Scraps
Matrix Theater

The first half of the play is realistic;  the second, surrealistic.  The protagonist in each half—make that in each scene—differs from the last.

That’s just two instances of Geraldine Inoa’s unique, far-out approach to writing a play—in this case Scraps, now in a West Coast premiere at the Matrix Theater, which has become a kind of showcase for black plays which were successful in New York (such as The Mountaintop).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Prophet$
Factory Theater

Protestant Christianity's individualistic approach to its source material acknowledges a variety of interpretations, enabling virtually anybody to make a career of spreading the gospel in all its enigmatic diversity. Human nature being what it is, however, the number of self-styled proselytizers motivated by greed and hypocrisy should come as no surprise.

The 1980s, in particular, stand out in the history of our nation as the benchmark for a virulent epidemic of Tartuffian humbuggery.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Ada and the Engine
The Artistic Home

"If we wanted melodrama, we would have gone to the opera!" snaps the only character without an axe to grind in Lauren Gunderson's historically deconstructive origin story of the modern computer. Since this remark is made early in the play, its irony is unlikely to register on audiences until too late for us to retrace our steps and meander down alternative paths.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Howard Street Theater

We are accustomed to musicals staged in football field-sized stadiums cluttered with wedding-cake decor, but Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell wrote their musical manifesto for intimate rooms like Theo Ubique's new home on the Evanston-Chicago border, and once you experience this 1998 cult classic in its natural environment, you'll wonder why anybody would want to see it anyplace else.

Here's the set-up: we playgoers are in a scruffy Chicago club (think Reggie's Music Joint in the South Loop) where Hedwig and her band, the Angry Inch, are appearing.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2019
Transference
Broadwater Black Box

Hypnotherapy, past lives, and metaphysical repartee are at the heart of Transference, Jim Blanchette’s dark comedy which just closed at the 2019 Hollywood Fringe Festival.  The unexpected mixture makes for a unique theatre experience, one with a surprise popping up every few minutes.

Esther Mira plays Dr. Herbert, a psychiatrist doing her best to keep her cool and deal professionally with Mrs. Clark (Lisa K. Wyatt), an uptight, stressed-out woman who keeps accusing the shrink of failing to help her.  Against her better judgment, Dr.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Rory and the Devil
Thymele Arts Center - California Room

The 2019 Hollywood Fringe Festival went out with a bang, thanks to the closing-day production of Rory and the Devil, the playwriting and directing debut of David McElwee  The New York-based McElwee has dipped deep into his Irish heritage to bring to life the denizens of a rural pub in Donegal, circa 1972.  The timing is key, because that was when the “troubles” between north and south Ireland were at a fever pitch, with gun battles, bombings and fisticuffs creating a war-like atmosphere.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Ethel Waters: His Eye is on the Sparrow
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Theater

Jannie Jones returns to a role she created in a triumphant emotional and musical expansion of her acclaimed early  performance as Ethel Waters at Florida Studio Theater. Happily, Larry Parr’s biographical monologue still uses just the right songs to illuminate Waters’s life. Jannie does them more than justice, showing why she’s so frequently invited to perform at FST, but this time she displays exceptional acting chops as well.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Happy Talk
Pershing Square Signature Center

Jesse Eisenberg really needs to stop writing the same play. His Happy Talk explores the simmering rages just beneath the surface of an apparently placid household, but the Oscar-nominated actor-playwright has previously written and starred in three works—Asuncion, The Revisionist, and The Spoils—all of which deal with condescending Americans ruining the lives of good-natured non-Americans with smug presumptions of superior perceptions and intelligence.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Stonewall
Lincoln Center - Rose Theater

Asserting identity is a theme in two recent musical offerings, Dave Malloy’s a cappella piece Octet and composer Iain Bell and librettist Mark Campbell’s world-premiere  Stonewall  presented by City Opera. The latter celebrates the 50th anniversary of the history-making uprising in Greenwich Village which marked the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. Like Octet, Stonewall features a diverse and engaging score and employs multiple, single-trait characters whose lives intersect.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Octet
Pershing Square Signature Center

Asserting identity is a theme in two recent musical offerings, the operatic Stonewall and Dave Malloy’s a cappella piece Octet. Malloy’s work at the Signature Center focuses on a group of technology addicts at a twelve-step meeting and, like Stonewall, features a diverse and engaging score and employs multiple, single-trait characters whose lives intersect. Though the characterizations are a bit thin, a fascinating, believable world is created.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Toni Stone
Steinberg Center - Laura Pels Theater

