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
Paris Love Story, A
Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

The one-man-band Hershey Felder is back at The Wallis with a new show, A Paris Love Story.  Actor/pianist/writer Felder has won world-wide fame and fortune for his previous shows about such famous composers as Gershwin, Bernstein, Beethoven, and Liszt.  Now he has trained his sights on Claude Debussy, one of his childhood heroes, and brought his life to the stage in a warm, loving way.

Felder walks in Debussy’s footsteps here, addressing the audience in two alternating voices:  his own and that of the French master himself.  It makes for an engrossing and clever nar

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
All My Sons
American Airlines Theater

While Broadway’s import Ink charts the descent of British public discourse into the gutter, All My Sons rips off the apple-pie surface of complacent post-war America to reveal a cesspool of corruption. As the play opens in the Roundabout Theater Company’s revival, it’s a picture-perfect weekend morning in designer Douglas W. Schmidt’s idyllic suburban backyard. Successful businessman Joe Keller is reading the Sunday paper as neighbors cheerfully pop in and out, chatting about their lawns and picnics.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Ink
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

When profit becomes the prime motive of conduct, bad things happen. James Graham’s Ink, now at the Samuel J. Friedman in a production for Manhattan Theater Club after a hit run in London, focuses on the degradation of British journalism in the late 1960s. Graham follows the rise of publisher Rupert Murdoch and editor Larry Lamb as they turn second-rate tabloid, The Sun, into a newsstand sensation by peddling scandal, fear, and resentment to a volatile British public.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Curse of the Starving Class
Pershing Square Signature Center

In All My Sons, now revived on Broadway, Arthur Miller’s America is a sunny place slowly shown to conceal a metaphorical swamp. Sam Shepard’s The Curse of the Starving Class, which premiered in London in 1977 and off-Broadway in 1978, offers an even bleaker view of the US, with a nuclear family coming apart on an already blighted landscape.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus
Booth Theater

Taylor Mac’s Gary is an irreverent satiric sequel to one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known but bloodiest gore tests, Titus Andronicus. Mac has made a name in the avant-garde world of Off and Off-Off-Broadway as a performer and playwright, bending gender and theatrical rules in such works as Hir, The Lily’s Revenge, and his performance piece A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. Gary is his Broadway debut and makes a bold departure from the the usual Main Stem fare.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Beetlejuice
Winter Garden Theater

While Broadway’s Tootsie makes a new and invigorating stage to screen transfer, Beetlejuice sticks fairly close to the Tim Burton-directed 1988 cult film comedy about an explosively frenetic demon, a lonely Goth girl, and a milk-toast couple of newbie ghosts. But director Alex Timbers’s haunted-house concept makes this show more than just another movie-into-musical.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Tootsie
Marquis Theater

Musicals based on hit movies have become a staple on Broadway. The creative teams of most of these shows such as Pretty Woman, School of Rock, and Kinky Boots, take the established screenplay and insert some songs, and call it a day. But Tootsie, derived from the 1982 comedy starring Dustin Hoffman as struggling actor Michael Dorsey who disguises himself as a woman to land a role, actually updates and improves the material. Robert Horn’s book is a sharp and funny update on Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal’s original script. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Songs from the Silver Screen
Music Box Theater

It's that time again. Time to get out and enjoy the nightlife in Houston. The cheerful delights continue as the familiar troupe at the Music Box Theater takes on their latest subject: “Songs from the Silver Screen.” To steal a line from the movie “Casablanca,: the cast has been able to round up “the usual suspects,” minus one, as cast regular Kristina Sullivan was granted a much-deserved vacation during this production. But all the regulars remain, including Brad Scarborough and Rebecca Dahl, the company's founders, along with Luke Wrobel and Cay Taylor adding to the fun.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Kiss Me, Kate
Studio 54

Another opening, another revival of Kiss Me, Kate or perhaps re- titled “Kick Me, Kate,” as this is what will come to mind as you watch Kate (Kelli O’Hara) give Petruchio’s (Will Chase) derriere what for and more in this rowdy and rousing and also slightly finessed version courtesy of the Roundabout Theater Company. The original play-within-a-play book by Bella and Sam Spewack was ingeniously fused with Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew but may have a slightly creaky resonance during these Me-Too days of late.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Juno and the Paycock
Irish Repertory Theater

