Bonnie Parker
Trinity River Arts Center

Diminutive actress Dixie Lee Sedgwick performed her one-woman show, Bonnie Parker, on May 1, 2002 at the Trinity River Arts Center in its next-to-last workshop production before opening May 21 for a two-week run at Blue Heron Arts Center in New York. Sedgwick, who also wrote the show, has been refining it since spring 1999 at numerous Dallas area venues. She has done extensive research on the distaff half of the outlaw duo Bonnie and Clyde (presented on celluloid in 1967 with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty).

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Capitol Steps: When Bush Comes to Shove
450 West 42nd Street

Why is this comedy revue, "When Bush Comes to Shove," different from all other comedy revue? One, it's a troupe of grownups whose insights and satires show mature writing with depth and intelligence as well as humor. Two, they are all Broadway-level singers. From Bush's malapropisms to Arafat and Sharon to baseball to the environment to cloning, they are right on target as they take familiar melodies and skewer something. It's full of mind-ticklers like the exceptionally brilliant word backward (or bird wackward) trip that Mike Tilford takes us on.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Damn Yankees
Walnut Street Theater

Damn Yankees is a 1955 musical with a great premise and two spectacular roles, but, let's face it, the show has flaws. It is slow-moving, and the minor players are stick figures with corny dialogue. The most interesting character, Lola, appears to have been an afterthought. This quintessential Bad Girl doesn't show up until the latter half of Act One, at which time Gwen Verdon, in the original production, stole the show.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Fat Lady Sings, The: A Musical Journey Celebrating the Singers of Size
Theater Works

Draped shoulders to toes in shiny swirls on black falling as if from epaulettes, she might be Kate Smith imparting Irving Berlin's blessing of America. Carol A. Provonsha's voice is bit higher and hair blonder, though. The cascades of cloth turn out to be drapes when returned to her entrance arch. But Kate is definitely Provonsha's model in the sense of her inspiration as a performer of size. And of sex? As a Catholic schoolgirl, Provonsha -- whose mother costumed drag queens and brother was one -- met Sophie Tucker and also saw Mae West in person.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Fully Committed
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

An actor's nightmare must surely have him struggling to audition for a role while supporting himself taking reservations for a trendy, top-rated Manhattan restaurant. In its equivalent of The Lower Depths, abandoned by the head and assistant reservationist, Sam must handle intercom and outside phone calls from over 30 people.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Heroes, Inc. / The Road to Hades
Fault Line Theater

Fault Line's storefront theater is often the starting point for aspiring actors, a place to learn to memorize short scripts, take direction on a very small stage, and have some fun. It is also a theater with two-week runs -- a short rehearsal schedule. Both of which mean that experienced actors between gigs can hone their skills while making a very short commitment. The current offering includes a continuing series, "Heroes, Incorporated 3," subtitled "John System vs. The Global Crime League."

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, The
John Golden Theater

It's as if producer Max Bialystock is back in business, trying to mount a comedy about a subject so gross, the play will have to close after one performance. Credit Edward Albee for choosing an inconceivable plot, writing about a man who has sex with a goat and making us care about him. Not only that; Albee has written perhaps the wittiest of all his plays. Bill Pullman and Mercedes Ruehl are an apparently-happy married couple with a relatively normal gay son. Pullman is a world-famous architect, on top of the world at age 50.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Few Stout Individuals, A
Signature Theater Company at Peter Norton Space

A good way to describe John Guare's newest play, A Few Stout Individuals, would be, well, stout. Literally busting at the seams with characters, historical events and information, this extravagant re-imagining of the process by which one Samuel Clemens (William Sadler) attempted to draft the memoirs of President Ulysses S. Grant (Donald Moffat) is overstuffed. But nobody can make that quite as endurable as Guare, as for every scene in the play feels trite or mundane, twice as many are healthy reminders of what an accomplished storyteller the man can be.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Few Stout Individuals, A
Signature Theater Company at Peter Norton Space

I generally love John Guare's writing for both stage and film, but you can't win `em all. A Few Stout Individuals, his new take on a dying, debt-ridden Ulysses S. Grant and the question of who will write his memoirs, starts with a stiff opening with nothing happening and then dives into repetitious banter and haranguing, much by an acerbic Mark Twain, which is painful to watch.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Into the Woods
Broadhurst Theater

