Beowulf
Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts

When Benjamin Bagby is on stage, he tells a story nearly everyone knows, in a language no one understands - and the audience is mesmerized. His performance of Beowulf, in Old English, is creative, disciplined, entertaining, inspiring... in short, theater of the first magnitude. Bagby exploits the entire range of vocal sound, form, and technique: he growls, yells, sings, whispers, chants, as required. Through a thorough education to the oral tradition and a meticulous analysis of the text, he animates each phrase with commitment to his specific aesthetic decision.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
January 2001
42nd Street
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

As the ur-backstage musical, ironically first "staged" on screen, 42nd Street is famous for its story of the small-town girl who steps out of the chorus of a show opening on Broadway, replaces the incapacitated leading lady. and becomes a star. With her last-minute triumph, she restores her director to fame, keeps cast and crew from falling out of work in hard times, and finds off-stage romance with her on-stage partner. It's all with the blessings of the last star, who hooks up with a romantic offstage co-star of her own.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2001
Cabaret
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

From the opening strains of the knockout opening number, which bids the audience "Wilkommen" in several languages, Cabaret is marvelously successful in transporting audiences to a different world. It is 1929, and the world is that of Weimar Germany, in the days when the Third Reich was coming to power. John Kander and Fred Ebb's magical score allows us to effortlessly slip into the past, when good times were as close as the neighborhood nightclub.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2001
Captain's Tiger, The
Off Broadway Theater

The following statement may be taken as a criticism, although it's not meant that way. Athol Fugard's most recent play, The Captain's Tiger, is not an emotional blockbuster. It is a finely crafted piece of work that casts a hypnotic spell over the audience.  A cascade of words falls soothingly over the ears, much like the sounds of gently lapping waves. Captain's Tiger is a nautical tale that tells of the author's early days on a steamship. The author is only 20 and very unsure of himself.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2001
Constant Star
Actors Theater of Louisville

I was put on this earth to agitate, writer/director Tazewell Thompson has Ida B. Wells proclaiming in Constant Star, his absorbing play about the fiery, uncompromising journalist, lecturer, teacher and anti-lynching crusader for civil rights and women's suffrage. áUntil recent years, the life and work of this Mississippi-born daughter of slaves was largely missing from history books. One reason may have been because Wells irritated members of her own race who believed men, not women, should lead the civil rights battles.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
January 2001
Death By Chocolate
Derby Dinner Playhouse

Death By Chocolate, Derby Dinner Playhouse's dumbed-down current offering, recalls those simple-minded corny senior plays that small town and rural high schools used to do. Surely they are choosing better things these days. This comedy/mystery, set on the eve of the reopening of a posh health resort in Pennsylvania's Poconos Mountains following the supposed suicide of its previous owner, is loud, frantic, and agonizingly unfunny as it hammers home every cliche of the genre.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
January 2001
Dream Of Doors, The: A Musical Celebration!
Players of Sarasota

The titled portals of The Dream Of Doors are metaphorical. They represent entrances to jobs, restaurants, neighborhoods in which to live, schools, even means of transportation, doors that were closed, mainly to African Americans, before and during their struggle for Civil Rights. Representative black people advance arguments for breaking the doors down violently vs. accepting limited entry or access vs. demanding forcefully but nonviolently that the doors open. The dream refers to community elder Ms.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2001
Glimmer, Glimmer And Shine
Mark Taper Forum

Warren Leight, author of the successful Side Man, returns to the jazz world in his new play, which depicts the age-old war between artistic and bourgeois values. Martin and Daniel are twin brothers who once teamed up with Edddie Shine to form a hot horn section in a popular 50s swing band. The play opens up forty years later, when time and fate have conspired to shatter the bonds that knit these men together.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2001
Art
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Patty & Jay Baker Theater Complex

When it comes to fashion, food trends or theater, Milwaukeeans have learned to be patient.  It can take months - even years - before the latest hit migrates to the Midwest.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
December 2000
Belle Of Amherst, The
Playhouse Theater

The Belle Of Amherst is worth seeing under any circumstance, and especially so when we attended on the 75th birthday of its star, Julie Harris.  Miss Harris won a Tony Award for this portrayal 24 years ago -- her unprecedented fifth Tony as Best Actress -- and she told us yesterday that this tour will be the last times she'll do the role.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
December 2000
Blue Bird, The
F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater

It's a brave director that takes on the rarely-produced (since its Moscow premier in 1908) Maeterlinck fantasy, The Blue Bird and comes away from the challenge unscathed. Unfortunately, Bonnie J. Monte, artistic director of the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, doesn't escape the curse. No matter that she states in the program that the play is close to her heart, the result of her efforts is a deadly dull and ponderous consideration of a very strange and remote children's adventure tale.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
December 2000
By Mercer
Florida Studio Theater Cabaret Club

Johnny Mercer wrote at least 1,000 song lyrics and music for some more. What a task to represent his accomplishments in a brief revue! Maybe that's why there's so little spoken about him or them; his words, after all, are the important things.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2000
Christmas Carol, A
Goodman Theater

When Henry Godinez assumed directorial responsibilities for the Goodman's annual production of A Christmas Carol in 1997, a fable in danger of eroding into complacency had its philanthropic imperative restored with an immediacy as vivid as a George Cruikshank engraving.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2000
Christmas Carol, A
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Pabst Theater

One of America's favorite holiday traditions, A Christmas Carol comes to life each year in Milwaukee's Pabst Theater, a beautifully restored, historic theater in the heart of downtown.  This is the 25th annual production staged by the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.  Traditions are not to be tinkered with, and the Rep has remained faithful to the spirit and the story of Ebenezer Scrooge.  This recent adaptation by the Rep's artistic director, Joseph Hanreddy, is an audience-pleasing triumph that weaves traditional holiday carols into the timeless tale.  Many of the songs

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
December 2000
Christmas Revels, The
Cahn Auditorium

It's not often one hears "Shalom Chaverim" sung in a program purporting to replicate a medieval Christmas Revel in celebration of the winter solstice. But at the Revel on the campus of Evanston's Northwestern University, the Jewish song shares equal time with "Dona Nobis Pacem" under the collective title "Canons Of Peace". Anyway, Sidney Carter's "Lord Of The Dance"' -- set to a traditional Shaker hymn -- leads audiences up the aisles at intermission, so authenticity is no stricter than necessary to give us a feel for our milieu.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2000
Copacabana
Shubert Performing Arts Center

Barry Manilow, the affable singing star who started his career by writing and composing ad jingles, decided to turn his wildly popular, Grammy award-winning song, "Copacabana," into a musical comedy (it is still called Copacabana. Here, Manilow's written the music and collaborated on the book with lyricists Bruce Sussman and Jack Feldman, who wrote the aforementioned song.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
December 2000
Diva on the Verge
Odyssey

You don't have to be an opera-lover to love Julia Migenes' affectionate send-up of the world of opera. It's a world she knows well, having trained as a soprano and sung at such major venues as the Metropolitan, Covent Garden and Vienna Volksoper, where she specialized in the music of Donizetti, Berg, Strauss and Puccini. Migenes (who is married to the film director Peter Medak) would be enjoying an even more successful operatic career if not for her irreverence and rebelliousness.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
December 2000
Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, A
Cabot Theater - Broadway Theater Center

Skylight Opera Theater has enriched Milwaukee's theater scene twice this year, with a landmark production of the rarely performed musical, Floyd Collins, and now with a fresh and lively version of the chestnut, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way To The Forum. The strength of any production of Forum rests on the ability of the leading actor, who portrays Pseudolus the slave. The role was originally created as a star turn for the late Zero Mostel, who led the Broadway cast.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
December 2000
Heaven
Yale Repertory Theater

Heaven, as perceived by a very angry Canadian playwright George F. Walker, in his play of the same name, is hell on earth and visa versa. Or so it seems in his newest work, directed by Evan Yionoulis. The advertisements for this production come with a parental caution advisory; they should come with an adult caution advisory.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
December 2000
Almost Asleep
45th Street Theater

Few topics immediately draw attention in the theater; one is the subject of rape. Similar to the Holocaust in terms of severity, it is an issue that requires sensitivity by the makers but is also one that a viewer seems almost forced to be compelled to. That said, I wish Almost Asleep, the latest play by Julie Hebert (whose Ruby's Bucket Of Blood has become a Showtime feature) gave us something more to be compelled by than its subject.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Alice in Modernland
Sledgehammer Theater