What Sean O’Casey’s political tragicomedy Juno and the Paycock lacks in plot, it makes up for in characterization. Under Neil Pepe’s splendid direction for the Irish Repertory Theater, characterization gets its due. Pepe, who is currently the Artistic Director of the Atlantic Theater Company, has made the O’Casey play resound with a riveting ferocity. O’Casey wrote the terrifically subversive play in 1924 eight years after the Easter Uprising of 1916, and only two years after the terrible Civil War.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
King Lear
Cort Theater

It is to be expected that a seasoned critic would have seen William Shakespeare’s King Lear more than once, perhaps in my case quite a few times. That Glenda Jackson is playing the (monumental) role makes it unique for many reasons that should be obvious. But before we go too deeply into the production and the performances that will inevitably invite pros and cons, I want to share a program quote from Bonnie J.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
All My Sons
American Airlines Theater

What irony there is having productions of Arthur Miller’s excellent emotions-extracting drama All My Sons emerge with apparent frequency and acclaim after it was decried as a Communist play and a blatant undermining of the American business ethos. It is back again courtesy of the Roundabout Theatre Company. It remains terrific.

There is no question that the accusations and allegations have proven to be woefully misguided both by the passage of time and the more open debate regarding the play’s social and political point of view.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Plough and the Stars, The
Irish Repertory Theater

It would be very easy to be under the delusion that I was not, in fact, at the Irish Repertory Theater in NYC but rather at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre so resonant is the forthright Irish-ness of their terrific production of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. What an audience can expect is that this grandly lyrical almost epic drama is vibrantly alive with characters mainly damaged by the disabling events of the times. The eminent dramatist had a patriotic zeal and a hearty political conscience that reflected his own passionate involvement.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Too Heavy for Your Pocket
George Street Playhouse

Although I previously saw this award-winning (2017 Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award) play a year ago in New York, it made a lasting impression on me, one that made me eager to see it again now that it is at the George Street Playhouse. Although Too Heavy for Your Pocket is well acted and remains worthwhile, the current production left me less than enthused. But more about that later.

As a graduate from the Yale School of Drama, playwright Jireh Breon Holder was inspired by his family history.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Othello
Factory Theater

It might have been the first production where Desdemona was strangled—twice—with a one-handed choke-hold, but that was because Brianna Buckley's right arm was encumbered with a sling mandated by an injury the week before. What was no accident, however, was the paradigm shift of Othello's misaccused wife struggling to escape the wrath of her angry husband.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Secret of the Biological Clock, The
Athenaeum

Don't be fooled by the title: This is not another grim grown-up gynecological jeremiad, nor a bumping-uglies spoof of classic ( and copyright-protected ) teen heroes Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. In fact, sexuality barely figures in a "coming-of-age" story for late-bloomers—i.e. over 30—based in metaphors as intricate as 3-D chess.

For some parts of the play, our locale is the aptly named town of Middlewood in 1965, where a group of enterprising adolescents exhibited a preternatural talent for domestic-level detection (lost wills, missing jewelry, etc.).

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
La Havana Madrid
Den Theater

This joint production of the Teatro Vista and Collaboraction theater companies premiered in March 2017 at Steppenwolf's 1700, where it sold out its run in one day. Three months later, the remount in the Goodman's Owen likewise set audiences to scrambling for tickets despite multiple extensions. The current incarnation, its third, looks to prove likewise successful.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Bronco Billy
Skylight Theater

Clint Eastwood’s 1980 film Bronco Billy has been revisited by screenwriter Dennis Hackin and turned into a full-blown musical which is doing L.A.’s intimate-theater scene proud. Packed with catchy songs (mostly by Chip Rosenbloom and John Torres), boasting of a large, enthusiastic and gifted cast, the show fills the 99-seat Skylight Theater with Broadway-like size and sizzle—so much so that it wouldn’t surprise me if the show’s next stop were The Great White Way. Bronco Billy tells the charming, heartwarming story about a self-styled cowboy hero (Eric B.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Soho Playhouse

What a terrific performance Burt Grinstead gives us as the eponymic characters - character - in Blanket Fort Entertainment’s production of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde! The show is a 70-minute-long adaptation of Robert Louis Stephenson’s famous 1886 book, “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” It’s played exclusively for laughs, and Mr. Grinstead is a marvel of a comic actor. As the good Dr Jekyll he pushes his hair back, cleans his glasses and lets his voice break. As the evil, cruel, malignant, hateful, reprehensible Mr.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Invisible Tango
Geffen Playhouse - Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater

Invisible Tango is, to put it simply, the best magic act I’ve ever seen.

