Slave Play
Mark Taper Forum

Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play was written six years ago when the African-American playwright was a student at Yale. His play, which deals with race and sexuality in the USA, is very much a young man’s work, packed with scatological humor, wild experimentation and provocative ideas. Thanks to its boldness and power, the play was produced off-Broadway (by New York Theatre Workshop) when Harris was still a student.  It then went to Broadway in 2019 and received twelve Tony nominations , sparking controversy the whole time.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Music Man, The
Winter Garden Theater

How amazing do you have to be to make Sutton Foster slip into the background? Just as good as Hugh Jackman. It's not a fair contest. Jackman is so magnetic that when he's onstage, you don't notice anyone else. And when he's not, you wish for him to come back. That smile alone is so totally irresistible. No wonder people are mesmerized by this Harold Hill.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Play That Goes Wrong, The
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

In The Play that Goes Wrong, there are actually two plays that do so. One is an English mystery about a 20th century murder at a fictional Haversham Manor  The  other is the mystery play’s presentation by The West Palmetto Drama Society.  What goes absolutely right is Florida Studio Theater’s production of both, in which everybody and everything that goes wrong come off to hilarious perfection. 

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Skeleton Crew
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

It's hard to imagine drinking coffee, changing clothes, or having a serious conversation in the break room at this factory. But in this one set show, that's where the action is.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Great Leap, The
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

As part of the years China took The Great Leap to be an International leader, 1958 up to 1989, China invited and hosted Americans in sports exhibition games against its top players. Lauren Yee’s play, The Great Leap, features a school basketball team from San Francisco in such a competition in 1989. The piece focuses, though, on both competitors’ coaches and particularly a seemingly unlikely U.S. player of Chinese descent. So doing, it reveals not only personal histories but links up with major political ones that span decades.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Prayer for the French Republic
City Center - Stage 1

 “It’s the suitcase or the coffin,” bluntly explains a character in Prayer for the French Republic, Joshua Harmon’s somewhat overlong, but ultimately moving drama ostensibly about one family of French Jews, but it’s really about the state of European and all Jewry. The man uttering the unvarnished, but pragmatic assessment of what it means to be a Jew is Charles Benhamou (solid Jeff Seymour), a father and husband contemplating moving his family from a comfortable, upper-middle-class existence in Paris to an unknown situation in Israel.

Dave Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Long Day's Journey into Night
Minetta Lane Theater

Transposing classic plays into modern eras has been an accepted theatrical technique for quite a while now. Moving these timeless works into a contemporary setting can illuminate their universal themes and bring insight to current issues. But these time-warp productions have mostly been for Shakespearean texts. Few more recent classics have switched time frames, probably because we are too familiar with their original settings to accept any updating.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
MJ
Neil Simon Theater

Even before MJ begins, the excitement in the air is palpable. Some people who don't like Michael Jackson, for one reason or another, but none of them are in the audience.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Intimate Apparel
Lincoln Center - Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

The African-American experience in different decades of the 20th Century is explored with ingenuity and passion in two new Off-Broadway musicals. Both feature eclectic and captivating scores, but unlike the overly obvious Black no More, Intimate Apparel, at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, succeeds in telling its relatable story to become an integrated and powerful piece.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Hang, The
HERE

Taylor Mac is an award-winning playwright-performer whose works seen on, Off, and Off-Off-Broadway question not only gender norms but also conventional dramatic structure. His bizarre musical entertainment The Hang  eschews traditional elements such as story and character to focus on a celebration of queerness in a free-form spectacle which is part party, part philosophical debate, and part funeral rite.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
English
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

Our relationship with language is the subject of Sanaz Toossi’s perceptive new play English, presented in a taut and affecting production by Knud Adams in a co-production from Atlantic Theater Company and Roundabout Theater Company. It’s so refreshing to hear from a new voice and gain perspective outside the American kitchen sink.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Singing Revolution
Broadwater Theater

Singing Revolution: The Musical arrives just in time to lift us up out of our pandemic funk with a blast of joy and hope.

The show tells the unusual story of Estonia’s 1987 song-filled, peaceful uprising against communist Russia. The tiny country stood up to its occupiers by protesting in a non-violent way, using the power of song to help achieve its goals of freedom and democracy. The tale has been turned into a big, brash American musical by Tony Spinosa and James Bearhart, and it’s just what we need to cheer us up in these parlous times.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Mala
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

In the real world, caregivers do not get trophies or medals for their often heroic, physically-exhausting and emotionally-draining work. Nonetheless, caregiving is often part of adult life. It may not be something one looks forward to, but it must be dealt with, all the same.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Antonio's Song
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stiemke Studio

It has been a long, winding pandemic journey for the exquisitely crafted and performed Antonio’s Song/I was Dreaming of a Son, which opened recently in the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s intimate Stiemke Studio. According to Artistic Director Mark Clements, who directs this piece, this co-production between the Rep and Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) was originally scheduled to open at the Rep in March 2020.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
How and the Why, The
Beverly Hills Playhouse

The How and the Why is a menstruation drama.  More correctly, a mother-and-daughter menstruation drama.