Alice In Modernland is a world premiere by jazz vocalist, saxophonist, writer, and composer, Kirsten Nash. She has combined her love of jazz, blues, and many variations of rock with a contemporary version of the classic tale of one woman's dream/nightmare. Kirsten Brandt, who gave us the award winning Sweet Charity in 1998, has directed an almost-ready-for-Broadway production. But is New York ready for singer Alice's travails into the world of the cross-dressing Queen of Hearts (Christopher Hall), the Duchess (Leigh Scarritt), the Y.D.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Antigone
Vahdat Hall

Dramatic Arts Center Iran had the honor of being the first foreign company to appear at Rome's newly-restored Coliseum this past summer. Their production of Antigone was subsequently restaged for indoor performance at Vahdat Hall in Tehran.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Betrayal
American Airlines Theater

I'm not the world's biggest Harold Pinter fan, which is something I should share straight off.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Black Comedy
Wilma Theater

When Black Comedy begins, the stage is in total darkness, but we hear actors moving about and talking normally, describing objects in a room - chairs, a piece of sculpture and so on -- as if they see them clearly. Suddenly bright stage lights come on, as the characters exclaim: "Oh, a fuse must have blown. I can't see a thing."  This is the brilliant conceit that Peter Shaffer uses in this short comedy from early in his career. It is totally different from his dark, dramatic, best-known plays, Equus and Amadeus, and is a total delight. 

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Bluff
MeX Theater at Kentucky Center for the Arts

The terse, unappealing title Jeffrey Sweet has chosen for his unsettling comedy-drama about mismatched young lovers is appropriately descriptive, both literally and symbolically. The play's resolution stems from a verbal duel in which one character's bold show of confidence causes another to capitulate. Symbolically, the people in Bluff can be seen as teetering on the edge of a precipice. And Gene (Tad Chitwood), the dental supply salesman and detested stepfather of prickly, mixed-up Emily (Carla Witt), is certainly bluff in manner and speech.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts

Alone on stage for what seems like an eternity, talking and undressed, Susan Riley Stevens is such a strident Maggie, no wonder Brick fails to succumb to her charms.  Her sexiness doesn't last as long as the haranguing that diminishes her anguish.  Jay Stratton's Brick is pretty one-note too.  We get no sense of his longing for a relationship that represented purity, although we do finally see his disgust at how it's been torn at or lacking by everyone in his family, Maggie above all.  But neither Stevens or Stratton make us care. 

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Class Act, A
Manhattan Theater Club - Stage II

I never would have predicted it, but it seems the American musical isn't in such a bad state after all.  After the recent triumph of the surprise charmer The Full Monty on Broadway, here we have the belle of them all, A Class Act, which is to mind, the most original and affecting musical since Hedwig And The Angry Inch. There's true magic in it, and I suspect it's because its creators threw away all the stupid notes on how a musical is supposed to manipulate its audience.  More than any show (musical or play) I can recall in recent memory, it has its fin

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Cobb
Lucille Lortel Theater

You don't have to be a baseball fan to cheer for Cobb, Lee Blessing's (A Walk In The Woods) riveting play about the controversial slugger, who became as famous for hitting the ball as he was for hitting anyone who crossed him. Despite Cobb's remark, "I was too real for myth," Blessing has taken into account various legends that have surfaced about this great but petulant, player, who also became baseball's first millionaire, and devised not one but three ways to present him.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Christmas Carol, A
88 Tremont Street

Upon its first publication in 1843, Dickens's A Christmas Carol became an instant hit.  Since then, it has become the most popular and beloved story in English literature.  In the early years of our century, the allegorical novella spawned a dozen silent films.  The advent of sound brought nearly 150 audiovisual versions.  Starting in 1934, it was a family tradition for two decades to listen to Lionel Barrymore portray Ebenezer Scrooge annually on CBS radio.  The work has been turned into countless straight stage adaptations, musicals, parodies, and animated cartoons

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Christmas Schooner, The
Bailiwick Arts Center

The CD of The Christmas Schooner might make the lyrics on the chorus numbers more intelligible, but nothing matches the scope of Bailiwick Rep's thrilling wintry sea-storm, conjured on the Penrods' cinema-sized vessel by a company whose teamwork serves to define ensemble playing, nor the engaging exuberance of its crew rejoicing in their safe arrival on shore.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Compleat Female Stage Beauty
Plays & Players Theater

During the Puritan era, women were barred from appearing on the English stage, and a man named Edward Kynaston became the most popular of all actors playing female roles. He refused to play men because "there's no artistry in that." This play examines what happens when the monarchy is restored and King Charles II orders a reversal. Men are banned from playing Desdemona, Ophelia and Cleopatra, actresses now take over those roles - and we have one seriously unemployed guy. Kynaston faces an identity crisis, in his romantic as well as his stage life.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Deathtrap
Performing Arts Theater of the Handicapped