Created and performed by Helder Guimaraes, a Portuguese-born magician now residing in L.A., Invisible Tango mixes fabulous card tricks with personal storytelling in a masterful and captivating way. When not gasping with amazement at his legerdemain, the audience sits entranced by his way with words.  A small, bespectacled chap with a lively, vibrant personality, Guimaraes knows how to talk to strangers, form a human connection with them, catch them up in his spell.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, The

(See review(s) under TWENTY-FIFTH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE, THE)

Twenty-Fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, The
Next Act Theater

As the 2019 school year comes to a close, what could be more topical than hosting an old-fashioned school spelling bee? It’s definitely on the course list for Next Act Theater, where All In Productions presents The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

This 2005 Broadway musical by William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin earns high marks for originality, casting, and creativity.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Too Heavy for Your Pocket
Baird Hall

Nowadays, protest demonstrations may be assembled within the boundaries of the law and the participants carry out their peaceful agendas uninterrupted.

We owe these displays of what was once labeled "civil disobedience" largely to the activists championing an end to racial segregation in our country during the mid-20th century. Among these were the so-called "Freedom Riders"—multiethnic bands of crusaders who defied, often at great peril, the de facto apartheid operating in the Southern states.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Hamlet
Navy Pier

Long ago, before universities evolved into the trade-schools-for-rich-kids they represent today, their curriculum in preparation for civic leadership encompassed such subjects as logic, classical rhetoric, theology, grammar, and mathematics. This course of study reflected the belief that if a person was educated in how to think—that is, how to evaluate information through rational examination—all other knowledge would come easily.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Come from Away
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

At the same time Americans were reeling from the impact of 9/11, a very small town almost an ocean away came together and, through the generosity and ingenuity of its townsfolk, managed to care for thousands of people from around the world who arrived unannounced in their back yard.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Ten-Minute Play Festival (14th Annual)
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

[Editor’s Note: As noted in the review, the author of this critique was involved in the process of choosing works for this festival.]

For the first time I’ve attended Theater Odyssey’s short play festival, that originated with a single night’s performance of Ten Minute Plays by playwrights in Sarasota, Manatee, and Tampa Bay. This 14th year, the contest to choose plays was extended to entrants from all of Florida.  Included in a culminating performance of latest best short plays is one chosen from a Student Ten Minute Play Festival contest.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Resurrection of Son House, The
Geva Theater - Nextstage

It seems that GeVa Theater Center's long devotion to creating a worthy theater piece devoted to the history of Son House has reached a temporarily completed form in this rich, complicated show that dazzled the opening night audience. Geva commissioned the work more than four years ago, and at this point it includes a number of impressive, prestigious contributing African-American artists, and stars the irresistible Cleavant Derricks.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
All My Sons
American Airlines Theater

It all feels true, Arthur Miller's articulate and touching themes of family and society, war and business, denial and self-deception. His 1947 American classic, All My Sons, an immaculately plotted exploration of an American family, is skillfully revisited at the American Airlines Theater by The Roundabout Theatre Company.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Sweeney Todd
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Although Sweeney Todd’s roots are in Renaissance revenge tragedy, 19th century English penny dreadful stories, and a 1973 dark melodrama, its concerns with class social differences, economic inequality, exploitation, and inhumane actions haven’t lost their relevance.  Nor have the power of literary suspense and triumphant romance. All receive emphasis through music at once classical and contemporary. At Asolo Rep, a relatively small cast acts with great aplomb.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
What the Constitution Means to Me
Helen Hayes Theater

Is the Constitution enough of a temptation to draw you to the Helen Hayes Theater for playwright Heidi Schreck's What the Constitution Means to Me? It should be. Part bio, part poli-sci, this is an original free-wheeling, emotional, and audaciously relevant play, at a time the country can benefit from its dose of provocative honesty.

