Burn This
Union Square Theater

There's a little deja-vu in Signature Theater's revival of Lanford Wilson's 1987 play, Burn This, for those who have recently seen Broadway's Frankie & Johnny in the Clair de Lune, another romance between two diametrically opposite characters. Anna (Catherine Keener) is soft, naive, introspective and sensitive. Her unlikely paramour, Pale (Edward Norton), is bombastic—a cursing, drinking, drug-taking emotional bulldozer.

Jeannie Lieberman
Date Reviewed:
September 2002
Burn This
Union Square Theater

This review of the current revival of Lanford Wilson's Burn This comes in two parts: What it is and what it could (and perhaps should) be. First, the opening half hour of expositional chatter among a former dancer, her gay roommate and her boyfriend as they relive the funeral of a third roommate who, with his boyfriend, perished in a boating accident, is static, boring, without style or energy, poorly cast and directed (by James Houghton).

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
September 2002
Ben Franklin: Unplugged
Saint Cecilla's Playhouse

Do not miss Josh Kornbluth's Red Diaper Trilogy! Kornbluth writes with wit, delivers with gusto. His monologues demand your constant attention. The delivery moves from rapid fire to deliberate, well-placed pauses that allow the audience time to absorb this huge talent's output. The trilogy includes Red Diaper Baby, The Mathematics of Change and Ben Franklin: Unplugged. Red Diaper Baby is a coming-of-age tale of Josh's experiences growing up as a child of Communist parents in New York City.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
September 2002
Delicate Balance, A
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stiemke Theater

A shoo-in for any Milwaukee critic's Top 10 list is the current Milwaukee Repertory Theater production of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance. In a production that borders on perfection, director Edward Morgan slices through the gauze of a seemingly well-ordered suburban lifestyle. Though the play won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966, it remains remarkably fresh and funny. (Clearly, Albee was ahead of his time.)

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2002
Enrico IV
F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater

Don't ask me why the plays of Luigi Pirandello, Italy's most revered 20th century playwright and one of the world's great dramatists, aren't given half the stage time of those of Chekhov, Ibsen and Shaw, those other deservedly-exalted titans of modern dramatic literature. Never mind, just grab this opportunity to go to The New Jersey Shakespeare Theater's production of Enrico IV, and see one of the Italian master's most challenging and complex plays.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 2002
Enrico IV
F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater

Madness, masks, mirrors, and portraits symbolize the shifting and inter-penetrating theatricalities of Luigi Pirandello's Enrico IV -- the third production of the 2002 New Jersey Shakespeare Festival season. The play constitutes a long philosophical and poetic diatribe on the fact that to be human is to be mad. Pirandello's dark view was influenced by a variety of sources: his wife's insanity, his own paranoia, existentialism, theater of the grotesque, Einstein's theories of relativity, and, most importantly, the ideas of nineteenth-century philosopher Henri Bergson.

Kathryn Wylie-Marques
Date Reviewed:
September 2002
Few Good Men, A
Theater At The Center

It's a big step from the musical comedies that are Theater At The Center's usual fare to a gripping, tightly-written courtroom drama -- especially one set in so hyper-masculine an environment: A Few Good Men takes place at a court-martial hearing in response to a marine's death on the likewise tension-riddled site of Guantanamo Naval Base.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2002
Hairspray
Neil Simon Theater

Cute and cartoon-y, a campy, cardboard comedy with heart, this bouncy, bubble-gum bauble is already a favorite among those whose entertainment requirements are non-cerebral. Marissa Jaret Winokur as Tracy is every tubby teen's heroine as she blithely blitzes through weight-related insults and stereotypical barriers to achieve her dreams in remarkably short succession: to dance on the local TV's "The Corny Collins Show" (Clarke Thorell) and steal the beauty queen's (pouty Laura Bell Bundy) hunky beau (Mathew Morrison).

Jeannie Lieberman
Date Reviewed:
September 2002
Guys, The
Flea Theater

The Guys employs a simple but very effective premise: a woman penning eulogies for firemen killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks asks their captain for details about his lost men. Also, to break up the solemn q&a, the interviewer breaks into the occasional poignant, personal solilquy. Even a year after the bombings, Anne Nelson's chamber drama has the feeling of theater-as-therapy, an act not of political questioning or outrage (as was Reno's recent solo), but of communal mourning.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
September 2002
Boys from Syracuse, The
American Airlines Theater

