Yellow Face
Todd Haimes Theater

At the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Broadway house, the Todd Haimes, Leigh Silverman skillfully directs David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face, a smart farce taking on political correctness, racial identity, media frenzy, and theatrical and journalistic conventions. The play has taken on richer depths and subtler ironies since it was presented Off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 2007. A clever mixing of fact and fiction, Yellow Face skewers every participant in our raging cultural wars, including the author himself.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2024
Good Bones
Public Theater

James Ijames’s Good Bones at the Public Theater also takes on the importance of community and largely succeeds in exploring the conflict between gentrification and besieged minority neighborhoods. His basic concept is sound, with several fiery clashes between his quartet of characters, representing different interests as the forces of change and social inequity threaten an African-American urban district.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2024
Our Town
Barrymore Theater

Kenny Leon’s starry revival of Thornton Wilder’s classic 1938 portrait of everyday life, Our Town, features a diverse, multiethnic cast but doesn’t hit you over the head with a message of inclusion or “wokeness.” Susan Miller took on that theme with her own adaptation of the play, called It’s Our Town, Too, which incorporates gay couples into Wilder’s Grovers’ Corners.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2024
Dirty Laundry
WP Theater

The cast list for Mathilde Dratwa’s Dirty Laundry at the WP (Women’s Project) Theater, gave me pause. Three female characters are listed as Blue, Red, and Green. The remaining personae are Me, My Dad, and Another Woman. This generic designation on the single-sheet program (a full program is available digitally) struck me as potentially pretentious. But once the play started, the mysterious names made some sense, and Dratwa’s moving, clever work unfolded, skillfully and compassionately depicting the messy, difficult business of family relations.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2024
Waitress: The Musical
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

One of Milwaukee’s best-known theater companies, Skylight Music Theater, opens its 65th season in one of the city’s most beautiful venues, the Broadway Theatre Center. Their inaugural production, Waitress: The Musical, opened October 4 and continues until nearly the end of October.

Waitress is, in many senses, a “small” musical. It deals with family and work relationships in a certain small town. But Waitresshas always attempted to be something bigger, too.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2024
Safety Not Guaranteed
Brooklyn Academy of Music - Harvey Theater

It took a while, but Safety Not Guaranteed, the new musical based on the 2012 indie cult film now playing at BAM’s Harvey Theater, gradually grew on me. By the end of its intermissionless hour and 45 minutes, I was rooting for its quirky characters to find resolution and/or romance. Nick Blaemire’s book, based on Derek Connolly’s screenplay, is initially too slick for its own good with one-liners and weird traits substituting for character development.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2024
Yellow Face
Todd Haimes Theater

Yellow Face is not going to delight every member of the audience. I loved it; my companion, not so much. It is, at heart, a political piece, dealing with identity, loyalty, and how we see ourselves and others. The bright center revolves around the teamwork of two excellent actors, performing a dance of friendship, enmity, and confusion. 

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2024
Off the Charts
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

Jukebox favorites that scored “Off the Charts” of Billboard Magazine from 1958 to beyond the end of the 20th Century show the development of Pop Music. Four vocalists, often fast-moving, and a dramatic pianist pack all into the “Off the Charts” show at Florida Studio Theatre’s Court Cabaret. They do so in excellent costumes and make-up. The women’s also symbolize the historical import of Hair.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2024
Three Tall Persian Women
Elayne P. Bernstein Theater

 It has been a year since the death of Nasrin’s (Niousha Noor) husband. An enlarged photo of him is displayed on an easel in a Laguna Hill, California home compactly and effectively designed by Obid Akbari. It is traditional that on the first anniversary family and friends gather to celebrate a life.

The playwright of Three Tall Persian Women, Awni Abdi-Bahri, who plays the daughter Goinar, is asleep on a pullout sofa in front of a studio piano. She wakes in a cluttered space in her underwear interrupted by her mother Nasrin (Niousha Noor).