Any Sondheim musical with as much to offer as Into the Woods must be approached with a certain degree of gratitude and reverence, even when the full experience falls short of our high expectations. In Woods, Sondheim and librettist James Lapine are working on a level, musically and intellectually, higher than most of us can grasp, and when they hit the mark - either thematically with the piece's meditations on loss and the bonds between two people, or musically with such songs as "No One is Alone" and the delightful "Agony" -- the results are transporting.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Into The Woods
Broadhurst Theater

Stephen Sondheim's deconstruction of fairy tales in Into the Woods is both an intellectual and a theatrical experience. He's a unique wordsmith, and a quirky, zany, subtle, tunesmith. The fun in Act One is his cleverness in retelling the familiar tales. The fun in Act Two is his dark but theatrical take of the aftermath of "Lived happily ever after." With the flawless casting of John McMartin, Laura Benanti, Kerry O'Malley, Molly Ephraim, Gregg Edelman, and the entire rest of the ensemble, playing in Douglas W.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Godfadda Workout, The
American Place Theater

The Godfadda Workout brings a new star performer to New York. Okay, he's 43 and has been a performer for many years, but he's new to us. Seth Isler is an actor, comedian and impressionist, flexible in body and character, with great charm and athleticism.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Man Who Had All The Luck, The
American Airlines Theater

In his very first play, Arthur Miller gave himself a problem he couldn't quite write his way out of: can you make heavy drama out of something that doesn't happen, near tragedy out of the mere fear of tragedy? He gave it a game try, though, creating a character who, blessed with constant good luck, develops a neurotic dread of the misfortune that has to be just around the corner. It's a workable conceit, but David Beeves' reactions are so extreme, the piece stops being a universal drama and turns into a less convincing, less interesting look at aberrant pathology.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Man Who Had All The Luck, The
American Airlines Theater

Arthur Miller's first play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, written when he was twenty-five, truly shows the promise of the great writer he became. We see the seeds of his marvelous Death of a Salesman in a failing father who has false ambitions for one of his two sons. The conflicts are more blatant, but the power was there in this play, full of drama, anguish, even some humor and melodrama. And what an interesting problem: what goes on inside a man who is lucky in all of his endeavors? How does that affect him and those around him?

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Metamorphoses
Circle in the Square

It's been apparent since her highly-stylized and acrobatic work in Chicago that director Mary Zimmerman has a unique and captivating theatrical sense. What she's now refined, judging from her current Metamorphoses, is a sense of cohesion and purpose to her storytelling. Not only do we get pretty and witty stage pictures to look at, but this retelling of Ovid's myths has a children's-theater simplicity, and the evening, using interconnected themes and stories, builds to not one but two touching finales.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Morning's at Seven
Belasco Theater

Tired of the relentlessly pointless plays littering the season and yearning for the deep contentment one gets from a gentle and satisfying human comedy? Look no further than Paul Osborne's 1939 charmer, Morning's at Seven, which was rediscovered two decades ago and, thankfully, re-rediscovered again, courtesy of director Daniel Sullivan and a nifty cast of old pros, most notably William Biff McGuire, Elizabeth Franz, Estelle Parsons and Buck Henry.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Mystery of Charles Dickens, The
Belasco Theater

IIn the Broadway one-man show, The Mystery of Charles Dickens, starring Simon Callow, we see a 19th-Century man portrayed in 19th-Century grand-ham performance style, when there was no amplification in theaters, and one must above all be heard, mustn't one. The show, for the most part poorly written by Peter Ackroyd, begins with rather boring exposition about Dickens' early life. As it continues, Callow, at least in this show, proves to be basically a voice actor with unused physical capability.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Private Lives
Richard Rodgers Theater

At times, Howard Davies' staging of Noel Coward's classic comedy feels like it's going to be the Private Lives. Lindsay Duncan, with her effortless glamour, smashing smile and insouciant delivery, could not be bettered as Amanda; while, apart from a couple of unnecessary winks to the audience, Alan Rickman casually underplays ex-husband Elyot. (He's so laid back, in fact, that he occasionally fails to project.) Adam Godley convinces as Amanda's stuffed-shirt new hubby; Emma Fielding makes a lively, wacky Sibyl.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Private Lives
Richard Rodgers Theater