Teenage Heidi Schreck, from Wenatchee, Washington, an “abortion-free zone,” was persuaded by her mother to enter her speech about the Constitution in the American Legion Oratory Contest.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Fiddler on the Roof
Stage 42

When the original 1964 production of Fiddler on the Roof premiered on Broadway, the character of Tevye, a struggling, big-hearted, Torah-quoting milkman from the Russian shtetl, Anatevka, moved into the lexicon of Broadway theater's standout characters. Of course, Tevya was already known to readers of Sholem Rabinovich, aka Sholem Aleichem, the “Jewish Mark Twain,” who wrote short stories about the vivid characters of the impoverished Yiddish-speaking villages of Russia.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Burn This
Hudson Theater

While the lead performers sizzle, the play fizzles. In the current revival of Lanford Wilson's Burn This, at the Hudson Theater, Keri Russell and Adam Driver, connect like sparkplugs while the play stumbles unevenly between the past and conflicts of the present.

Lanford Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize for The Fifth of July in 1980, but writing his upcoming play, Burn This, presented a struggle.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Crime and Punishment
Edgemar Center for the Arts

First produced in Chicago in 2003, this adaptation of Crime and Punishment was seen in L.A. ten years ago. Now it has returned in a new production directed by Peter Richards and starring three superb actors.  That’s right:  three actors, because this is a stripped-down, modern version of the 500- page novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Written by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus, the adaptations tells its story in an astoundingly brief ninety minutes.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Utility
Rivendell Theater

Literary scholars can speak of the narrative device labeled "a dark night of the soul" but the darkness surrounding our heroine on this sweltering East Texas evening in a house still recovering from flood damage is the result, in whole or in part, of her chronically irresponsible husband neglecting to pay the minimum due on their electric bill—an oversight disabling the air-conditioning and reducing their 8-year-old daughter's birthday party to a back-yard romp with balloons and a hastily repaired Walmart cake, instead of the promised movie.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Another British Invasion
Midtown Arts & Theater Center

It is hard to believe it is the better part of two decades since I first had the pleasure of hearing talented soprano, Kelli Estes, as she performed in New York City. How could I have guessed then that fate would soon find us both working in the Houston area where, happily, whenever I am in town, I continue to have pleasant opportunities to see her perform with the talented LoneStarLyric Company that she founded thirteen years ago back in 2006?

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
What the Constitution Means to Me
Helen Hayes Theater

While the current off-Broadway revival of The Cradle Will Rock is a relic of the past, Heidi Schreck’s unconventional stage piece, What the Constitution Means to Me, at the Helen Hayes on Broadway after two Off-Broadway runs earlier this season, is a living, breathing document, much like the constitution it addresses. Schreck’s unusual stage memoir recreates her journey as a 15-year-old making speeches on our sacred document cross-country to earn scholarship money. She also shares, as a grown woman in 2019, her view of the constitution.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Cradle Will Rock, The
Classic Stage Company

The Cradle Will Rock is John Doyle’s staging of the rarely-produced labor musical at Classic Stage Company. Marc Blitzstein’s legendary pro-union tuner is more famous for the circumstances of its premiere than the actual show. In 1937, the government-sponsored Federal Theater Project pulled funds for the production, directed by Orson Welles and produced by John Houseman. At the last minute, the company had to find another theater and the actors had to perform in the aisles since their union forbade their appearing on stage.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Lehman Trilogy, The
Park Avenue Armory

The Lehman Trilogy, in the vast space of the Park Avenue Armory for a limited run after engagements in Europe and London, conveys the story of 150 years of the titular financial clan.  Lehman, by Italian playwright Stefano Massini adapted to English by Ben Power, is a sweeping tale with three world-class actors (Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles, and Adam Godley) enacting all the roles in the saga of the family as they progress from immigrant storeowners in Alabama to kings of the trading floor on Wall Street to losing everything in the crash of 2008.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019

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