Sarah Treem’s play, now running at the Beverly Hills Playhouse (after several productions back East) is a two-hander about Rachel Hardman, a 28-year-old evolutionary biologist who was given up for adoption at birth .

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Grand Horizons
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Deciding to follow the “Live Your Best Life” motto of their Florida senior retirement complex, Nancy tells Bill she wants to end their marriage of 50 years. Thus begins what was once called a “matinee comedy.” Frequented mid-day by mainly women theater-goers, it had more risqué dialogue, jokes, and situations than film decency codes permitted. Bess Wohl’s version, Grand Horizons, holds its own in competition with films today by starring older, usually more restrained people—like its audience at Sarasota’s Asolo Rep.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Funny Girl
Sunset Playhouse - Eichmann Studio Theater

Milwaukee’s newest theater company, Bombshell Theater Co., makes an impressive debut with the 1960s musical Funny Girl. The polished production shows a lot of heart and looks amazing, with a seemingly limitless supply of costumes and wigs for its 17 cast members.

A bit of background: Funny Girl is the autobiographical tale of real-life vaudeville star Fanny Brice. It will always be known as the Broadway musical that made singer/director/producer Barbra Streisand a star. Streisand also won an Academy Award for her repeat performance in the 1968 film.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Our Town
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

It’s seldom that a director follows well an author’s stage directions as closely as Desdemona Chiang follows Thornton Wilder’s now-classic ones. What the Asolo Rep production differs from is the stylistically realistic movie version of Our Town,.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Skeleton Crew
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

When patrons enter the Samuel J. Friedman Theater for Manhattan Theater Club’s Broadway premiere of Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew, they are greeted with prominent signage as part of Michael Carnahan’s ultra-realistic industrial set. The paper admonishments and placards to abide by the theater’s COVID safety protocols blend in with the play’s written rules for the characters to refrain from smoking and gambling and to keep the break room clean. Thus, we are pulled into the crushing world of a Detroit auto-parts plant and its African-American employees.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Piano Men
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

Take a pair of crowd-pleasing musicians and two baby-grand pianos, place them inside the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s Stackner Cabaret, and let them loose with a cavalcade of hit tunes. That’s the formula for Piano Men. This latest creation, by artistic director Mark Clements, strikes all the right notes as these performers let loose with a playlist of greatest hits from the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Kimberly Akimbo
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

Kimberly Akimbo the newly penned musical with book and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire (Rabbit Hole, Shrek the Musical) and music by Jeanine Tesori (Fun Home, Caroline, or Change) is the most loving, loveliest, and poignant theatrical experience of the year.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Belleville
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Never before in viewing FSU/Asolo Conservatory’s performances have I seen so many talented people working hard to deliver a drama as inconsequential as Amy Herzog’s Belleville. It premiered in 2013 in what the program describes as a specific time of “new naturalism” that apparently is supposed to have various tragic and thrilling powers. Tragic, maybe. Thrilling, uh-uh.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Flying Over Sunset
Lincoln Center - Vivian Beaumont Theater

“What am I doing here?,” asks the magnificent dancer Tony Yazbeck portraying legendary movie star Cary Grant as he is about to experiment with LSD with two other luminaries—controversial novelist Aldous Huxley and playwright-diplomat Clare Boothe Luce—in the physically ravishing but emotionally numb new musical Flying Over Sunset (at Lincoln Center’s cavernous Vivian Beaumont Theater). I felt a similar unease and uncertainty at this lush concoction from an impressive creative team.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Company
Bernard B. Jacobs Theater

Bobbi, the protagonist of a gender-reversed revival of Company, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s innovative 1970 musical about marriage, friendship and the chasm between the two, is facing a dreaded 35th natal anniversary while still unattached. How she deals with the challenges presented makes for one of the most exciting evenings in the New York theater season so far.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2021
Flying Over Sunset
Vivian Beaumont Theater

Several audience members left Flying Over Sunset at intermission. They were the wise ones.

The first act crackles; the second drags. Both, of course, are directed by the great James Lapine, so I must presume that the playwright (also James Lapine) thought that bringing down the energy would give the work gravitas. Instead, it just drags.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
December 2021
This Wonderful Life
Matrix Theater

Rogue Machine celebrates its new home, The Matrix, by mounting the L.A. premiere of This Wonderful Life, a one-man play adapted from the ever-popular film, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Leo Marks is the remarkable actor who not only narrates the film’s story but impersonates most of its important characters, beginning with George Bailey, the angst-ridden small-town banker who contemplates suicide (“I wish I had never been born!”) and is saved by his guardian angel, who grants his wish, making him see what a difference he has made to his family and townspeople.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
December 2021
8-Track: The Sounds of the 70s

See Review under "Eight-Track" (http://totaltheater.com/?q=node/8784)

Eight Track: The Sounds of the Seventies
Theo Ubique Cabaret Theater

How you remember the 1970s depends chiefly on where you spent it—San Francisco, Philadelphia, Nashville, or Ann Arbor made for very different experiences, never mind the myriad economic, ethnic, chronological, and gender-linked factors.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2021
Kimberly Akimbo
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

