Antigone
Sixth at Penn Theater

I turned to the lady next to me, Greek scholar and co-host of KPBS' "A Way With Words," Martha Barnette, asking for her take on UCSD Professor Dr. Marianna McDonald's very contemporary translation of Sophocles' Antigone. The script is as current as tomorrow, spiced with current slang. Ms. Barnette's comment: extremely good. 

Antigone is a social commentary about government dictatorial policies and has had current application every time it's been performed throughout 2,443 years since it was written.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Closer
Mark Taper Forum

Patrick Marber's caustic portrait of love in our time focuses on two intertwined London couples and their struggles to stay together in the face of their own failings: infidelity, obsessive behavior and self destructiveness.  Marber, considered the heir to Pinter and Stoppard, writes in distinctive, post-modern fashion: staccato dialogue, wise-ass humor, minimal exposition, extreme sexual frankness, sketchy character development.  He is also fixated on addiction; his first play, Dealer's Choice, dealt with gambling and booze; Closer gnaws endlessly on the bone

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Comedy of Errors, The
Hollywood Playhouse

The Hollywood Shakespeare Festival has had more success in rethinking other Shakespeare plays than it has this spring with the vaguely noirish The Comedy of Errors. The decision to costume the players in 1940s garb to a background of blues and jazz doesn't particularly add to or hurt the production, but the stark lighting too often only hides faces under broad-rimmed hats without adding atmosphere. This is bad because too many players seem incapable of projecting a voice or a physical presence.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Drunkard's Revenge, The
North Park Vaudeville

Melodrama: 1. a dramatic form that does not observe the laws of cause and effect and that exaggerates emotion and emphasizes plot or action at the expense of characterization. 2. (in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries) a romantic dramatic composition with music interspersed.

Raymond Hull's The Drunkard's Revenge is a classic audience participatory melodrama as performed on the North Park Vaudeville's stage. Up front you are requested (or is that required) to boo the villain, rally for the hero, swoon over the lovely lady...well, you get the idea.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Dessa Rose
Lincoln Center - Mitzi Newhouse Theater

Dessa Rose, by Lynn Ahrens (book and lyrics) and Stephen Flaherty (music), is a well-meaning musical about love and slavery. It starts in 1847 when a sixteen-year-old, pregnant slave takes part in a minor slave uprising. The story feels trite and quite melodramatic, as bad Massa kills a slave and sells young Dessa. The singing is terrific - LaChanze as Dessa, Norm Lewis, Kecia Lewis, and all the rest of the ensemble - but there is little joy in the show, which often feels like a Greek drama, with most of the action talked or sung about.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Island of Slaves, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

On a sandy beach (surrounded on all sides by the audience, giving Conservatory student actors a rare chance to play in the round) after a storm, aristocratic Iphicrates (Brit Whittle) in tux and long silk scarf has washed up with his Harlequin (John Long), a manservant happy that he's saved a flask of liquor. He's also not worried, as is his master, to see the sandbar sign "Island of Slaves." And he's right!

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Glass Menagerie, The
Ethel Barrymore Theater

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams is a good show. Really. Quite good. Despite a total misconception in the production by director David Leveaux, and some of the worst lighting I've ever seen on Broadway (by Natasha Katz - who is usually one of the best). The play itself and most of the cast provide us with a satisfying, moving evening of theater.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Glengarry Glen Ross
Bernard B. Jacobs

Oh Boy! Want to see a demonstration of how good, how vivid real acting can be? Check out Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet's dazzling drama now revived on Broadway. It's the most exciting acting ensemble in town. Alan Alda will give you a lesson on how to do a nuanced monologue - his encounters as a nervous, failing, older salesman with the very controlled Frederick Weller as his supervisor are like a mongoose darting at a cobra. The nervous energy Gordon Clapp exudes as he tries to con the stolid Jeffrey Tambor into a crime is full pf prickly tingles.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
God Hates the Irish
Rattlestick Theater

God Hates The Irish: The Ballad of Armless Johnny, by Sean Cunningham, with music by Michael Frears, is a very black, absurdist musical comedy about the tribulations of an armless Irish man, played by the very engaging Bill Thompson, a good singer, comedian and actor with very elastic legs. The cast are all strong personas, including the bright, shiny Broadway-level Ann Bobby, Remy Auberjonois, the lovely Anna Camp, Lisa Altomare and James A. Stephens. It's all non-PC jokes, full of sexual outrageousness.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Light in the Piazza, The
Lincoln Center - Vivian Beaumont Theater