Toni Stone is probably the most famous athlete you never heard of. From 1949 to 1954, she played baseball in the Negro Leagues and was the first woman of any race to play professionally in the sport. She was hired for the San Francisco Sea Lions as a publicity stunt and had her longest stint with the Indianapolis Clowns, the diamond equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters who incorporated comedic antics into their very serious field work. Based on Martha Ackman’s biography, “Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone,” Lydia R.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Night Out, A
The Complex - The Flight

A group composed largely of former drama students at Los Angeles City College has gotten together again to put on a little-known play by Harold Pinter at the 2019 Hollywood Fringe Festival.  Directed by Sam Grey, A Night Out is a wicked portrait of a mama’s boy, Albert (Troy Rossi), with a hidden dark side.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Zombies on Broadway
Off the Wall Theater

Zombie lovers, rejoice! There’s a cleverly written production in Milwaukee that will more than meet your expectations for encountering the living dead. This world premiere musical, titled Zombies on Broadway, says it all. It’s a laughter-filled romp through the graveyard (er, Broadway) that will tickle anyone’s funny bone. Writer/director Dale Gutzman has wisely launched this show in the fun-filled summer season, and it more than holds its own with the rest of the city’s annual summertime treats such as Summerfest, Bastille Days and so forth.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
My Cry for Help
The Complex - Dorie Theater

Remember the name of Travis Acedia.  Creator and performer of the solo show My Cry for Help, now running at the 2019 Hollywood Fringe Festival, Acedia  is a powerful and  fiery actor who knows how to capture an audience’s attention and hold it tightly in his grasp.

In My Cry for Help Acedia tells a personal story about his lifelong battle with depression.  His honesty is conveyed in a monologue studded with manic bursts of energy and humor in which he pokes fun at himself and at the world around him.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
My Trans Wife
Flight Theater

Watching My Trans Wife at the 2019 Hollywood Fringe Festival made me think of a passage from the Song of Solomon: “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”

Mimi Kmet and Mara Wells are a testament to the truth of that adage. Kmet, who identifies as a straight ciswoman, was raised as a good Catholic girl. Mara, a transwoman, spent most of her life as a male.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Much Ado About Nothing
Delacorte Theater

Kenny Leon’s free Shakespeare in Central Park production of Much Ado About Nothing appears to be an unchallenging evening of delightful hijinks provided by a superlative all-African-American cast led by a blazingly witty and strong Danielle Brooks as the merry Beatrice and a virile yet comically vulnerable Grantham Coleman as Benedick, her adversary on the field of love and words. But Leon places the Bard’s lighthearted comedy within a serious framework.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Mysterious Circumstances
Geffen Playhouse

An aversion to Sherlock Holmes stories and to their occult-loving author Arthur Conan Doyle undoubtedly makes me the wrong critic to be reviewing Mysterious Circumstances, Michael Mitnick’s new play which just opened at the Geffen.  Mitnick, working on a Geffen/Edgerton Foundation commission, has turned Grann’s magazine article (see above) into an elaborate whodunit involving the death not only of Holmes but of his superfan, Richard Lancelyn Green (Alan Tudyk, doubling up).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
America v. 2.1
Barrington Stage

The avant-garde, play within a play, America v. 2.1. The Sad Demise and Eventual Extinction of the American Negro, by Stacey Rose has brilliant moments. A superb cast (Ansa Akyea (Donovan), Jordan Barrow (Grant), Kalyne Coleman (Leigh), Peterson Townsend (Jeffrey), Peggy Phar Wilson (The Voice)) has been crisply directed by Logan Vaugh, and choreographed by Kevin Boseman.

The broad reach of the one-act, ninety minute play is truly ambitious and immense. Set in the future the ensemble of four actors are seemingly indentured to a grueling and inhumane schedule.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Emma
Lifeline Theater

When your stage floor measures a mere 28 X 30 feet, you build UP, crafting scenic designs incorporating staircases, ladders, and sometimes even ski-slope-steep slides. When your play is a Regency romance by no less a luminary than Jane Austen, however, the skin-tight breeches and narrow ankle-length skirts of period fashions impair the athletic gymnastics necessary to navigate such terrain.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Secret Life of Bees, The
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