The leading women of two new musical productions are facing momentous birthdays. Bobbi, the protagonist of a gender-reversed revival of Company, is facing a dreaded 35th natal anniversary while still unattached. The title character of Kimberly Akimbo, a musical adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2000 dark comedy, is just turning 16, but the consequences of aging are much graver for her. Kimberly is suffering from a rare disease which causes her to age four times faster than normal and her approaching date could be a death sentence.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2021
When Harry Met Rehab
Greenhouse Theater Center

Comedies throughout most of our culture's 20th century habitually boasted a "drunk scene” — the pivotal moment in the plot when all is revealed/resolved by an overserved raisonneur (character acting as the voice of the author or dramatist) reveling in the candor afforded the inebriated. Even today, T-shirts, tankards and TV sitcoms continue to smile indulgently on moms swilling wine during their busy days and dads guzzling beer in their off-duty hours. The message conveyed by these images is that alcohol is a harmless substance.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2021
Clyde's
Helen Hayes Theater

Though it’s called “Clyde’s” and a photo of a devilishly grinning Uzo Aduba (Emmy winner for “Orange Is the New Black”) in the title role is on the Playbill cover, she is not the focus of Lynn Nottage’s funny and moving new play. Clyde is the tyrannical proprietor of a truck-stop sandwich shop in rural Pennsylvania, and though she sizzles and scalds the stage whenever Aduba explodes into Takeshi Kata’s superbly detailed kitchen set, costumed by Jennifer Moeller in an outrageously flashy wardrobe, the center of the play is Clyde’s staff of four ex-cons.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2021
America in One Room
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

In September, 2019, an upscale Texas resort held a conference of a group of voters widely representing Americans of every stripe, particularly political, racial, and social.  They would consider many important national issues and opine on them from their diverse experience and points of view. A final compendium of their discussions would go to Representatives in D.C. and the press. Learning about and contemplating all this inspired Jason Odell Williams’s America in One Room, now at Florida Studio Theater.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2021
Company
Bernard B. Jacobs

The question is: Can a female "Bobbie" work just as well as a male "Bobby" in  Company? The answer is a resounding Yes!, especially in the capable hands of the luminescent Katrina Lenk. Once you experience this production, it will be hard to accept the male "Bobby" again. Men aren't hounded about being unmarried at 35; women are.

Lenk has a strong, pure voice and also brings a real sensitivity to the role.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
December 2021
Laramie Project, The
First Stage Milwaukee

Milwaukee’s nationally acclaimed children’s theater company takes a big, dramatic leap forward with its production of The Laramie Project. The First Stage cast comprises members of the company’s training program for advanced high school actors, and the show is recommended for those age 13 and older.

Despite its generic-sounding title, The Laramie Project is a documentary play that details the true life-and-death story of 21-year-old Matthew Shepard, an openly gay college student who was brutally beaten and left to die on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
December 2021
Mr. Dickens' Hat
North Shore Center for the Arts

Dickens was not dead, to begin with. While history attests to his riding the train that derailed midway across the Kent river just outside Staplehurst on that fateful day in 1865, the famous English author not only escaped serious injury but ministered to the wounded passengers by fetching them water, using his fashionable high-crowned hat as a canteen — that same hat enshrined later in the London haberdashery of one Mr. Garbleton, coincidentally located next door to a millinery shop owned by a Mrs. Prattle.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2021
Christmas Carol, A
Milwaukee Repertory Theater

Christmas is a time of celebration, and this year’s Christmas also marks the return of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater classic, A Christmas Carol. It has been two years since the residents of Charles Dickens’s Victorian London have trod upon the stage of the historic Pabst Theater, which is trimmed to holiday perfection year-round. With its swathes of rich red curtains and carpeting, intricate staircases and sparkle of myriad crystal chandeliers, the Pabst is undeniably the perfect spot to host this timeless English tale.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
December 2021
Girl from the North Country
Belasco Theater

What a lofty pedigree: written and directed by Conor McPherson, music and lyrics by Bob Dylan. To top things off, the cast is brilliant. Every performer has an abundance of talent, and the singing soars. So why doesn’t Girl from the North Country work?

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
December 2021
Morning Sun
City Center - Stage I

When you go to see Morning Sun, bring a lot of Kleenex. Unless you have a heart of stone, you will cry.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
December 2021
Jesus Christ Superstar
Marcus Performing Arts Center

It’s difficult to believe that more than half a century has passed since the world first heard Andrew Lloyd Webber’s/Tim Rice’s hard-rock musical, Jesus Christ Superstar. Initially released as a record album, it caused an international sensation. While the Brits were initially cool to this rock-n-roll treatment of the biblical story, which told of the final days of Christ’s life, Americans seemingly couldn’t get enough of it. The album was named 1971 Billboard Album of the Year.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2021
Children, The
Fountain Theater

Skillful acting and directing help smooth over the dramaturgical fault-lines in The Children, a nuclear disaster play now in its L.A. premiere at the Fountain.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2021

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