Though forever overshadowed by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rogers and Hart were as delightful a duo as ever concocted musicals for the Broadway stage. Where the later team dealt in lushness, epic themes, and emotional upheavals, the earlier duo found greatness in zest, cheery wit, and melodies so easy, only a muse could have penned them. If the Roundabout’s revival of The Boys from Syracuse looks a little slapdash, it sounds nifty, thanks to a cast of Broadway pros who can play goofy characters and still sing—formidably—for their supper.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
September 2002
Boys From Syracuse, The
American Airlines Theater

If your main reason for enjoying musical theater is the performance of the music, then The Boys From Syracuse is a must-see. The 1938 Rodgers & Hart score is attractively sung and played in this new Roundabout production. David Loud conducts a tasteful orchestration by Don Sebesky that keeps the flavor of the original. Jonathan Dokuchitz, Tom Hewitt and Erin Dilly are particularly good vocally, while Lauren Mitchell sings her big number, "Falling in Love With Love," in a lower key than we're used to, making it more conversational but less thrilling.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
August 2002
Filumena
Florida Studio Theater

Torrid lighting! A thin gushing of water from the mouth of a lion's head fountain. A soprano's thick operatic intro, soon to be matched by the ravings of Domenico Soriano, master of the Neopolitan house. Or is he?

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2002
Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune
Belasco Theater

Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune takes one of the oldest staples of playwriting - the first date - and grills up two hours of negotiations, neuroses, desires, and regrets. Familiar territory, but the humor is relatively fresh, from F & J's convincingly frank sexual jousting to Johnny's emotional neediness that swings between endearing and borderline scary.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
August 2002
Henry The Horse
Actor's Asylum

Henry the Horse has all of the right ingredients. Director Pam Benjamin amusingly interprets playwright Tom Hyatt's script and has brought to it a cast of enthusiastic, talented performers.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2002
Hotel on Marvin Gardens, A
Cabot Theater - Broadway Theater Center

The official opening of Milwaukee's fall theater season now opens in August, a month when many Milwaukeeans are still distracted by a nice day at the lake, or perhaps are planning to attend one of the superlative summer festivals that enliven the city at this time of year. In mid-August, there's also a very popular food and music festival at the local zoo, which packs in thousands of visitors and probably makes the animals wonder what in the world is going on.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2002
Hairspray
Neil Simon Theater

Harvey Fierstein in a jumbo housedress and croaking his trademark "Hellaaaooh" is already enough reason to see any show he's in, so it's a hair-hopping pleasure to report that his current vehicle, Hairspray, adapted from John Waters' break-out commercial film, boasts a half-dozen other reasons for its instant hit-dom. Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman's punchline-filled lyrics hit the mark often enough to keep our ears on ever-perk, matched as they are to Shaiman's intentionally-derivative but buoyant tunes ("Mama, I'm a Big Girl Now" being the catchiest).

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
August 2002
I'm Not Rappaport
Booth Theater

Pundits have sniped at the number of 1980s re-runs taking up prime Broadway real estate lately—Into the Woods, Morning's at Seven, Noises Off—but the truth is that all these revivals have proved worthy and highly entertaining. The hot streak continues with I'm not Rappaport, Herb Gardner's 1985 Tony winner about two old men fending off muggers, senescence and obsolescence in Central Park.

If the set-up screams "boulevard," the byplay between Nat (Judd Hirsch) and Midge (Ben Vereen) still musters big laughs, and the writing rarely lapses into cuteness.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
August 2002
I'm Not Rappaport
Booth Theater

Herb Gardner's I'm Not Rappaport, now revived on Broadway, is a joyful experience. Two alter kockers, one of them an old Red, sit on a park bench in New York and cope with the contemporary world and the frustrations of being old. Performed by the sensational Judd Hirsch in a turn that can only be accomplished by many years of understanding the character (he won a Tony for the same role years ago) and with fine support by Ben Vereen and a very good Anthony Arkin, the delights multiply as the brilliantly written play unfolds.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
August 2002
All Over
Gramercy Theater

Edward Albee's 1971 play, All Over, about a family and friends waiting for the patriarch to die, is full of exposition, some of it interesting. As directed by Emily Mann, the piece consists mainly of old- fashioned, careful declarations by the highly professional performers, with everybody ACTING, and no real conversations. Emotional risings and occasional laughings are carefully stitched into the proceedings, and good, bright lines do pop up, but even if some of the stories told are engaging, a play that is almost all exposition tends to be static and boring.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
July 2002
Antony and Cleopatra
American Players Theater

Spring Green, WI, lies in a particularly beautiful section of the state. For 23 years, audiences have waited for the summer opening of American Players Theater, which makes its home in Spring Green. APT offers a rotating repertory of plays in its outdoor amphitheater. Most of its season typically consists of Shakespeare's plays. The two initial offerings this season consist of Antony and Cleopatra (see TotalTheater Criticopia review) and The Taming of the Shrew.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2002
Barbara Cook: Mostly Sondheim
Lincoln Center - Vivian Beaumont Theater

