Weir, The
online streaming

Five lonely people swap ghost stories in a secluded Irish country pub in Connor McPherson’s touching play, The Weir. This woes of this disheartened quintet are strikingly relevant for the COVID-19 era. They are attempting to make human connection despite the psychological barriers that separate them.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2020
Groups of Ten or More People
online (youtube)

How's this for a story premise: On March 12, 2020, four young Chicago artists decide that since entertainment in the city has been shut down temporarily because of the "pandemic" (whatever that is), they will swear an "accountability pact" to abstain from social media, recreational substances, hookups, and other frivolous distractions to instead focus on creative projects too long postponed, and by doing so, emerge improved when the social whirl resumes in....oh, three weeks, maybe.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2020
Les Blancs
National Theatre - Olivier Theater

During the pandemic, NT Live at Home is providing a means of diversion with archival recorded performances from the National Theater. The latest production, a reworked version of Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs from 2016, is especially relevant as the Black Lives Matter movement dominates the news. Hansberry achieved fame in 1959 with her brilliant A Raisin in the Sun, the first play by an African-American woman on Broadway.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2020
And So We Come Forth
online (youtube)

As the hiatus from live theater continues with no respite in sight until at least 2021, we draw what sustenance we can from Zoom plays, archival broadcasts, benefit readings, and Hamilton on Disney Plus. Richard Nelson’s fictional Apple family is experiencing a similar sense of depravation and loss.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2020
The Golden Girls: The Lost Episodes
online (vimeo)

As the long intermission drags on into its fifth month, home movies and backstage chat are no longer enough for theatergoers craving brand-new written-from-scratch plays to remind them of better days when we really were all in this together—a theme epitomized in “The Golden” Girls, the long-running television comedy from the 1980s celebrating AARP-eligible women living independently and speaking their minds with uncensored candor.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2020
Quarantunes Live
Music Box Theater

Is there musical theater after COVID-19? You betcha! And Houston’s Music Box Theater is prepared to prove it to you. It is my high honor to announce the winner of this year’s award for Cleverest Title of a New Musical. May I have the envelope please? ... [Drum roll]… And the winner is… The Music Box Theater for Quarantunes Live. Better still, the show itself is very clever.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
June 2020
Christmas Bingo: Summer Edition
Royal George Theater

In the southern hemisphere, Christmas arrives in sunny summer, and Saint Nicholas brings children gifts in a boat rather than a sleigh. We learn this and many other holiday factoids—the history of candy canes, say, or how the annunciation would sound if the angel Gabriel were a Hamilton-style rapper—in the course of this irreverent,  but never blasphemous, comedy from the writers of Late Nite Catechism (still running without a break nearly thirty years after its premiere).

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2020
Candida
Online

The Gingold Theatrical Group (GTG), New York, has for years been producing monthly readings of Shaw's plays on stage. In this time of the plague, they're one of the innovative companies adapting to the lock-down by going digital. Starting on May 20th and available online for five days, they presented a reading of Shaw's Candida.

Candida was the fifth of Shaw's plays, written in 1894 and published in 1898 as one of the “Plays Pleasant.” Its first success was in new York in 1903, and a second success followed in London the next year.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
May 2020
Macbeth
online video

While stages are closed nationwide, we will have to settle for filmed past performances from mostly British and Canadian companies such as the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Stratford Festival. The latter two are streaming previous incarnations of wildly different  Macbeths. The Stratford Festival’s unedited version is competent and more conventional, but less viscerally exciting. Visual excitement is caused whenever Ian Lake as Macbeth frequently removes his shirt to expose a brawny torso, but it doesn’t make up for a lack of dramatic tension.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2020
Macbeth
online streaming

While stages are closed nationwide, we will have to settle for filmed past performances from mostly British and Canadian companies such as the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Stratford Festival. The latter two are streaming previous incarnations of wildly different  Macbeths. Shakespeare’s Globe’s version of the Scottish Play is a pared-down 90-minute edition for high-school students.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2020
In-Zoom
online streaming

“We’re heads now. We talk in windows,” cries one of two nameless characters in Bill Irwin’s touching, ten-minute play In-Zoom, presented by the Old Globe Theater of San Diego. The cry of frustration sums up our current lockdown status. This short two-hander addresses our lack of connection and the attempt to reach each other, literally breaking the barrier of cyberspace.