I did not find The Light in the Piazza, based on a novella by Elizabeth Spencer, with book by Craig Lucas, music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, to be very engaging, except for the visuals and the voices of the performers. Director Bartlett Sher is very good at staging: keeping the principals and extras moving around the stage in interesting patterns. The set by Michael Yeargan gives us views of Italy that are a fascinating travelogue and a profound comment on the action in his wonderful visuals of space and light on Italian ruins, piazzas and buildings.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Spamalot
Minskoff Theater

Monty Python's Spamalot is the most entertaining excuse for entertainment since Hairspray. Director Mike Nichols has taken Eric Idle and John Du Prez's medieval spoof about Arthur and his boys, and, with the aid of the funniest, most ridiculous choreography in town by Casey Nicholaw, a brilliant set, absurd (and glamorous) costumes by Tim Hatley, and has put together a musical extravaganza as foolish and funny as The Producers.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Hurlyburly
37 Arts Theater

I don't know if the original production of Hurlyburly was a comedy. The film - over an hour shorter than the play - has bitterly funny scenes but plays as tragedy. As such, it's very effective. All the more curious, then, that this production is an extremely funny black comedy. The irony is that the three main leads - Ethan Hawke as Eddie, Josh Hamilton as Mickey and Bobby Cannavale as Phil - all seem to be doing impressions of their counterparts from the movie (Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey and Chaz Palminteri).

David Steinhardt
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
On Golden Pond
Cort Theater

On Golden Pond, by Ernest Thompson is a sentimental and ultimately very moving play about diminishment in old age, as an elderly couple spend their last summer in Maine. Thompson's words are bright and insightful in the very realistic conversations between James Earl Jones and the beautiful Leslie Uggams as Jones' character, a man who is "losing it," expresses his anger and frustrations. In the beginning, it's homey dialogue but seems to be directed, by Leonard Foglia, at a snail's pace (which picks up later).

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Pillowman, The
Booth Theater

Kafka Lives! Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman is a gothic horror story of repression and cruel interrogation in a totalitarian state, and about child abuse creating Art. McDonough is a very good short story writer, and several of his graphic tales involving cruelty to, and butchery of, children are hung on the framework of a man's grilling about involvement in murders that replicate killings in his stories.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Steel Magnolias
Lyceum Theater

Robert Harling's Steel Magnolias is not a play for jaded cynics. It's a lovely production, and all you have to do to enjoy it is to sit back and let yourself be a participant in the lives of these Southern women, well played by a fine ensemble cast: Delta Burke, Lily Rabe, Frances Sternhagen, Rebecca Gayheart, Christine Ebersole and Marsha Mason. The humor is folksy Americana, the characters have a reality to them and zing lots of amusing lines as they congregate to communicate in the local beauty shop.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Streetcar Named Desire, A
Studio 54

Uh, oh. We are at the mercy of strange and foreign directors who don't understand the delicate sensibilities and balance needed in a Tennessee Williams play. Edward Hall, from across the pond, helms the current A Streetcar named Desire, and he has misdirected the talented John C. Reilly so badly, the play's real currents are lost. Williams' love of depravity, sexual tension, deteriorated people, the holes in shattered lives, the survival of the primitive, expressed in poetic terms, is undercut as Reilly shows Stanley rather that being him.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Longacre Theater

Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is one of the most perfectly constructed plays in the contemporary canon. The foreshadowings, conflicts, rising and falling actions, final climax and denoument give us a classic example (along with the brilliance and wit in the dialogue) of how to write a play. But in order for the play to really work, you need equal adversaries fencing and clashing on the stage. Unfortunately, this is not the case in the current Broadway production.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Bat Boy
Don Powell Theater

The occasional sound of bats flying overhead is heard during the pre-show for the San Diego premiere of Bat Boy: The Musical. Billed as a musical comedy/horror show, it is truly a send-up of the 1950s horror films and much more. Dr. Rick Simas directs this Off Broadway hit of 2001 for San Diego State University's theater.

Bat Boy, sired by a bat and a human, lived in a cave until his teens. He is discovered by the three trailer-trash teens (Kevin Maldarelli, Kelsey Vener, and Omri Schein) of Mrs. Taylor (Jamie Kalama).

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
All Wear Bowlers
HERE Arts Center

What can a critic say about a show which includes in its program an essay by the performer/creators, informing us that "we seemed to strike the perfect balance between talk and play, philosophy and slapstick? And with a director who boasts a "PhD from Stanford in drama theory and criticism on top of that? all wear bowlers, lowercase letters and all, presents itself as a pre-deconstructed masterpiece that has been “in development 3 years.” Only problem is, it's not very good.