While Michael R. Jackson’s musical A Strange Loop is decidedly risky, The Secret Life of Bees at Atlantic Theater Company, based on Sue Monk Kidd’s best-selling novel, is an unsurprising musical where racial conflict is cast in absolute terms of black and white (forgive the pun) and ambiguity has no place.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Long Lost
City Center - Stage 1

Donald Margulies’s Long Lost, at Manhattan Theater Club, could have easily become a soap opera or Lifetime-TV-movie. Black-sheep, middle-aged Billy arrives unannounced at the swanky office of his successful, estranged brother David during the Christmas holidays claiming he is dying of cancer and has nowhere to go after having destroyed all of his relationships. The manipulative Billy sows disaster wherever he goes, undermining David’s happy marriage to the self-possessed Molly and damaging his bond with his teenaged son Jeremy, just back from college. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune
Broadhurst Theater

Breaking the metaphorical walls between disconnected people is the theme of Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune,, a tender romance between unlikely lovers. It’s one of the prolific McNally’s better known works, premiering Off-Broadway in 1987 at Manhattan Theater Club with Kathy Bates and F. Murray Abraham as middle-aged co-workers at a diner searching for romance before it’s too late. Abraham was replaced by Kenneth Walsh, and the play transferred to a hit Off-Broadway commercial run.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Strange Loop, A
Playwrights Horizons

Like Jackie Sibblies-Drury does in Fairview, Michael R. Jackson inverts audience expectations and conventions with his autobiographical musical A Strange Loop at Playwrights Horizons. While Sibblies-Drury mercilessly probes cultural and racial biases, Jackson turns the glaring spotlight on himself, an African-American, plus-sized gay man, a demographic usually relegated to comic relief supporting roles, particularly in tuners.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Fairview
Polonsky Shakespeare Center

The 2019-20 Off-Broadway theater season begins with a quartet of productions exploring African-American identities through a variety of lenses—out-of-the-box deconstruction, autobiographical satire, traditional musical, and Shakespeare. The most original and frightening is Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Fairview, now at Theater for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn following its run last summer at Soho Rep. This refreshingly different examination of how we perceive race begins conventionally enough, almost like a sitcom.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Butcher Holler Here We Come
Thymele Arts Center

Butcher Holler Here We Come is literally and figuratively underground theater at its best. Casey Wimpee’s play, now running at the 2019 Hollywood Fringe Festival, is set in a West Virginia coal mine, circa 1972 (when coal was still king.)  As directed by Leah Bonvisutto, the play unfolded in a bare room in the Thymele Arts Center which had no overhead stage lights.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Anne, A New Play
Museum of Tolerance - Peltz Theater

Anne, A New Play is, as the title suggests, a fresh take on the Anne Frank story. Adapted from the book by Anne Frank by two Dutch playwrights, Jessica Durlacher and Leon de Winter, the play premiered in Amsterdam in 2014.  Now it has found its way to the Museum of Tolerance in a stripped-down version which takes liberties with the original English-language version by Albert Hackett and Francis Goodrich (which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1955).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Ready Steady Yeti Go
The Electric Lodge

It’s kids vs. the adult world in Ready Steady Yeti Go, a look at a bunch of middle-schoolers who meet  in  a ramshackle shed in the woods somewhere in the USA to give vent to their feelings and thoughts.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Loot
Odyssey Theater

Director Bart DeLorenzo, working with a superb, mostly British cast, has given us a splendid production of Joe Orton’s Loot.  The black farce has just opened at the Odyssey, where a long run is predicted.

Orton, as most theatergoers know, was a disciple of Oscar Wilde, an epigrammatic comic playwright who gleefully punctured pomposity and propriety with wit as his stiletto.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Love, Loss, and What I Wore
The Players Center for the Performing Arts - Mainstage

The Players’ production differs from the usually seen oral interpretative Readers Theater one.  Director Carole Kleinberg uses a “star” guide and two mothers with four more actresses playing various characters to further dramatize life stories of women.  Each phase is characterized by memories of dress donned during the action or advice-taking, hence the title Love, Loss, and What I Wore.

Jeffrey Weber works with the director’s blocking to supply an attractive set of shifting backgrounds showing child-like drawings of women in different clothes.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Desire in a Tinier House
Pride Arts Broadway

It's love at first sight, eyes meeting—not across a crowded room, but through a car window. The irregularity of Carlos (the man inside) occupying the front seat with the ex-boyfriend of Trevin (the man outside) does nothing to obstruct the former's capitulation to the latter's lustful entreaty.