The premise is simplicity itself and like a Samuel Beckett playlet, In-Zoom captures the comic and tragic conundrum of daily life. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2020
Mad Forest
online streaming

While NT Live and other venues have offered archival productions to watch during COVID, a scattering of plays have been adapted to the new normal of digital presentations. Most companies have given readings for benefit fundraisers, but Bard College’s theater department attempted something different with its Zoom-based staging of Caryl Churchill’s 1990, “play from Romania,” Mad Forest. Director Ashley Tata and her student cast had begun rehearsals when the pandemic struck.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2020
Streetcar Named Desire, A
National Theatre -

There is one upside to all the theaters being closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Through streaming, YouTube, Zoom, and other digital platforms, we get a chance to catch up with intriguing productions we may have missed. One such is the Young Vic’s innovative 2014 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, which was shown in cinemas through HD Live and played a limited engagement at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2016 following an extended run in London. NT Live at Home will play the production for free on YouTube through May 28.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2020
To Master the Art
Broadway Playhouse

The spunky six-foot-two, "fluty"-voiced daughter of a staunch Republican from Pasadena, California, may not seem the stuff of heroism—isn't she famous, not for her work with the secret service during WW II, but for her COOKING?—so why is Julia McWilliams Child remembered today even by feminists too young to have seen her anywhere but on television?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2020
Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration

A plethora of Broadway performers came together online to celebrate the 90th birthday of the most influence musical-theater songwriter of his era, Stephen Sondheim. The event, titled Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration, presented by Broadway.com as a fundraiser for ASTEP (Artists Striving to End Poverty), had some technical issues when in premiered on April 26, but it’s now available on YouTube, and it is gorgeous and spectacular yet intimate and casual at the same time.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2020
What Do We Need to Talk About?: The Apple Family
online streaming

With Broadway, Off-Broadway and regional stages closed due to the Coronavirus pandemic, theater artists have adapted to the new normal rather than waiting in limbo for a return to their traditional venues. Playwright Richard Nelson has taken his fictional Apple family into the current world of social distancing and videoconferencing and delivers a poignant and insightful portrait of how we live now.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2020
Pride and Prejudice
online streaming

Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has forced stages in New York City and around the world to close until further notice and much of the world remains in lockdown, many theater companies are offering productions online through various social media platforms. Many of these events are free or available for a limited time. Streaming Musicals recently presented a “virtual opening night” of Paul Gordon’s musical adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel, “Pride and Prejudice,” originally produced at TheaterWorks Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, California in December 2019. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2020
Hamlet
online streaming

Several British companies including the National Theater and Shakespeare’s Globe have been videotaping their productions for consumption in cinemas for some time and are now making their archives available on YouTube. The Globe is currently offering their 2018  Hamlet starring artistic director Michelle Terry in the title role. This is not the first instance of a female Melancholy Dane, the most famous being Sarah Bernhardt, followed decades later by Judith Anderson, Diane Venora, Maxine Peake, and Ruth Negga (recently seen at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse).

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2020
Teenage Dick
Theater Wit

When the orders came for the theaters to close right at the start of the spring season, Theater Wit was the first to forge a contract with Actors Equity for permission to live-stream their production of Michael Lew's inventive dissertation on Shakespeare's  Richard III. while adhering as closely as possible to the communal imperative at the foundation of theater itself.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2020
72 Miles to Go...
Steinberg Center - Laura Pels Theater

In this age of social distancing, it should come as no surprise that the most romantic and moving scene in any show on or off-Broadway—before the theaters were all closed due to the coronavirus outbreak—doesn’t even contain two people onstage. It’s a vignette between a man and a cell phone. There’s nothing voyeuristic or bizarre, but it’s heartbreaking and tear-inducing.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Two Character Play, The
The Athenaeum

The setting of The Two Character Play is a post-bellum mansion in the Deep South surrounded by sunflowers "as tall as the house.” It is presently occupied by an adult brother and sister living in seclusion following the trauma of their astrology-obsessed father killing first, their mother, and then himself. Ever since that fatal night, Clare has become increasingly unnerved by the hostile curiosity of the neighbors, as well as the memories lurking in the silence of empty rooms.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Seventy-Two Miles to Go...

see listing(s) under: 72 Miles to Go...