David Steinhardt
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Bindlestiff Family Cirkus: From the Gutter to the Glitter
Theater For The New City

The Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, now at the Theater for the New City, offer the real deal: unabashed, old fashioned vaudeville and sideshow, without embellishments, performed by an accomplished duo with great circus skills: Keith Nelson and Stephanie Monseu. Also on hand in From the Gutter to the Glitter are the fun musical duo, pianist Peter Bufano (who also juggles) and zippy violinist Kathe Hostetter.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Bach at Leipzig
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse Theater

Weaving historical fact with fiction is nothing new, but up-and-coming playwright Itamar Moses offers a few intriguing twists in Bach at Leipzig. The play is receiving its first major production on the Milwaukee Repertory Theater's stage.

With a rock-solid cast and accomplished director at the helm, Bach at Leipzig gradually wins over the audience. This is no small accomplishment, as the play's historical events are essentially non-dramatic. This much is known: when a prominent musician in Germany dies in 1722, a successor must quickly be named.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Boswell's Dreams
Off-Broadway Theater

The name "James Boswell" doesn't tend to ring a bell other than for historians, who may recall him as Samuel Johnson's biographer. Johnson wrote the first English dictionary and was considered a monumental figure of his time. Boswell, however, was an embarrassment to his family for generations after his death. Both men come vividly to life in this stellar production by local playwright Marie Kohler.

Like James Boswell, Kohler comes from a family of wealth and privilege.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Cats
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

The Apple's on a roll this season with truly golden dancing and delicious ensemble acting. In an intimate setting we get caught up in "Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats," the Names, the prospect of the Ball, "Moments of Happiness" and sometimes discord from the likes of "Macavity" and "Mistoffelees," and finally, which of the cats will get a once-a-year chance at a new life. I've always thought the clever costumes and make-up along with spectacular (and unusual, at its debut time) set accounted for most of the appeal that made Cats such a popular show.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Coriolanus
John Jay College

Responding to the comment that Shakespeare never blotted a line, Dr. Johnson quipped, "Would that he had blotted a thousand." Johnson might well have had in mind several rocky out-croppings in the stream of Coriolanus, a decidedly rhetorical play, to change my metaphor. Much of the text is reportage: something has happened elsewhere. Still more text consists in tales to be re-told, though these, blessedly, are planned for some off stage events (in Act One, scenes 1, 4, 7, 10; nearly as much in Act Two, and thereafter).

Nina daVinci Nichols
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Edge
Coconut Grove - Encore Room

At one point in the one-woman, multi-charactered play called Edge, Sylvia Plath, then a college student with vague aspirations to be an artist, describes her drawings as "elegant" and "precise." It's a description easily applied to the performance of actress Angelica Torn as Plath, who gave up visual art for a life of poetry, then eventually gave up life as well. Combined with playwright Paul Alexander -- who also directed and designed the evocative lighting -- Torn delivers a portrait of Plath that is aching, funny and enraging.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, The
Poway Performing Arts Company

PowPAC's production of The Effects Of Gamma Rays On Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds should not be missed. In it, epileptic Ruth (Blair Hollingsworth) is bipolar, catty, both nasty and nice, and extremely convincing when she has a fit. She's a brat, a supportive sister and is emotionally close to her mother. She is duplicitous and manipulative, with emotions that change in nanoseconds. Old mute Nanny (Beth Mercurio, aging herself a good 40 years) is being taken care of (read: taken advantage of) by Beatrice.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Julius Caesar
Belasco Theater

So Denzel Washington is playing Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and he's just fine. His charisma fills the theater, his acting is mostly good, and hey - that's Denzel up there lookin' good. It's okay if he speechifies in a couple of soliloquies, he's really good in conversation, and his star presence transcends his faults.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Blogging About Cat Stevens
Shetler Studio Theater

Monologues appeal to the voyeur in us. Details of someone else's life - we can't ever get enough of them - especially when they're presented in such a persuasive way as in this collection. A few themes run through the 12 lives on view. Blogging is one. Private thoughts made public; it's as if blogs were invented for exhibitionists. Just like these actors. Another theme is pain, but usually that's told to us only after the character gets us through the more mundane part.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Bad Date Theater
Adams Avenue of the Arts

Bad Date Theater!, a co-production of Misfit Productions and Korbett Kompany Productions showcases five examples of oddball relationships. Alan Ball's The M Word, directed by Bob Korbett, features Connie Terwilliger and Bob Korbett as two people contemplating that move into the realm of the M word. Both characters are anal about contemplating every aspect of a marriage, which includes household duties, child rearing, extra-marital affairs, marriage adjustments, and much more. Terwilliger and Korbett form a perfect team. She is prim and proper.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Burn This
Cygnet Theater