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
September 2024
Hills of California, The
Broadhurst Theater

Estranged siblings gather at the bedside of a dying parent. Crushed dreams have an inextricable hold on the family. A dying town symbolizes those dashed hopes. The most charismatic character delivers an amazingly self-aware monologue summing up everyone’s problems including her own.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2024
Once Upon a Mattress
Hudson Theater

Once Upon a Mattress is a total joy, and wow, do we need this in these troubled times. The stand-out, of course, is the glorious Sutton Foster, as Princess Winnifred. She can do it all: sing, dance, and whenever she steps onstage, she brings a thousand watts of energy and joy. As with all brilliant performers, you can feel the air in the theater become uplifted whenever she appears.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2024
Ghost of John McCain
SoHo Playhouse

While Forbidden Broadway has been merrily chugging along for over 40 years, the musical satire genre has not had many other successful offerings, particularly of the political variety. Perhaps it’s because our current political landscape is so ridiculous (the eating of cats and dogs is now a big issue) that parody would seem redundant.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
September 2024
Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song
Theater 555

Musical theater conventions past, present and future come in for a riotous ribbing in the latest edition of Gerard Alessandrini’s perennial parody revue Forbidden Broadway. This one’s subtitled “Merrily We Stole a Song,” and it ties in with the recent revival of Merrily We Roll Along which originally opened the same year as the first Forbidden show, 1982. This latest edition was initially announced to open on Broadway (a first for the series) at the Hayes Theater.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
September 2024
Table 17
Robert Wilson MCC Theater

In recent years, the romantic comedy genre has had several hits on screen, but few on stage. The musical version of “Pretty Woman” and the original First Date had short runs. Defying this trend, Douglas Lyons’s non-musical Table 17 at MCC Theater’s Off-Broadway space is currently packing in audiences and might make the leap to a commercial run. Lyons’s only previous Broadway playwriting credit is the sitcom-ish Chicken and Biscuits, but Table 17 is a deeper and more satisfying dish.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
September 2024
Roommate, The
Booth Theater

The Roommate, Jen Silverman’s slight two-character comedy at the Booth, begins in an unusual way. After the house lights have dimmed, the play’s stars Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone enter. Their names and a photo of them are projected on Bob Crowley’s sprawling farmhouse set. They acknowledge the audience’s applause, exit, and then re-enter in character to start the show.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
September 2024
Odd Man Out
Sheen Center for Thought and Culture

A truly unique theatrical experience is hard to come by these days, even if the Drama Desk Awards do have a category for it. If you searching for an event that you wouldn’t get anywhere else, the best place is the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture in the East Village where Odd Man Out, a total immersive production in pitch darkness, is playing. Originally presented in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this 90-minute drama employs all the senses but sight and totally engages the audience.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
August 2024
Once Upon a Mattress
Hudson Theater

Once Upon a Mattress, the delightful fairy-tale musical, has always been a thin affair. Basically a revue sketch stretched to a full evening, its success has depended on the talents of its leading lady and director. The book by Jay Thompson, Marshall Barer and Dean Fuller takes the story of “The Princess and the Pea,” gives it a slightly adult spin, and adds tangential material for supporting players. The songs by Mary Rodgers and Barer are catchy and sweet, some in the character-building manner of Rodgers’s fabled father Richard.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
August 2024
For Colored Girls Who have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf
Marcus Performing Arts Center: Wilson Theater

The Milwaukee Black Theater Festival began three years ago as a community response to the killing of George Floyd. The quest for Black voices continues this year with a three-week festival that encompasses many events in and around Milwaukee. The best-known of these events is probably a full production of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2024
Four C Notes, The: Recreating The Music of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons
Florida Studio Theater - Goldstein Cabaret

The show’s subtitle tells exactly what The Four C Notes is and does.  At FST’s Goldstein Cabaret, audience appreciation on opening night erupted in clapping for every doo-wop hit of Frankie Valli and his group, even before the finale of any one of them.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2024
Pirates of Penzance, The
Alice Busch Opera Theater

