Feelin' Groovy 8: 9 Weeks of Peace and Music
Music Box Theater

Houston’s Music Box Theater continues to amaze audiences with their seemingly bottomless reservoir of musical creativity and comedy flair. With its long-running and very talented quintet of regular stars, Rebekah Dahl, Brad Scarborough, Kristina Sullivan, Cay Taylor, and Luke Wrobel, the brilliant troupe has been delighting full house crowds for more than a dozen years. That popularity shows no signs of a let up.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
July 2023
Rock & Roll Man
New World Stages

OK, so they weren’t exactly dancing in the aisles at New World Stages the night I attended Rock & Roll Man. However, what the audience was doing to show their love for everything that was flashing before their eyes during the musical’s fast-paced, two-act, wonder-filled 2 hours and 20 minutes was hooting, hollering, whistling, laughing, clapping, snapping their fingers, gyrating in their seats and most surprising of all shedding nostalgic tears of joy, all of this while basking in the glorious glow of rock & roll.

Ed Rubin
Date Reviewed:
July 2023
Cottage, The
Hayes Theater

 If you’re looking for a fizzy cocktail to help you cool off from the global triple-digit heat wave, you couldn’t find a funnier or more intoxicating concoction than Sandy Rustin’s bubbly The Cottage. Set in the bucolic English countryside in the 1920s, Rustin’s theatrical bauble is a combination of lighter-than-air Noel Coward romantic mix-up and Georges Feydeau bedroom farce, with a dash of absurdist meta-theatricality.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2023
All Play (13th Annual Sarasota Improv Festival Finale)
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

A highlight of Florida Studio Theatre’s 13th Annual “Improv Festival” was the “All Party” gathering for improvisations delivered by the first spontaneous troupes or groups to volunteer to perform them. FST’s Director of Improvisation, Will Luera, announced subjects to be improvised, okayed the order of improvisors, and even determined the time some of
the skits ended. 

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2023
Flex
Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

You don’t need a working knowledge of basketball to enjoy Flex, Candrice Jones’s infectious and fast-paced new play on friendship and competition in a high-school girls team at Lincoln Center’s Off-Broadway Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, but it would help. There is a lot of talk about point guards, fouling, and free throws, but the more important themes involve the limits and responsibilities of teamwork and the roles of gender and race in sports and class.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2023
MC Hammersmith
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

Highlighting the 13th Annual Florida Studio Theater “Improv Festival”, after its COVID-related absence since 2019, British Will Naameh performed as star improvisor MC Hammersmith on the last Festival day, at 4 and 9 p.m. Basically a rapper, he accomplished also a few variations on his signature freestyle creation and delivery.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2023
Guys and Dolls
Class Act Theater

Those familiar with the witty short stories of newspaper columnist Damon Runyon may also be acquainted with the types of gangsters, gamblers, hustlers, and floozies that populated the 1940’s Manhattan and Brooklyn prohibition underworld of which he wrote.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
July 2023
Divas Three: Celebration of the Great Female Vocalists from the ‘60s Through the ‘90s  
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

Title and subtitle tell what the show at Florida Studio Theatre during its summertime season of visiting troupes is all about. Vocalists highlighted are Barbra Streisand, Whitney Houston, Carole King, Cher, Celine Dion, Bette Midler, and Aretha Franklin.  Still each of the trio of performers brings in her own personality, along with each wearing stunning sequined costumes in different styles but matching colors.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2023
Hamlet
Delacorte Theater

Hamlet, which I saw in previews, is The Public Theater’s major production in Central Park this summer. Director Kenny Leon has given us an interpretation with a solid foundation as a domestic tragedy, plus some terrific acting. But Mr. Leon peppers the production with such a variety of spices that we’re sometimes bewildered. His combining of styles that we find in the show is simultaneously post-modernist and Elizabethan.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
July 2023
Just for Us
Hudson Theater

Alex Edelman begins his Broadway one-man show Just for Us at the Hudson Theater with fairly standard jokes about gorillas and horses, but he soon makes a detour into deeper territory by recreating a bizarre and unexpectedly illuminating real-life experience. After keeping track of anti-Semitic posters on his Twitter feed, the Jewish comedian received a tweeted invitation to a white supremacist meeting in Queens, NY. That encounter forms the basis of Edelman’s hilarious and insightful monologue which goes beyond stand-up into social commentary.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2023
Great Gatsby, The: The Immersive Show
Park Central Hotel