Inspector Calls, An
Norvell Commons at St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church

Acacia Theater dusts off J.B. Priestley’s 1945 classic, An Inspector Calls, with wonderful results. The production plays in a newly created, black box-type theater in an Episcopal Church.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Taming the Lion
Theater 40 - Reuben Cordova Theater

Poor dramaturgy spoils what might have been a good play. Taming the Lion, now in a world premiere at Theater 40, is based on the true story of William “Billy” Haines, a popular movie star in the 1920s and 30s.  The handsome Billy was openly and defiantly gay, a fact that distressed his boss, Louis B.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
Pershing Square Signature Center - Romulus Linney Courtyard Theater

Surprise of all surprises, the 1969 movie “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” thanks to The New Group and Pershing Square Signature Center, is back in the news again—this time, not as a film but as a play with music. Cleverly directed by Scott Elliott, from a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman, the musical has dialogue and locations nearly identical to those in the film.

Though some fifty years have flown by, I remember seeing Paul Mazursky’s film when it first opened.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Frozen Jr.
Nancy Bock Center

I’m sure I am not alone in recalling the childhood wonder of curling up with a beautifully illustrated book of Grimm’s Fairytales and the like. There was a special enchantment in being transported to magical kingdoms in the far-off lands of our imagination. So it was that last weekend was the perfect opportunity to revisit such mysterious and wondrous places, right on the stage of the Nancy Bock Center for the Performing Arts here in The Woodlands, Texas.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Middle Passage, The
Lifeline Theater

What distinguishes Charles Johnson's approach to Black history from that of the sermons recently churned out by playwriting workshops is that instead of a thesis (or a headline), he starts with a story—not just any story, in this case, but a rip-roaring roller-coaster adventure yarn keeping us so riveted on the progress of the action as to barely notice the massive body of knowledge we are absorbing unawares.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Eclipsed
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse

The saying, “war is hell,” came to mind when witnessing a play that takes place during the 2003 Liberian civil war. Children were recruited as warriors and sent to the front lines of battle. Young women either joined the military or became subjects of the men around them. These women, dragged away from their families and communities, were known as “wives.” They were forced into sex slavery and servitude. That’s pretty grim stuff, even for a war play.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Unsinkable Molly Brown, The
Abrons Arts Center

The new version of Meredith Willson and Richard Morris’s upbeat musical, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, from Transport Group at the Abrons Arts Center, would seem to have little in common with recent Off-Broadway shows about suicide and torture. But it also plays with narrative, in that Dick Scanlan, author of the new book and lyrics, has totally reshaped and offered different perspectives from the 1960 original, which won a Tony for Tammy Grimes and an Oscar nomination for Debbie Reynolds for the 1964 film version.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Cambodian Rock Band
Pershing Square Signature Center

Fractured narratives are featured in two recent Off-Broadway offerings depicting how families of severe trauma victims cope—or don’t—with their personal tragedies. Three generations of suicidal depression play out simultaneously in Alice Birch’s Anatomy of a Suicide, while Laureen Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band, at Signature Theater Company following multiple regional stagings, traces the Khmer Rouge’s brutal legacy on a former rock musician and his daughter.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Anatomy of a Suicide
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

Three generations of suicidal depression play out simultaneously in Alice Birch’s Anatomy of a Suicide at Atlantic Theater Company after a run at London’s Royal Court. The storyline’s fractured narrative twists and turns, sometimes even shatters, occasionally resulting in confusion but mainly inducing the unsettling, disturbing effects of the sources of psychological damage. This is not a comfortable piece of theater, but it is affecting and memorable.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Day of Absence
The Biograph

Circa 1965, Douglas Turner Ward, weary of plays authored by African-Americans dismissed by critics unable to transcend their  cultural myopia, wrote this "reverse minstrel show" based on the precept of mutual dependency articulated in the folk saying "the master is slave to the slave.”