Grant Barbara Cook a little leeway with her titles; "Mostly Sondheim" is really half Stephen Sondheim and half songs this great composer/lyricist wishes he'd written -- and grant her a few minutes to get comfy with the Vivian Beaumont stage (she claims to love the space but spends her opening number swiveling like a sprinkler head), and you'll be treated to an evening of fine, sometimes moving singing.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
July 2002
Bye Bye Birdie
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

Kids. It's one of the best and best-known songs from Bye Bye Birdie. There's "nothing the matter" today with those oh-so-many kids who fill the stage with so much sound, freshness and energy. It even makes me a bit ashamed to feel that the show's outdated. Still, there's something to be said for an era in which a performing idol like Elvis (here fictionalized as Conrad Birdie) wouldn't balk at heeding his country's call to armed service. And there's no lack of publicists today to think up a related stunt, as does Albert Peterson.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2002
Festival of Independent Theaters
Bath House Cultural Center

The greatest drawback to the 4th annual Festival of Independent Theaters (FIT), now playing through August 3, 2002 at the Bath House Cultural Center on White Rock Lake, is that it is not juried, resulting in an anything-goes policy. With nine companies performing in blocks of twos and threes in repertory over four weekends, FIT, while hosting three wonderful productions, reflects the unevenness of material and directing and is not yet ready for prime time.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
July 2002
Grouch, The
College of St. Elizabeth - campus amphitheater

The plot of The Grouch, about Knemon (Joseph Costa), an unsociable and cantankerous old "grouch" who won't have anything to do with his neighbors and expends a great deal of time and energy keeping all suitors away from his daughter, builds upon a series of funny encounters, confounding confrontations and just-plain-silly doings between him and the members of the mountainside community. If his comeuppance and a happy ending for the lovers are a foregone conclusion, it is getting to that point that provides the makings for the merry moral denouement.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
July 2002
Endpapers
Variety Arts Theater

There are 11 different characters in Thomas McCormack's comedy-drama Endpapers, and, most astoundingly, they're played by 11 different actors. And no, it's not a musical. In an age when playwrights daren't pen anything with more than a half-dozen roles in it (because producers won't produce anything with more than a pocketful of Equity salaries attached to it) we're reminded of just how much breathing room a full-size cast gives a dramatist.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
July 2002
Endpapers
Variety Arts Theater

The moment you sit down in the Variety Arts Theater for Endpapers and encounter the marvelous set by Neil Patel, you feel you're going to see something special -- and it all is. Thomas McCormack is a smart writer who really knows his subject: the world of publishing. The play is full of insights, high humor and thoughts that reach the corners of your mind. The premise is that the patriarch of a publishing company is dying. Who will succeed him? We learn a lot about the underpinnings of this world while we are thoroughly entertained.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
July 2002
Aida
Forrest Theater

Disney's Aida is a visually stunning show, and this road production looks almost the same as the Broadway original. The sun-drenched oranges, reds and pinks and the sparkling stars in the dark night sky are beautiful and exotic. If only Elton John's score had as much luster. John clearly is trying to expand his range. "Easy as Life" is a worthy dramatic monologue, "The Gods Love Nubia" is a stirring anthem, and "Like Father Like Son" is a dramatic argument that advances the plot while rousing us. But most of the rest is conventional rock.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Barbra's Wedding
Plays & Players Theater

As Barbra's Wedding begins, a wife prepares an elaborate pie for her husband, who could not possibly care less. It's playwright Daniel Stern's way of letting us know this marriage is in trouble. But it also illustrates the play's flaws. The scene goes on endlessly, as neither the character nor the author knows when to change gears. And the husband never makes an effort to sample his wife's creation, let alone show his appreciation for her effort, thereby losing a chance to reveal shades of gray in his persona and thus losing audience sympathy for his character.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Blown Sideways Through Life
Florida Studio Theater

Everything that made me a misfit in the world made me right for the theater, Claudia Shearer decided. Michelle Gardner, wonderfully genuine as the author, takes us through 64 jobs she was unsuited for. With energetic, compelling force she makes the 65th -- this tour de force--a success, personally and professionally. Simplicity is the key, including the set (a glass-paneled backdrop that changes backlit colors moodily) and props consisting of a large elevated platform with steps and a ladder at one side.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Bye Bye Birdie
Coronado Playhouse

Bye Bye Birdie never really grows old. There are always ardent fans, young of age, that idolize their favorite talent. The plot is simple. Rock idol Conrad Birdie is drafted into the Army. His PR flak/manager creates a media moment in Sweet Apple, Ohio. And, of course, we get love requited and unrequited, the balloon-sized ego of the idol, swoons by the thousands from adoring teens, preteens, and pre-preteens; and frustrated parents.