 A pair of current Off-Broadway productions present nontraditional interpretations of two of the most iconic male protagonists in Western literature—Hamlet, the indecisive melancholy Dane, and Jay Gatsby, the mysterious millionaire and symbol of American ambition. Both shows display gimmicky staging to plumb the depths of William Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observations on the human condition, but they obscure the richer insights of both works, resulting in flashy productions and incomplete renderings of the original.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2023
Hamlet
Delacorte Theater

 A pair of current Off-Broadway productions present nontraditional interpretations of two of the most iconic male protagonists in Western literature—Hamlet, the indecisive melancholy Dane, and Jay Gatsby, the mysterious millionaire and symbol of American ambition. Both shows display gimmicky staging to plumb the depths of William Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observations on the human condition, but they obscure the richer insights of both works, resulting in flashy productions and incomplete renderings of the original.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2023
Black Pearl Sings!
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

With 19 relevant songs Black Pearl Sings! returns to Florida Studio Theater, which helped in its development. The drama concerns a convicted black murderer who needs parole to search for her daughter and a white musicologist who must find ur-African and American songs by black slaves to publish and promulgate. This should get her a long-denied Harvard professorship controlled by white men and, in the past, stolen from her by one. Will the women get together to achieve their ends?

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2023
Bad Cinderella
Imperial Theater

Little did Andrew Lloyd Webber know when he saddled his most recent musical with the ill-chosen name “Bad Cinderella” that he was handing theater critics here in New York a cudgel with which to beat his latest Broadway production to a pulp.

And beat it they did, savagely so, to the point of forcing it to close at the Imperial Theatre on June 4, 2023 after only 33 previews, 85 regular performances, with a loss rumored to be near $19 million dollars.

Ed Rubin
Date Reviewed:
June 2023
Comeuppance, The
Pershing Square Signature Center

Remember when theater used to be of the moment and reflect what was going on outside the auditorium politically and socially? How playwrights were like doctors forcing us to gaze upon an X-ray of our societal ailments? Such intense examination in our otherwise escapist entertainment fare does occur upon occasion and should be celebrated. Two current Off-Broadway productions, The Doctor and The Comeuppance, offer an unblinkered diagnosis of the current divided state, and while it may not provide a pretty picture, these X-rays are illuminating and gripping.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2023
Doctor, The
Park Avenue Armory

Remember when theater used to be of the moment and reflect what was going on outside the auditorium politically and socially? How playwrights were like doctors forcing us to gaze upon an X-ray of our societal ailments? Such intense examination in our otherwise escapist entertainment fare does occur upon occasion and should be celebrated. Two current Off-Broadway productions, The Doctor and The Comeuppance, offer an unblinkered diagnosis of the current divided state, and while it may not provide a pretty picture, these X-rays are illuminating and gripping.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
June 2023
Once Upon a One More Time
Marquis Theater

Mix the fairy-tale revisionism of Into the Woods with the tween pop jukebox format of & Juliet, add a dash of female empowerment from Six and a smidge of meta story-within-a-story sensibility from Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, and you have Once Upon a One More Time, the derivative but entertaining new musical at the Marquis. Employing “the music performed and recorded by Britney Spears” for its score, Once has a built-in audience of the Britney Army, but for non-inductees it’s still a fizzy summer delight. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2023
Wet Brain
Playwrights Horizons

After you’ve seen as many dysfunctional families plays as this critic has, you may begin to doubt the absolute truth of Tolstoy’s famous maxim that each unhappy family is unique. They tend to blur together, and you can’t tell one weepy clan stage saga from another. The woes of the Hispanic, Arizona-based family in John J. Caswell, Jr.’s surprisingly spicy, funny, and gut-wrenching play Wet Brain, a co-production of Playwrights Horizons and MCC Theater, may be familiar, but the way Caswell conveys their fractured dynamic is inventive and different.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2023
Days of Wine and Roses
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

The potential was there: a musical based on “Days of Wine and Roses,” the searing 1962 film detailing an alcoholic couple’s smash-up and painful partial road to recovery. The creative team and cast are impressive. The score is by Tony winner Adam Guettel (The Light in the Piazza, grandson of Richard Rodgers and son of Mary Rodgers), the book by Craig Lucas (Prelude to a Kiss, Blue Window), direction by Michael Greif (Rent), and to star two of the brightest musical performers on the boards today—Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2023
Surfer Boys, The
Florida Studio Theater - Goldstein Cabaret

