and Samuel (tender Patrick Breen) have lost the zip in their marriage, while their teenage daughter Eisa (fiery Kara Young) aspires to be the next Lauryn Hill and obsessively fears being ordinary.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Linda Vista
Hayes Theater

Like Serafina in The Rose Tattoo, Dick Wheeler, the misanthropic protagonist of Tracey Letts’s Linda Vista at Second Stage’s Hayes Theatre, is no picnic. He rails against Trump voters, all contemporary music and film (especially comic-book adaptations), and Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature as signs of cultural rot.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Rose Tattoo, The
American Airlines Theater

“My life is unhappy. I want to change it and I don’t know how.” That’s the subtext of a lot of American drama, and several productions currently on and Off-Broadway explore this trope of angst with insight and compassion. One is a neglected classic from Tennessee Williams, the poet of the frustrated and lonely. Yet, surprisingly, the Williams play is the most optimistic and life-affirming of the bunch.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Hamilton
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

It has been a long wait, but the people of southeast Wisconsin finally get to be in the room where it happens. Hamilton has arrived.

And what a reception it’s getting. The mostly sold-out performances in this three-week run offer a top-ranked professional tour, which is also visiting two other Wisconsin cities (Appleton, then Madison) during its time in America’s Dairyland. From the buzz heard among the pre-theater crowd on press night in Milwaukee, it’s clear that people have been waiting for this moment.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Linda Vista
Helen Hayes Theater

Dick Wheeler (a terrific Ian Barford) is discontented. Newly separated from wife and son, he moves into a San Diego apartment.

David A. Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Lightning Thief, The: The Percy Jackson Musical
Longacre Theater

The three previously reviewed musicals are Off-Broadway in intimate theaters and clubs. The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical, based on Rick Riordan’s young-adult fantasy novel, began life Off-Broadway a few seasons back and, after a national tour, is now at the Longacre Theater. How does this tween-targeted family tuner settle into big, bad Broadway?

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation
The Triad

Forbidden Broadway is back after a hiatus of five years in a brand-new edition subtitled “The Next Generation.” Creator-writer-director Gerard Alessandrini’s beloved spoof of musicals both good and bad has been running in form or another for over 9,000 performances in cities all over the world. This new version has some misses, though. A Harry Potter bit is kind of obvious, and the parody of The Ferryman  repeated gags Alessandrini used when he skewered another Irish hit, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, 20 years ago.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Little Shop of Horrors
Westside Theater

The Roundabout’s Scotland, PA off-Broadway and Little Shop of Horrors in a commercial run at the Westside Theater translate weird, dark little movies into weird dark little musicals.

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

Scotland, PA at Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theater and Little Shop of Horrors in a commercial run at the Westside Theater translate weird, dark little movies into weird dark little musicals. Both shows feature frighteningly fun, gruesome murders and spoofy scores, ribbing the music of their respective eras. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Cinderella
Crighton Theater

Conroe’s wonderful Crighton Theater has, for many years, continued to send me personal invitations to the shows mounted by the much-loved Stage Right Productions Company. The group has as its longstanding motto: “A Community for the Entire Family.” That motto has perhaps never been more appropriate than for the very cute current offering of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s musical,  Cinderella, cheerfully directed by Stage Right veteran, Sara Preisler.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Sunset Boulevard
Ruth Page Center for the Arts

You've seen it on the big movie-palace screens, on small television screens, on big Broadway stages, and now you can see Billy Wilder's classic tragedy noir up close and intimate in the 218-seat Ruth Page. Ah, but in 2019, when the employability of Glenda Jackson, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren et al., are inarguable, can Porchlight Music Theater sell playgoers on the premise of an actress being all washed up and over the hill at the ripe old age of—FIFTY???

This noir-era Mrs.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Effect, The
Strawdog Theater Company

It doesn't take a mind-reader to note that the first flush of love often produces symptoms mimicking those of madness. Adherents of the James-Lang Theory of Emotions have even argued that what we call "love" is merely a label that we affix to the combination of such symptoms, while supporters of Thomas Szasz declare that the source of the eccentric behavior popularly dubbed "lovesickness" is more often spiritual than organic.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Invisible
Stage 773

It could be a scene out of a Beth Henley play: townswomen clustered around a kitchen table, intent on the progress of their club chapter's membership drive, the preparations for the upcoming rally and congratulating one another on their newly won right to vote (this is 1925). Gradually, however, we realize that the festival is a cross-burning pageant, the snowy linens being folded are hoods and cloaks, and the recruitment campaign under discussion is in support of the Women's Ku Klux Klan of Mounds, Mississippi.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 3019
Slave Play
Golden Theater

Think of the vulgar terms that substitute for having sex or making love. All carry the stench of subjugation. Now add not just men subjugating women but whites subjugating blacks. And you have Jeremy O. Harris’s raw, provocative, over-extended Slave Play about fear, desire, jealousy, and reconciliation.