Who says opera and operetta can’t be fun? The Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, NY, opened its 2024 season with two lighthearted productions, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance (1879) and Francesco Cavalli’s La Calisto (1651), both featuring inventive staging, magnificent voices, and lots of frivolity.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
August 2024
La Calisto
Alice Busch Opera Theater

Who says opera and operetta can’t be fun? The Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, NY, opened its 2024 season with two lighthearted productions, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance (1879) and Francesco Cavalli’s La Calisto (1651), both featuring inventive staging, magnificent voices, and lots of frivolity.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
August 2024
Job
Helen Hayes Theater

The play starts with a bang—well, not literally. After being bombarded with high-decibel rock music before the lights dim, the audience is confronted with two characters, one wielding a gun pointed at the cringing other. There follows a series of short false beginnings with the target responding in a number of different ways to the threat, separated by quick blackouts.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
August 2024
Outsider, The
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

In a disgraced governor’s office, his short-term appointee lieutenant governor must stand for a special election. Ned Newley would probably be best person in the job but he’s not (at least yet) a best candidate. He hasn’t outstanding personality or ability to speak publicly. Nor is he physically very attractive. He is definitely “The Outsider” in the office. The so-named play has Ned being groomed to win by experts in politics, but their teachings are self-centered and dramatically farcical.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2024
Cats: The Jellicle Ball
Perelmen Performing Arts Center

Cats was never among my favorite musicals. The appeal of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s whimsical doodle based on T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” has always escaped me. Two and a half hours of actors in feline costumes prancing around a junkyard and meowing to be chosen to ride a giant tire to the “heavy-side layer” is not my dish of cream. How it got to be one of the long-running shows in Broadway and West End history remains a mystery to me. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2024
From Here
Pershing Square Signature Theater

A musical centering on the deadly 2016 Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando, Florida? Well, anything can serve as the basis of a tuner including such unusual examples as the travels of the mummified corpse of a minor train robber (Dead Outlaw), the women’s suffrage movement (Suffs) or the bloodthirsty killing spree of a certain demon barber and his cannibalistic accomplice (I shouldn’t have to give the title, but here goes, Sweeney Todd). It’s a matter of presenting the material in a new and exciting manner as the three named examples did.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2024
Ain't Done Bad
Pershing Square Signature Center

Country Western music is not what you might expect for the score of a dance-theater piece exploring the coming out process of a young gay man and the reaction of his family. But, Jakob Karr’s dynamic dance piece Ain’t Done Bad, now at Signature Theater Center after a run in Orlando, Florida, is an explosive and passionate declaration of the love that now speaks its name loudly and the music feels just right. That might be because the tunes playing on the soundtrack are those of Orville Peck, the openly gay C&W singer-songwriter.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2024
Dear Jack, Dear Louise
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

The many seniors in Florida audiences know all about actual letters, but theatergoers of all ages should also appreciate those that reveal life in America during WWII. Author Ken Ludwig’s family’s experience inspired his comedy of letters. Dear Jack, Dear Louise presents a soldier and a dancer-actress in a practice of the time: correspondence to boost a military man’s morale via consent by a woman to mutually writing.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2024
N/A
Lincoln Center - Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

If you were discouraged by the recent disastrous presidential debate performances by both main party candidates, you might seek hope and inspiration from another, sharper example of political theater. Mario Correa’s slim and powerful new play N/A dramatizes the conflict between Nancy Pelosi, the first woman Speaker of the House, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2024
Agitators, The
St. Christopher's Episcopal Church - Norvill Commons

Two important figures from America’s past form an unlikely but enduring friendship in The Agitators, the current production by Acacia Theatre Company.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2024
Music of Laurel Canyon, The
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

I must admit I didn’t know much about Laurel Canyon until Florida Studio Theater “informed” by staging music created there. It seems this music and its creators produced admirers (and present performers like BuffaloRome) in a Los Angeles L.C. area above Sunset Strip. Now Michael Visconti and his band bring back the songs and spirit of L.C. in the 1960-’70s.  If you liked them then, you’ll like them at FST’s Court Cabaret. Or maybe value discovery.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2024
What Became of Us
Atlantic Theater - Stage 2