Basically a concert show, The Surfer Boys is Brian Noonan’s conception of a tribute to The Beach Boys and an attempt to create music, especially their hits of the 1960s. All but a few of the included tunes are earlier and later. Everything typifies the
performers’ styles and their era’s concerns, but there’s little drama in the music or snatches of plot.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2023
Symphonic Tribute to Elvis
Pavillion

As one of the world’s premier outdoor amphitheaters since Frank Sinatra was its Grand Opening star on April 28, 1990, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in The Woodlands, Texas, has had no shortage of blockbuster talents gracing its stage. And while Elvis Presley had long before predeceased the arrival of this splendid venue, it seemed very much as though he arrived there last Wednesday night.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
June 2023
Holmes and Watson
St. Christopher's Episcopal Church

Acacia Theater Company, Milwaukee’s Christian faith-based theater company, offers theatergoers a scintillating mystery by playwright Jeffrey Hatcher in Holmes and Watson. The play conjures yet another adventure of the great fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, and his right-hand man, Dr. Watson. And more than a few mysteries are uncovered along the way.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2023
Tootsie
Marcus Performing Arts Center

Milwaukee’s current season of Broadway shows ended in mid-June with a non-Equity production of Tootsie, which recently closed at the Marcus Performing Arts Center. Tootsie the musical is based on the 1982 hit film, starring Dustin Hoffman, in which he attempts to overcome obstacles to get hired as an actor – even if it means posing as a woman.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2023
Shear Madness
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

The landlady of Shear Madness beauty salon has just been scissored to death outside. Who dunnit? If you attend Florida Studio Theater’s “Shear Madness” production, you will decide. First, a “pre-show” introduces six living characters as they appear with voiced-over biographical detail in a bright salon with working sinks, etc. Then the activity turns into action as the search for the murderer begins.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2023
Grey House
Lyceum Theater

You know you’re in trouble when one of the first lines of a thriller is “I’ve seen this movie before.” That unoriginal piece of dialogue is spoken by Henry, half of a pair of classic victims, as he and his wife Max stumble into a remote mountain cabin after crashing their car. Anyone who has ever watched a horror flick will known something very bad is going to happen. This is the overly familiar premise of Levi Holloway’s bizarre, limp spook show Grey House now at the Lyceum, though probably not for very long.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2023
Parade
Ambassador Theater

Alfred Uhry’s musical Parade, co-conceived by Hal Prince with music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, is now playing to sell-out crowds and rave reviews, and back on Broadway after 25 years (for a limited run through Sunday, August 6) at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. The musical took its first Broadway bow at Lincoln Center Theater in 1998 under the direction of Prince where it won a Tony Award for best score and book. It ran 39 previews and 84 regular performances.

Ed Rubin
Date Reviewed:
June 2023
Authentic Tribute to Cash and Orbison, An
Crighton Theater

An assortment of out-of-town commitments had taken me away from Texas for just over two years, so it was a dream come true to at last find myself back enjoying a fine meal at Joe’s Italian Restaurant in Conroe, before taking an after dinner stroll past the inviting town’s various gift shops, pubs, and antique stores, on the way to the historic and beautifully restored Crighton Theater for the evening’s concert.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
June 2023
Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, The
James Earl Jones Theater

When it opened in 1964, Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window must have been quite jolting. The playwright’s 1959 Broadway debut A Raisin in the Sun was somewhat challenging. As the first play by an African-American woman to play what was then known as the Great White Way,  Raisin may have shaken traditional theatergoers with its predominantly black cast and tackling of such issues as housing discrimination and institutional racism.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2023
New York, New York
St. James Theater

 I'm not originally from New York, but having lived here for fifty years, yes! I am a New Yorker. This is very much in the spirit of New York, New York, when the finale rings out over the audience, and there is singing, cheering, and standing in the house. True, this is not the finest musical ever presented, but there are familiar songs ("Marry Me," "A Quiet Thing," "The World Goes 'Round") and the leading lady, Anna Uzele, gives a performance that no theater goer should miss.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
May 2023
Drowsy Chaperone, The
Class Act Theater

It was exactly one quarter-century ago when I had the first of what would be dozens of opportunities to review the splendid musical productions of the Class Act company. Now, 25 years later, the organization continues to amaze with the astonishing, Broadway-worthy musical productions it produces year after year. The latest such success story is its absolutely wonderful The Drowsy Chaperone, now playing for one last weekend at the Class Act Theater in The Woodlands, Texas.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
May 2023
Greatest Hits Album: Side B, The
Music Box at Queensbury Theater