Bye Bye Birdie is just plain fun, replete with many of director Leigh Scarritt's students of all ages.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Capitol Steps: When Bush Comes to Shove
John Houseman Theater

n December, 1981, a group of White House staffers planned a Christmas Party with song parodies and skits about current political headlines. Several administrations later, now known as "Capitol Steps," the group has made several albums and tours the country making fun of the very people who employ them. New York is lucky to have them for a few weeks.

Jeannie Lieberman
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Carnival
F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater

At the end of last season, The New Jersey Shakespeare Festival made a diverting digression from classic plays with The Fantasticks, the famously whimsical and long-running musical by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones. The oddly delicate 1960 show that opened inconspicuously Off-Broadway and without the benefit of great reviews, delighted audiences and became a hit that ran 40 years. It also proved a resounding hit with the Shakespeare Festival audiences. Perhaps that show's success inspired artistic director Bonnie J.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Carnival
F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater

Carnival, which opens the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival's  "Grand Magic" 40th anniversary season, is definitely fun for the children and pre-teen crowd, but as adult fare, this production is predictable and lacks imagination. Maybe it's post-September 11th cynicism that makes this show seem incredibly dated.

Kathryn Wylie-Marques
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Cooper Savage
West End Theater

There's so much to admire about Bash Halow's Cooper Savage, it takes a slight trepidation to report that the play never quite works. Halow is obviously going for a hailstorm of themes: Southern family dysfunction, budding sexuality, self-image issues, the appeal of a possibly dangerous drifter. But all these tantalizing ideas never coalesce into one solid production. Only in the fragments can an audience see the possibility of what could have been.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Company
John F. Kennedy Center For The Performing Arts

For the second instalment in the big "Sondheim Celebration," the Kennedy Center has gone back to the engaging 1970 Company, which received 15 Tony nominations and came through with seven wins, catapulting Sondheim into the pantheon of musical theater. Whereas the Broadway original had a set (by Boris Aronson) that emphasized the vertical and featured two elevators, Derek McLane here has devised an enveloping metallic set that emphasizes the horizontal: it presents an aerial view of several New York skyscrapers, with shifting projections on a large upstage screen.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Fifth of July
Diversionary Theater

Playwright Lanford Wilson delightfully manipulates the American variant of English, turning drama into comedy and comedy into drama. He writes, "Somewhere there is a portrait of him that is going through hell," when describing a man who refuses to age in the last fifteen years. The Fifth of July brings 60s Berkeley radicals together on July 4th, 1977. They have changed from the days of free love, protest marches, and getting and staying high. The current events take place at the Talley summer place in Lebanon, Missouri.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Endpapers
Variety Arts Theater

What could be more reassuring and satisfying to a playwright than to have his first full-length play turn out to be quite good? That playwright Thomas McCormack happens to be 70 years old may, at first, sound astonishing but not when you discover that his play is drawn from a world he knows intimately. Isn't that what everyone tells us to write about?

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Hurlyburly
Le Chat Noir

In the canon of Hollywood-is-full-of-greedheads plays, David Rabe's 1984 excoriation of tinseltown decadence ranks as one of the most potentially tedious, its boys-will-be-pigs antics nowadays almost as quaint as those of Sinatra and his frat buddies.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Morning's At Seven
Belasco Theater

Paul Osborn's lovely play, Morning's at Seven, has just been extended for another month on Broadway. Run -- do not walk! The play is a peek into a rural past, in 1938, with ordinary Americans and their family interactions. It's almost like an anthropological study of customs, beliefs, taboos of a time long gone as four elderly sisters deal with the consequences of their marriages, lives, and affairs. The entire acting ensemble is super, though Piper Laurie, Julie Hagerty, and Elizabeth Franz really knocked me out with the breadth of their performances.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Annie Get Your Gun
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

Whoopee for the Golden Apple's respecting the great Irving Berlin by doing all the music and words that he wrote for Annie Get Your Gun. Recent p.c. "revisalizers" would have us deprived of the very funny "I'm an Indian Too" and the "Indian Ceremonial" Dance that's a choreographic high point in Golden Apple's production. Luckily, we even get the clever "Old Fashioned Wedding" that Berlin wrote for a 1966 revival.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2002

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