Good theater doesn't get much better than Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan in Noel Coward's Private Lives. As directed by Howard Davies, the actors emphasize and embellish the human side of the brisk brittle characters we usually see in this play. Flip dialogue is not enough for these masters of comic timing; they also dig into the underlying conflicts of these smart, wealthy wastrels as their relationship survives through conflict. Act One is one of the funniest ever written.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
And Then They Came For Me
Dallas Children's Theater

When playwright James Still read Eva Geiringer Schloss' book, "Eva's Story: A Survivor's Tale," about her experiences during the Holocaust, he was moved to construct a play from its contents.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Blue Surge
Public Theater

I'm not one of the several theater critics quick to hail Rebecca Gilman as the playwright du jour and savior for the social-consciousness play. Her previous efforts, which include Spinning Into Butter and the male-stalker effort, Boy Gets Girl, intrigue with their initial tautness and tease of entering darker territory, but Gilman always makes the plays safer and more accommodating than they should be. It's almost as if a committee dictated their end results, because what begins as jolting drama ends up as flat tract.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Blue Surge
Public Theater

Blue Surge is a rare bird: a first-rate, working-class drama. It's a hot, very funny, contemporary comedy, perfectly cast: Rachel Miner, Joe Murphy, Colleen Werthmann, Steve Key, Amy Landecker are directed with energy and great timing by Robert Falls. The show's well designed by Walt Spangler, costumed by Birgit Rattenborg Wise and lit by Michael Philippi. The people are proletarians: cops, hookers, the uneducated working class (except for a middle-class girlfriend of one of the cops as a contrast in aspirations).

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Cloud Nine
Diversionary Theater

Cloud 9: Act I: 1880, Plantation in Africa. The height of British imperialism.  Act II: 1980, London. While taking place 100 years later, three continuing characters age a mere 25 years. While technology has taken quantum leaps, human social progress has barely moved. Confused yet?

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Cocktail Party, The
Patio Playhouse

Patio Playhouse's current production, T. S. Eliot's Tony-winning play, The Cocktail Party, staged by Richard Gant, opens closes with a cocktail party.  In between, the play ponderously explores relationships, morality, and bad cooking. Why is the hostess missing? What is her husband's relationship with one of the guests? Who is the stranger at the party? Who is deceiving whom?

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Compleat Female Stage Beauty
Globe Theater

It's the 1660s, and Charles II (Tom Hewitt) has opened the theaters after two decades of Puritanism. Further, he's decreed that women shall play the female roles, and males may no longer do so. Edward Kynaston (Robert Petkoff), the leading man in the field, revolts, now out of work and out of favor.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Cooking With Gus
Theater Works

Do you like TV comedies a la Lucille Ball? If so, and you don't mind one transposed to the stage (but dealing with a TV show), you're going to toast this marshmallow. Successful published cook Gussie loves and lives with Walter yet puts off marriage while her dream of having a televised cooking show keeps eluding her. When the big opportunity arrives, she faints from camera fright.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Dazzle, The
Gramercy Theater

A few years before R. Crumb's siblings and the Lidz uncles, the Collyer Brothers, real-life "Hermits of Harlem," slowly declined from high society into ostracized seclusion. They were ultimately found, long-dead, by police who discovered the two bodies walled in by eccentric inventions and bundles of newspapers. Richard Greenberg, who is becoming a formidable dramatist, didn't let himself be bound by the truth when turning the Collyer story into The Dazzle, which gives one brother some traits of the other and disregards chunks of real biography.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Everybody Loves Opal
Coronado Playhouse

The Coronado Playhouse is currently running John Patrick's Everybody Loves Opal under the direction of Keith A. Anderson. Opal Kronkie lives on the edge of a dump in a Midwestern city. She is a third-generation owner and a third-generation collector of miscellaneous refuse of others. Set designer Rosemary King utilizes Coronado Playhouse's large deep stage to the maximum. The set includes stairs and ramp to an upstairs and a hidden exit to the basement, as well as the house entrance.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Elephant Man, The
Royale Theater

The elements are all there for a touching, provocative evening of theater as the sad life of grotesquely deformed John Merrick, "The Elephant Man," is recounted in Bernard Pomerance's famous play. What unfolds at the Royale Theater, however, is a clunky, remote affair, with five Brechtian touches for every two that actually work.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Fortune's Fool
Music Box Theater