The premise of Day of Absence is simple enough: One day, privileged white citizens awaken to discover their town's non-white citizens missing from their jobs, their homes, even the jails (which are on permanent lockout).

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Sheepdog
Theater Wit

Have you heard the story about the investigation of a white cop who shot a black suspect? Of course you have—just as you've heard the one about the co-workers on the police force who fall in love and embark on a plan to marry. Oh, and let's not forget the one about the woman torn between her own misgivings and her loyalty to her on-and-off-duty partner. How, then, does Kevin Artigue succeed in generating so much empathy, excitement, and introspection from a collection of literary premises explored to exhaustion in recent years?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Lipstick Lobotomy
Trap Door Theater

Home, goes the adage, is where they have to take you in, but if you're an adult female viewed by your kin as a liability to its tribal aspirations, you might find yourself sequestered under the surveillance of gentle-but-firm warders in some remote retreat providing palliative care to the infirm of mind, body or impulse control—sanitariums having supplanted convents as cloistered residences befitting ladies of sheltered upbringing.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Charley's Aunt
St. Bonaventure Oratory

Scholars may attribute the birth of cross-dressing comedy to Plautus and Shakespeare, but the genre as we know it today traces its origins to Brandon Thomas's record-breaking farce (running for 1,466 performances before closing).

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Broadway at the Box
Music Box Theater

It seems that each year at this time I am confronted with the daunting task of trying to summarize the countless delights of the Music Box Theater’s latest creative tribute to Broadway musical theater. This year’s edition, Broadway at the Box 2020, is perhaps even more difficult to capture in words because the vocal prowess and comedic skill displayed during the two hours of numerous clever sketches seems better than ever. For years I have wondered when this talented little troupe would run out of brilliant ideas, but that just hasn’t happened.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Your Arms Too Short to Box with God
WBTT Theater

With parts of Vinnette Carroll’s original script and director Harry Bryce’s experience with her staging of productions after Broadway’s, WBTT lays claim to an area premiere production true to Carroll’s conception of the drama and how it should be presented.  Your Arms Too Short to Box with God is a serious, if a bit repetitive, yet exuberant creation of Jesus’s path from his Beatitudes Sermon and Palm Sunday to Crucifixion to Resurrection through acting, dance, and singing of gospel music.

A standout in the company, Charles Lattimore Jr.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Barks and Purrs
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne's Lab Theater

A dramatic feature of “The Colette Project” being helmed by New College of Sarasota with its Alliances Francaise U.S.A. producers, three performances of Barks and Purrs appear first at New College and then at Florida Studio Theater. The play bespeaks Colette’s comic talent and love of animals. It amuses as three actors imitate two cats and a dog while occasionally becoming the pets’ owner and her male partner.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2020
Confession of Lily Dare, The
Cherry Lane Theater

In or out of drag, whether on stage or page, the 65-year-old actor playwright Charles Busch, with some forty years of show business under his belt, is a force to be reckoned with. His signature calling card is in his allover inventiveness, his humorous tongue-in-cheek playfulness, looking outrageously spectacular in a gown and wig, and most importantly, a straightforward honesty in everything he touches. In short, Busch is entirely believable even when he is not.

Ed Rubin
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Glance, The
Off the Wall Theater

Milwaukee theatergoers looking for something new, thought-provoking, a bit exotic and a bit erotic can do no better than to head to Off the Wall Theater for the world premiere of The Glance. Artistic director Dale Gutzman has done it again – created a show that gives viewers an inside look at the talent and mind of Caravaggio, now considered one of the greatest artists in history.

The play, which is being performed in a minuscule, 40-seat theater, is so engrossing that it does not allow the audience to look away for even a second of its two-hour running time.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2020

Pages