PATH (Performing Arts Theater of the Handicapped) takes up the challenge of playwright Ira Levin's Deathtrap. They handle the complex mix of comedy and murderous plot twists with aplomb. In Deathtrap, playwright Sydney Bruhl, portrayed by Gary Zupkas, has an epidemic-sized case of writer's block. His last plays have been major bombs. A former student has submitted an excellently-crafted play. His wife, Myra, played by Karen McDaniel-Kopicki, conspires with him to murder the young playwright and steal his work.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Duchess Of Malfi, The
Bailiwick Arts Center

Young artists might find it easy to visualize John Webster's lurid 17th-century thrillers in present-day settings, but the task is not as easy as it first appears. Though our universe is not without its share of sensationalistic horrors in lofty social circles, we have learned a few things since The Duchess Of Malfi and The White Devil exposed the hypocrisy and greed rampant in unsettled times. Three hundred-odd years of enlightenment have instituted measures designed to restrict the abuses of power that fuel Webster's bloody intrigues.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Everybody Loves Opal
Venice Golden Apple Dinner Theater

John Patrick is a Pulitzer-prize winner, though not for this play about a frugal junk-lady whom everybody loves. Nevertheless, Everybody Loves Opal has been popular community and dinner theater fare. I doubt that will be the case with Venice Apple's production, which, much like the three crooks' plot to insure and then kill Opal, needs to have a fire lit under it. When a gag works, like Opal making tea from recycled bags hanging on a line, it gets repeated ad nauseum.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Doll
P.S. 122

Writer Erik Jackson and director Joshua Rosenzweig were onto something with this one (the program indicates it was "freely adapted from Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House). For anyone who had to read Ibsen's play in high school or college or whatever, it is evident that this work begs for someone to camp it up. It has everything: the put-upon, suffering housewife waiting for feminism to be invented, and her ungrateful husband who mentally takes advantage of her, all wrapped up in a highly dramatic vacuum of high drama.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Full Monty, The
Eugene O'Neill Theater

Better shows may be playing around New York right now, but I can't think of one I have more unfettered affection for than The Full Monty, the just-opened musical that manages to improve upon the charming 1997 British film on which it's based. The show is rough around the edges, and there's scant evidence of its reported $7 million budget (sets are effective, but chintzy), but every minute the show wants nothing more than to entertain you and give you a rollicking good time.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Golden Boy
Long Wharf Theater

Golden Boy began life as a drama, written by Clifford Odets for the Group Theater in the 1930s. It espoused a sense of gritty realism, which matched the philosophy of this new dynamic group. Made into a film with William Holden (making his debut) and Barbara Stanwyck in 1939, Golden Boy was rewritten as a musical in the 1960s, with a book by Odets, music by Charles Strouse and lyrics by Lee Adams, as a specific vehicle for Sammy Davis, Jr., who was already a star. Just before the first rehearsal, Odets died.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Gumboots
Wilshire Theater

History begins as tragedy, ends as farce - or, in the case of Gumboots, showbiz. The origin of Gumboots goes back to colonialist days in South Africa, when blacks were thrust down into the bowels of the earth to dig out gold for their white masters, a typically brutal bunch of capitalists who treated them like slaves, condemning them to work in darkness while shackled to each other. On top of that, the workers were forbidden to speak to each other; forcing them to communicate by rattling their chains, whacking their boots and grunting musically.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Guys On Ice
Milwaukee Rep - Stiemke Theater

Oh, if only Wisconsin winters were as quick and enjoyable as Guys on Ice, a send-up of ice fishing currently playing at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. A favorite of the past two seasons, Guys on Ice returns with the same endearing cornpone humor that audiences have grown to love. There's Marvin (Doug Mancheski) and Lloyd (Scott Wakefield), losers in life (perhaps represented by the fact they never seem to get a nibble during the entire show). But they are kings of their fish shanty domain, telling tales, sharing secrets and dreams.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change
Florida Studio Theater Mainstage

Reportedly, this pleasant but innocuous compilation of skits and musical numbers is tops among nonprofit shows nationwide this season. A company of four portray twosomes, with the unifying theme being heterosexual(!) relationships from dating through marriage to geriatric widowhood.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2000

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