In the case of drunks, most people prefer to keep a safe distance. But the one on marvelous display in Mike Poulton's adaptation of Ivan Turgenev's 150-year-old, 19th-century play is a drunk of the highest order. Playing a rumpled, shabby Russian hanger-on named Vassily Semyonitch, Alan Bates gives a towering portrayal of a man whose world has crumbled on him, and in Fortune's Fool's penultimate scene, Bates performs an extended drunk bit that impresses by how un-technical Bates plays it.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Fortune's Fool
Music Box Theater

A play the way they used to make `em, albeit 150 years ago in Russia. In classic theatrical fashion, nothing actually happens -- nothing, that is, except secrets revealed, emotions roiled, foundations shaken and compromises made. Alan Bates, as an impoverished member of the household who pays his rent by occasionally allowing himself to be humiliated, bumbles and apologizes, abases himself and then rises to dignity, and, in a memorable turn, fashions a drunken remembrance into a comedic aria.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Fortune's Fool
Music Box Theater

Fortune's Fool, Turgenev's mid-nineteenth-century play is more of a valid drama for today than most plays written in the last decade. Its people have deep feelings and deep inner pain and find themselves in a moral dilemma. And how brilliant are two of today's finest actors: the great farceur Frank Langella and the amazing Alan Bates, who gives us long monologues without a moment that isn't fascinating. What a privilege to see a master like Bates play a character who declaims while getting progressively drunker -- it's one of the all-time great drunk scenes.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Heartbreak House
Cabot Theater - Broadway Theater Center

There's a bit of melancholy lurking around the Cabot Theater these days. Yes, some of it comes from Captain Shotover, the bearded curmudgeon who stars in Shaw's Heartbreak House. But much of it comes from this being the final year of the annual Shaw Festival.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
How The Other Half Loves
Poway Performing Arts Company

In comedy, timing is everything. Of course, it also helps to have a brilliantly written script, crisp, properly-paced direction and a cast totally into their roles. PowPAC's production of Alan Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves meets all of this criteria. The script calls for the living areas of two families with action in both areas at the same time. Both areas occupy the same space -- the breadth and depth of PowPAC's stage. James Caputo's set accomplishes absolute separation of living spaces, as realized by Rosemary King's excellent crafting of the walls.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
Scripps Ranch - Legler Benbough Theater

$ucce$$!

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Graduate, The
Plymouth Theater

Okay, regarding what all you've heard about The Graduate: it's only half-true. Yes, Kathleen Turner bares all. Yes, the show often bastardizes Mike Nichols' benchmark counterculture motion picture. And yes, the cast is wildly uneven and, in one case, downright awful. But it seems to me the shuddering cold response by critics operates on a decidedly pro-American bias, almost as if to say, "How on earth could this be a hit in (gasp!) London!" (Let's also not forget that many American productions are now heading there, not vice versa lately).

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Graduate, The
Plymouth Theater

Though not the disaster most critics have tagged it, this is still a curious production, one that retains some of the classic film's humor but feels utterly divorced from context or meaning, despite the between-scene snippets of `60s pop.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Graduate, The
Plymouth Theater

The Graduate is a hoot. Kathleen Turner's star turn is in the best Bankhead mode, and her impeccable timing brings a heartfelt laugh to every punchline in this fun-from-start-to-finish comedy. We know what's going to happen in this tale of seduction and first love, and this play's success is all in the telling. Adapted and directed by Terry Johnson, with a brilliant sense of what real comedy is, and long knowledge of whom to cast in the leads, the show totally succeeds.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Four
Manhattan Theater Club - Stage II

The generally high-level Manhattan Theater Club has a show called Four, by the very inept (for much of the show, we're listening to one half of a telephone conversation) Christopher Shinn, whose forebear was undoubtedly the bumbling Mayor Shinn in Music Man. Much of the dialogue rings false in this story of two interactions: a teenage gay white boy and a fifty-or-so-year-old black man who likes boys, and the man's lovely, bright daughter and her illiterate, basketball-playing young lover.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Mystery of Charles Dickens, The
Belasco Theater

He's the college English professor you wished you had - the one who transforms the life and works of an author into a lecture as entertaining as it is educational. Grandly hammy Simon Callow narrates and plays Charles Dickens, a bunch of Dickens' most colorful characters, and Dickens playing those characters. He justifies his over-the-topness by reminding us that this is probably how Dickens played Micawber, Gamp and Heep when he embarked on the reading tours that thrilled but ultimately killed him.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002

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