A roommate and his lover, Dominic, are killed in a freak boating accident in the bay off of Manhattan. His two roommates are in mourning. Anna (Jessica John), a choreographer, was his dance partner at times. Larry, a gay advertising designer, was a close friend. The latest Lanford Wilson play to hit San Diego, Burn This, graces the stage at Cygnet Theater. Set in a two-level loft in a Manhattan warehouse, the apartment is graced with unpainted drywall and a modest attempt at a kitchen.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Counsellor at Law
Theater at St. Clement's

John Rubinstein gives a powerful performance as the lawyer, the central figure in Elmer Rice's 1931 play, Counsellor at Law. He brings a dynamic vitality to a part that fills the theater. His acting has the depth, dimension, strength and charisma of a star, and that is just what this old, fascinating look into the life and office of an up-from-the-gutter achiever in the 1930s needs.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Clarence Darrow's Last Trial
New Theater

Shirley Lauro's Clarence Darrow's Last Trial is getting its world-premiere production in South Florida, and there's reasonable doubt that audiences at New Theater in Coral Gables will go away satisfied. The play is based on a 1930s murder trial notorious for its allegations and clash of cultures -- gang rape, murder, a well-connected family from America's Deep South, white U.S. sailors in a pre-statehood Hawaii. Into this steps Darrow, the legendary defender of otherwise lost causes, whose best days by this time are behind him.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Twelve Angry Men
American Airlines Theater

Twelve Angry Men is such a good play - especially when it's done by a professional cast like the one now on Broadway -- that it's needless to be picky picky picky. Reginald Rose's play, set in a jury room in a time when women and minorities were not on juries, wherein the twelve men vote eleven to one to convict, and gradually shift to the opposite, remains captivating. So director Scott Ellis doesn't have to create conflict through volume -- the content does it. And each man at a jury table doesn't have to stand for his comments.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Good Vibrations
Eugene O'Neill Theater

A quick view of Act One of Good Vibrations, the Beach Boys musical on Broadway: shallow, inane book by Richard Dresser; great set by Heidi Ettinger; some good singing voices; boring, unengaging. Director/choreographer John Carrafa's work had no dynamic in it. We escaped at intermission.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Belfast Blues
45 Bleecker

Geraldine Hughes was brought up in poverty in Northern Ireland during the time of "The Troubles" and is now performing her one-woman show based on her experiences at The Culture Project in The Village.

Besides herself, the lively Ms. Hughes plays a dozen or so characters of all ages, each with its own physicality, manner of speech and attitude.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Book of Days
OnStage Playhouse

San Diego is currently blessed with two plays by the Pulitzer-winning Lanford Wilson: Book of Days is at OnStage in Chula Vista, and Burn This is at Cygnet in East San Diego. The former chronicles events in the small Missouri town of Dublin, population just over 4,000. (Wilson, incidentally, was born in Lebanon, Missouri in 1934.)

Dublin has one industry — Walt Bates' cheese factory - thus making Walt (Tim Carr), at 60, the patriarch and his wife, Sharon (Kaly McKenna), the matriarch of the town.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Boston Marriage
Cook Theater at Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts

Elaborate Victorian language and modern slang. Semi-circular backdrop of 20th century abstract frolicking nudes (on -- could it be -- burlap?) cut out between one nude's legs as an entrance to a boudoir with old fashioned chaise. Contemporary glitzy black pants suit for Anna and sequin-topped pink evening gown on Claire, waited on by maid Catherine, with a lace-curtain apron over black swaddling cloths. Everything's mixed up with a parcel of artsy, once-innovative techniques that now simply make a mess.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Democracy
Brooks Atkinson Theater

Michael Frayn's theater accomplishments are truly amazing. With his two previous signature works, Noises Off and Copenhagen, the playwright ranged from backstage farce to nuclear fission and uncertainty theory. Now with Democracy, he has veered off into high-stakes Cold War politics, spiced with the machinations of party infighting and the deviousness of embedded spies. Yet there isn't a full act of honest-to-God stage dialogue in the three works put together!

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Dinner With Friends
Poway Performing Arts Company

Divorces affect many more people than the couple untying the knot. Dinner With Friends, playwright Donald Margulies' testament to breakups, is an extremely strong look at dissolution. Director Jay Mower, who also designed the set, brings to the stage, Cheryl and Sam Warner as Karen and Gabe -- the "perfect" couple, and Rob Tyler and Susan Lawson as the "imperfect" couple.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Einstein Comes Through
North Coast Repertory Theater

David Ellenstein is the very capable artistic director of North Coast Rep, and Marc Silver is an accomplished actor. The two are responsible, alas, for Einstein Comes Through.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
January 2005

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