A brief transportation delay in reaching the new location may have caused me to miss the first moments of the Opening Show from the Music Box Theater in its cozy and attractive new house located in the Queensbury Theater complex of Houston’s chic and increasingly popular CityCentre neighborhood.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
May 2023
Club Dada / Kabaret Kaput
Dixon Place

Club DaDA/ Kabaret Kaput is appearing for five performances at Dixon Place in NYC. It calls itself "a 'cabaret' in the Kurt Weil Weimar sense of the word,” but audiences expecting the Kit Kat Club from Cabaret will be disappointed. The two performers haven't bothered to hire a trio or even a pianist; they sing accompanied by recorded instrumentals. When an audience buys tickets to a cabaret, they expect cabaret, not karaoke. Singing to recorded tracks is unacceptable at open mic night; in cabaret it's unknown.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
May 2023
A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical
Broadhurst Theater

Like most jukebox bio-musicals, A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical is an excuse to play the subject’s song catalogue to an audience of rabid fans. Anthony McCarten’s book hits the usual bullet points—rise to fame, troubled marriages, conflicted and reflective old age—and provides intros to the smash hits. All is staged smoothly by Michael Mayer.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2023
Shucked
Nederlander Theater

Wanting nothing more than to crack some jokes and entertain us, Shucked offers us a heaping helping of hospitality and plenty of yucks. That’s all and, in this case, it’s enough.

Set in the mythical rural paradise of Cobb County, somewhere Down South, this hootenanny of hilarity is thin on story but heavy on puns and one-liners. The plot centers on a failed corn crop, blighted romance, and a visiting con man who is less honorable than Professor Harold Hill.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2023
New York, New York
St. James Theater

The Playbill for New York, New York lists the show as being “inspired by” the 1977 flick of the same name.” That Martin Scorsese opus wasn’t an ode to the glories of the titular burg, as the stage musical ascribes to be. The movie was basically a weepie, detailing the rocky courtship, marriage and break-up of volatile bandleader Jimmy Doyle (Robert DeNiro) and scrappy chanteuse Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli). The new book by David Thompson and Sharon Washington loads on three more main plotlines and provides a racial twist to the prime story.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2023
Rent
Hobby Center

It was bold. It was brassy. It was rowdy. It was brazen. It was "in-your-face." And for much of the time, it was musically quite loud.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
May 2023
Bad Cinderella
Imperial Theater

Unfortunately, Bad Cinderella is just not any good. It's hard to believe this is from the pen of the brilliant and acclaimed Andrew Lloyd Webber. The songs are immediately forgettable, and the plot is stodgy and depressing. There's a whiff of & Juliet, but none of the playfulness.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
May 2023
Knight of the Burning Pestle, The
Lucille Lortel Theater

Shakespeare eclipsed the other Elizabethan dramatists, but their plays are nonetheless very rewarding. If they're less rewarding than Shakespeare, they're also less challenging — the syntax is simpler. And being more accessible is itself a strength.

Francis Beaumont was one of the best of these playwrights He wrote The Knight of the Burning Pestle in 1607. It's a terrific comedy. It uses the technique of a play-within-a-play several years after Shakespeare experimented with it (and then abandoned it) in The Taming of the Shrew.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
May 2023
Man of La Mancha
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Asolo Rep claims its version of Man of La Mancha is modern and different from the original play and musical, set in Spain at the time of the Inquisition. It’s still structurally and meaningfully a play within a play about a hero who writes his dream about a character who pursues an “impossible” one. Both author Cervantes and his idealistic—if quite unrealistic— “quester” Don Quixote have to convert their greedy fellow prisoners so that they supplement the lead’s dramatic roles rather than take his possessions or power.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2023
Anything Goes
Class Act Theater

It was Thomas Wolfe who famously wrote, "You Can't Go Home Again." But I'm thinking that maybe he was wrong, because after two of our nation's Pandemic Years and assorted family matters that required my presence back in New York, I find myself blessed to finally be back in Texas reviewing a marvelous Class Act Production, as I have been able to so many times since back in the 1990's. This time around it is the always delightful Cole Porter musical, Anything Goes, which I last saw this group perform more than a decade ago back in 2012.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
May 2023

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