As time passes (to ascertain how much, or how quickly, you will have to read the script), Carlos and Trevin exchange personal information in addition to body fluids and flirtatious banter.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Come Together
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

Carole Bufford makes a triumphant return to Florida Studio Theater’s summertime Cabaret two years after her first hit. She has developed a whole new program but still celebrates songs from the years dear to the hearts (and ears) of typical older residents and tourists outside of “season” in Sarasota. The subtitle, “When the 60s Met the 70s,” tells the emphasis.

Bufford’s formula is to tell the story of each song, how it originated, became a hit, and often why it suited its singer and audiences.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Style and Grace
Black Ensemble Theater

Kylah Frye knows that Black Ensemble audiences come for the music, making the book for this musical bio-revue arguably the most no-frills directive in the theater's history. 

We've got these four singers, you see. The duo played by Aeriel Williams and Chantee Joy represent Lena Horne at two divergent stages of her career, while the other pair, played by Jayla Craig and Rhonda Preston, are introduced as the younger and (ahem) older Nancy Wilson.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Indecent
Ahmanson Theater

  Indecent, Paula Vogel’s touching play about the history of God of Vengeance, has now come to the Ahmanson after a successful run on Broadway.  It is not to be missed.

Written by Sholem Asch, the first Yiddish writer to be nominated (in 1943) for the Nobel Prize, God of Vengeance told the melodramatic yet daring story of a Jewish-owned brothel in Warsaw, where a lesbian love affair takes place between one of the prostitutes and the owner’s daughter (Elizabeth A.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Frankenstein
Water Works

In the season marking the 200th anniversary of Mary Godwin Shelley's groundbreaking horror classic, no less than four theaters have attempted to convey Frankenstein’s warning to audiences not yet grown in wisdom sufficient to ensure invulnerability to the danger foreshadowed by its adolescent author.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Moby Dick: Rehearsed
Theatricum Botanicum

The trifecta of Herman Melville, Orson Welles, and Theatricum Botanicum can’t help but be a winner.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Around the World in 80 Days
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Imagination blends with physical creativity to produce a highly inventive jaunt Around the World in 80 Days. It’s billed as family fun but shouldn’t disappoint anyone who loves Jules Verne’s novel or the film and plays based on it or even most theater-goers who enjoy comedy from slapstick to satire.  A British production, based on a French novel, presented by an Italian-named Florida rep company, it swiftly (and that’s the operative word) makes its home in a circus town.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Exit the King
City Garage

City Garage continues its ongoing exploration of the avant-garde theater with its latest production, Exit the King, by Eugene Ionesco. The 1962 play has been freshened up by Frederique Michel and Charles Duncombe, the mom and pop behind City Garage. Their new translation (and adaptation) is crisp and colloquial, easy on the ear. And they have mounted the play in equally vibrant fashion. Exit the King deals with mortality. A  king called Berenger (Ionesco’s version of Everyman; he turns up in other plays of his) is dying.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Dana H.
Kirk Douglas Theater

Watching Dana H. is like taking a trip to hell and back.

The play, written by Lucas Hnath, tells the harrowing story of his mother’s life. She is impersonated by the actress Deirdre O’Connell, who, clad in red and black, sits on stage being interviewed by an unseen Steven Cossen. O’Connell lip-synchs rather than speaks Dana’s lines, timing perfectly every move of her mouth and body.  It is a seamless, remarkable display of acting talent.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Long Day's Journey into Night
American Stage

Using the latest critical edition of Eugene O’Neill’s major play, American Stage presents a production true to his words and their dramatic impact. Never do Director Brendon Fox and his cast ever flag in their dedication to the spirit of the work. Despite its length, Long Day’s Journey into Night is not tiring, always engaging.

The play  begins with sturdy James Keegan as commanding James Tyrone almost swaggering toward wife Mary (Janis Stevens, fragile but trying to hide it). It’s after breakfast and they’ve established their space on the parlor table rug.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Marvelous Wonderettes, The
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

Bubbly and nostalgic, The Marvelous Wonderettes demonstrates particular summertime appeal to Sarasota’s and nearby senior residents and tourists.  But director Jason Cannon injects enough gentle ribbing into the characterizations performed to raise smiles from relative youngsters as well.

A 1958 typical Springfield, USA Senior Prom tinfoil-curtain-backed stage shows off four fresh young beauties behind microphones decked out in hearts, as the women are in pastel gowns with billowing chiffon below-the-knees skirts and matching pumps. They open with “Mr.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2019

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