Harris focuses on four couples: white man/black woman; white woman/black man; white man/black man; and a lesbian pair.

David A. Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Spring Awakening
Hobby Center

Let’s be clear right out of the box. The current offering from Houston’s Theater Under the Stars is not your grandma’s Broadway musical. For all of its theatrical dimensions and explorations of adolescent rebellion, Spring Awakening is clearly a teenage journey of self-discovery through the angst and perils of pubescent sexuality.

Based on the 19th century play of the same name by Frank Wedekind, this 2006 Broadway edition features the rock music of Duncan Sheik, and book by Steven Sater, whose lyrics often read like fine poetry.

David Dow Bentley III
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Vietgone
American Stage

As a new-coming view of Vietnamese Americans in but mainly after the fall of Saigon, Vietgone is a welcome change from stereotyped portrayals of Asian-Americans.  Its author has said he’s written a sex comedy but Brian Balcom, who directs it at American Stage, sees it as an epic journey of migration to a new world, themed with  bravery, resilience, and love. It hasn’t the overwhelming rap of a Hamilton, yet music and lyrics move the drama.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Miss Lilly Gets Boned
Electric Lodge

If you like your theatre wild and wacky, take yourself to the Electric Lodge where Rogue Machine is presenting the West Coast premiere of Miss Lilly Gets Boned, by Bekah Brunstetter.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Betrayal
Bernard B. Jacobs Theater

“I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.” – Harold Pinter, taken from his 2005 Nobel Prize Lecture.

When I first heard that Harold Pinter’s Betrayal was coming to Broadway, I was thrilled. I was long craving for something above and beyond the usual Broadway fare. Something challenging that would set my brain to thinking, and my heart to feeling.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Mother of the Maid
North Shore Center for the Performing Arts

Dead Celebrities have always been prime targets for exploitation by adherents eager to impose their own agendas on luminaries no longer capable of refuting spurious claims. Female icons are particularly susceptible to idolatry/iconoclasm based in academic speculation, and none more so than Joan of Arc, the legendary superstar of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453), who was later executed by the Roman Catholic church for the crime of heresy, but ultimately exonerated, declared a martyr in 1456 and canonized as a saint in 1920.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
X
The Biograph

The bunker drama—more specifically, the post-Armageddon bunker drama—has been a staple of speculative allegories since the bombing of Hiroshima ushered in the Cold War era, but science-fiction nerds smugly anticipating a stroll through well-mapped territory are hereby warned that just because playgoers may have watched a few episodes of “The Twilight Zone” doesn't mean they're home free (a phrase that will take on increasingly ominous connotations).

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Seventy Scenes of Halloween
Athenaeum

It didn't take a diviner to recognize Jeffrey M. Jones's 1990 play as a jilted spouse's "things-I-shoulda-said" list, with all the self-righteous bias implied thereby. It's now 2019, however, and so the smart young Louisiana-expats of the theater company making its Chicago debut have cleverly circumvented the distracting gender attributes once associated with the premise of a married couple spending a quiet Halloween evening with television and candy corn—oh, and intrusive holiday revelers, benign sheet-covered ghosts and mischievous masked demons.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2019
Height of the Storm, The
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Says French playwright, Florian Zeller about The Height of the Storm, “It is a play about love, about the very nature of love, about a couple who has been living 50 years together. I wanted to explore that very deep relationship together, when you don’t know any more who you are if it is without her, or without him.”