In Atlantic Theater Company’s What Became of Us (at their Stage 2), as in the current Broadway revival of Home, the protagonists serve double duty as narrators. Both plays deal with returning to your roots after journeys of alienation. The plays’ structure could put audiences at a distance since we are being told what happens instead of being shown directly. Such plays usually work better as novels, but thanks to polished performances and insightful direction, the action is immediate and relatable, as borth works are heart-warming and full of home truths. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2024
Home
Todd Haimes Theater

In Home (on Broadway at Roundabout Theater Company’s Todd Haimes Theater) and the Atlantic Theater’s What Became of Us off-Broadway, the protagonists serve double duty as narrators. Both plays deal with returning to your roots after journeys of alienation. These plays’ structure could put audiences at a distance since we are being told what happens instead of being shown directly. Such plays usually work better as novels, but thanks to polished performances and insightful direction, the action is immediate and relatable. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2024
Welkin, The
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, The Welkin is “the vault of the sky or firmament, the celestial abode of God or gods.” But the characters in Lucy Kirkwood’s ironically-titled play now at the Atlantic Theater Company after a run in London, are more concerned with matters on the Earth.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2024
World Goes `Round, The
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

The World Goes ’Round—devoted to the music and lyrics of Kinder and Ebb—is matched in devotion to their performance by the stars and band at Florida Studio Theater to begin its summer season. New FST Associate Artist Ben Liebert pays tribute to the show’s famous directors and choreographers marked by impressive stamps of his own in both positions.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2024
Here There are Blueberries
New York Theater Workshop

The audience at the New York Theater Workshop is greeted with a camera on a stand positioned before a backdrop with a giant logo for Leica Cameras. Pleasant upbeat music from the 1930s and 40s plays in the background. After the lights have lowered, there is a drumroll, reminiscent of the one heard in the beginning of Cabaret (ominous foreshadowing) and two smiling actors enter to describe the revolution by Leica’s portable, affordable product.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2024
Rhinestone Cowgirls: Legendary Ladies of Country Music
Florida Studio Theater - Goldstein Cabaret

Rhinestone Cowgirls is a lively revue of American Country Music and celebration of women artists who developed it. At Florida Studio Theater, three songstresses unite for a second summer, this time to both solo and harmonize major country music songs from the last century to today. There’s little scripted speech but many projections that explain or attribute progress in genre and major singers’ styles.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2024
Br!nk! Br!efs!
Brink! Briefs!
Baumgartner Center for Dance

For the past 10 years, the end of each season at Milwaukee’s Renaissance Theaterworks has meant another edition of the Br!NK! New Play Festival. Renaissance, the city’s only women-led theater company, sponsors the festival each year. The theater company administrators invite Midwestern women playwrights to submit their work for consideration. Two playwrights are selected each season to receive the Br!NK! Residency Award — the opportunity to develop and advance their scripts during a week-long workshop with a director, cast and dramaturg.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2024
Hell's Kitchen
Shubert Theater

Before anything else is said about Hell's Kitchen, praise must be heaped on this amazing cast. Maleah Joi Moon is simply spectacular as Ali, the seventeen year old girl who struggles with her mother, falls in love with the boy who seems all wrong for her, and discovers her love for music with an elder virtuoso. The combination of love and tension is perfect between Ali and her mom, Jersey (Shoshana Bean). Bean is basically in the background until she rocks out to surprise and thrill the audience- yes, standing ovation!

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
May 2024
Moulin Rouge
Marcus Performing Arts Center: Uihlein Hall

The Johnson Financial Group Broadway Series at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts concludes its 2023-24 season with a bang. No, this is not a reference to the confetti-spewing walking stick owned by the impresario in Moulin Rouge! The Musical now playing in Milwaukee for a two-week run. It is a reference to the most sumptuous, over-the-top musical to visit here this season – and the only show in the current season that is staying beyond its typical, one-week run.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2024

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