In a compact 80 minutes, the Manhattan Theater Club presents Zeller’s elusive mind puzzle at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, challenging the audience with questions, not answers.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Sisters in Law
Annenberg Center - Lovelace Studio Theater

Sisters in Law looks at the volatile relationship between the first two female Supreme Court justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Tovah Feldshuh) and Sandra Day O’Connor (Stephanie Faracy).  The play by Jonathan Shapiro, which is now running at The Wallis, is a kind of feminist manifesto.  Ginsburg and O’Connor may have had their differences but they both managed to stand together when it came to the issue of equal rights for women.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Surveillance Trilogy, The
Reuben Cordova Theater

In The Surveillance Trilogy, now in a world premiere production at Theater 40, Leda Siskind looks at all the ways Big Brother has control over us. Each of her three short plays deals with an ubiquitous (but secret) government power which wreaks havoc with our personal lives.

”Until All of This Is Over” is set in 1953, at the height of the McCarthy Era when many people suspected of being a communist were put under surveillance by the FBI.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
That's Amore
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

Florida Studio Theater’s Court Cabaret once again holds a hit tribute, this time to the career of singer and actor Dean Martin.  That’s Amore is not only the title of the show and one of Dean’s most memorable hit songs but also the reaction of the FST audience to both. Cast and musicians succeed in duplicating the various impressions Dean himself made.

Catherine Randazzo ably directs three men who catch the essence of Dean in song and patter as well as Emily Dennis, who represents his wives, lovers, and the women in his songs.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Bat Out of Hell
City Center

“You have to go over the top to see what’s on the other side.” So says one of the bizarre, cartoonish characters in Bat Out of Hell, the musical based on a series of rock albums recorded by the singer Meat Loaf. In this show, they definitely go over the top, but you may not want to see what’s on the other side.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Bernhardt/Hamlet
Goodman Theater

Even if Theresa Rebeck and the 21st-century champions of all things feminine and feminist had not declared it so, Sarah Bernhardt would have been one extraordinary female. A bona fide superstar of the gilded age stage with a string of hit shows and international A-list paramours, this was a woman who could do whatever she wanted—including display her trim nethers in “breeches” roles during an age when proper ladies were forbidden to reveal their ankles. When Bernhardt decided to take on the coveted role of Hamlet, however, even her supporters feared she had gone too far.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Betrayal
Bernard B. Jacobs Theater

Performing a Harold Pinter play is a delicate balance—to borrow a phrase from the similarly difficult-to-mount Edward Albee. Pinter’s cryptic characters with their numerous pauses and minimalist dialogue can come across as icy or frustratingly inscrutable.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Romeo and Juliet Adapted
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

The setting is a classroom that becomes Verona as a “lesson” given by a Prince of a teacher has her students becoming involved in an educational drama. Tyler Dobrowsky’s lively adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet fits well into a class period-time in schools throughout Florida, the main venues for an FSU/Asolo Conservatory tour.  It’s helped immensely by youthful actors of the major characters and direction in tune with them.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Sunday
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

In Jack Thorne’s Sunday at the Atlantic Theater, a group of twentysomethings meet on the day in question for a monthly book club discussion, drink too much vodka, and reveal their insecurities and emotional wounds. Shy, lonely Marie (a weirdly magnetic Sadie Scott) has just lost her publishing internship, while her more confident roommate Jill (vibrant Julianna Canfield) is moving ahead in the same industry and has a solid relationship with wealthy Milo (appropriately smarmy Zane Pais).

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Fern Hill
59E59 Theaters

While Broadway’s The Height of the Storm gives an unflinching, brutal look at the aging process, Michael Tucker’s Fern Hill, at 59E59 Theater after premiering at New Jersey Repertory Company, offers a rosier slant on the same subject. Once again, we are in a well-appointed kitchen of a country house where the mature occupants are facing difficult life choices (designer Jessica Parks is responsible for this elegant eatery). But this time, the solutions are relatively easy, and the outlook is full of fun and mirth with only a few bumps in the road.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Height of the Storm, The
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Reality is a slippery proposition in the plays of French dramatist Florian Zeller. In both The Father and The Mother, the title characters are lost in a maze of conflicting and confusing circumstances. So is the audience since everything is seen via the protagonists’ perceptions which are altered by dementia or mental illness. Zeller’s latest work, The Height of the Storm, translated by Christopher Hampton, is now on Broadway at Manhattan Theater Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater, after hit runs in Paris and London.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Fires in the Mirror
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror is almost closer in tone to a film documentary than live theater. Two actors—the very talented Marti Gobel and Elyse Edelman—do a terrific job of bringing forth 26 roles in this 100-minute production. Under the direction of Marcella Kearns and C. Michael Wright, the women tackle more men’s roles than women’s roles, and switch races and ages, as well.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2019

Pages