Forever Plaid
Vogel Hall at Marcus Center For The Performing Arts

Few theater lovers have gotten this far into the 1990s without coming across Forever Plaid, a send-up of 1950s male vocal groups. The Plaids, as most everyone knows by now, are four geeky guys who met in their high school audio-visual club and formed a band. Just as their career was starting to take off, the guys were killed in a car accident. Somehow, they have been returned to earth just long enough to complete the concert they would have played that night. An outlandish premise? Of course.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 1999
Haunting Of Hill House, The
Rudyard Kipling

There's nothing more theatrically appropriate for the Halloween season than an old-fashioned, scary mystery. Alas, The Haunting of Hill House does not meet the test. Shirley Jackson's novel of the same name is considered a masterpiece of psychological horror. But as adapted for the stage by F. Andrew Leslie, there's little sense of mounting terror or sinister foreboding.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
October 1999
Hedwig And The Angry Inch
Henry Fonda Theater

Thanks to a spellbinding performance by Michael Cerveris in the title role and to its equally dynamic music and lyrics, this rock-opera about the trials and tribulations of a transvestite diva from East Berlin lives up to the rave reviews it got back in New York. By turns satirical, campy, outrageous, bawdy, tender and moving, the show has a freshness and originality to match its in-your-face challenge to puritanical notions of sexuality and love.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 1999
Homework
Crossroads Theater Company

TV standout Kim Coles ("Living Single") opened the Crossroads season with a comedy she co-wrote with Charles Randolph-Wright about three childhood girlfriends (all played by Ms. Coles) from Brooklyn. There is the beautiful Jamaican immigrant Angela, the intelligent and sassy Shakronda, and the sweet and naive Kimme. Ms. Coles' play follows the young girls through grade school, high school, college and their respective careers. It is a heartwarming story in which one finds fame, another success and the third finds herself. Ms.

Donald Collester
Date Reviewed:
October 1999
Fully Committed
Vineyard Theater

One of the delightful surprises of the fall season, Fully Committed, is a shining example of economical theater. The gifted Mark Setlock, playing over 30 speaking roles all by himself, and the wonderful director Nicholas Martin (Betty's Summer Vacation) create an identifiable tale of an actor-hopeful in his stress-inducing job as a receptionist at a posh Manhattan restaurant. Left to his own devices, Sam must man the phone lines all by his lonesome while a flighty co-worker is off doing something vague.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
October 1999
Greenland Y2K
HERE - Dorothy B. Williams Theater

To ring in the new millennium at the North Pole is the ambitious goal of an intrepid explorer (Susanna Speier as the Explornographer), but her determination is outflanked by a pesky Y2K Bug (Ian McCulloch). The Bug must be placated at all costs or the electronic tools in Speier's survival kit will go kaput one by one. A tricky negotiation ensues, with each vying for the upper hand. Their complex and ultimately perverse relationship exacts a physical toll on the weary, white-clad Speier.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
October 1999
Henry V
Mazer Theater

A king that can do no wrong is favored with a stunning victory at Agincourt over French forces against impossible odds: The Life of King Henry the Fifth becomes Shakespeare's paean to the British monarchy. Director Laurie Wessely further focuses this production on the protagonist (played by Brad Raider) with judicious cuts to the text, enabling the actors to add generous space around their lines to ensure clarity, yet keep the running time under three hours.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
October 1999
Saturday Night Fever
Broadway Theater

There is no inoculation for Saturday Night Fever. The only thing that can alleviate the burning desire to return to the disco scene of the '70s, or cure those who still get the shakes thinking of the undulating John Travolta is to either rent the movie or go to the Broadway show. Setting the scene for that "Disco Inferno" called "2001" was apparently easy.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 1999
Side Man
John Golden Theater

I'm happy to report that revisiting Side Man is a pleasant experience, still impressive in its intimacy and elegance, supported by the estimable direction by Michael Mayer. The cast has changed a little, but the finely-tuned ensemble is still very strong. This is a great night on Broadway, grown-up theater for people who admire plays and the power they can have.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
October 1999
Alison's House
Mint Theater

This turns out to be the first revival for Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Alison's House since its original Broadway production that included Eva Le Gallienne. A new trove of Emily Dickinson's poetry had just come out in 1929; and in response, author Susan Glaspell created this fantasy (with all names and places changed) about love's many expressions.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
A...My Name Will Always Be Alice
Oregon Cabaret Theater

As presented by Oregon Cabaret Theater, A... My Name Will Always Be Alice earns an A-plus. A five-woman ensemble present more than two hours of on-point, sharp edged vignettes of civilization and its discontents, on the feminine side. The journey goes from childhood to old age, from the home to the office, from put-downs in kindergarten to send-ups in the art gallery. Together and individually the cast is excellent. The show, a themed musical revue about relationships, is laced with sketches and monologues; a mix of stops-out laughs and barely-contained tears.

Al Reiss
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Always...Patsy Cline
Downtown Cabaret Theater

The Downtown Cabaret bring a variety of shows to their stage, many of which are the tried and true musical comedy standards, others are distinctly off-beat. Always...Patsy Cline is certainly a departure, for instead of a cast of many, this true story of a famous country singer uses only two women, albeit backed by a six-piece orchestra.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Bang Bang You're Dead
Kentucky Center For The Arts

William Mastrosimone's 40-minute play, Bang Bang You're Dead, is a powerful response to the wave of school killings that have erupted in recent times.  Mastrosimone wrote the piece for teenagers to perform.  To make it widely accessible, he takes no royalties and specifies that no admission fees may be charged.  The play can also be read and downloaded free from the Internet at www.bangbangyouredead.com.  Walden Theater's teenage actors, in what is believed to be the play's first Kentucky production, opened their season

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Camino Real
Hartford Stage Company

Tennessee Williams is best known and loved for his plays steeped in realism, seething with sexual overtones like A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Rose Tattoo. The Hartford Stage is presenting on a multi-level set, a ferocious, feverish party, a swirling crimson-drenched Camino Real, which, although rooted in historical allusion, is far more phantasmagorical and abstract than any of Williams' other seventy plays. It was not well-received when it opened on Broadway in 1953.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Countess, The
Samuel Beckett Theater

[Reviewed at Greenwich Street Theater]

Maya Amis
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Countess, The
Samuel Beckett Theater

The Countess tells of a scandal in Victorian London society: a love triangle involving noted art critic John Ruskin, his beautiful wife Effie and his friend and protege, the preRaphaelite painter John Everett Millais. As the result of a four-month holiday spent by the trio in the Scottish highlands their lives are changed irreversibly. An affair blossoms between Effie and Millais, and with good reason, as the audience later is to learn. The secret the Ruskins hid, not disclosed until the final scene, is truly shocking, and more than justifies Effie's infidelity.

Diana Barth
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Countess, The
Samuel Beckett Theater

At last -- a show in New York that didn't try to blast me out of my seat, shock me out of my skin or dazzle me out of my wits. So many recent productions have been gussying up inanity by pitching it at shouting-match volume, I'd begun to wonder if I'd ever have to LISTEN to a play again. After all, who can contemplate the ocean when lifeguards are holding your head under water?

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Chorus Line, A
Drury Lane - Evergreen Park

Marc Robin must somehow be related to Croesus, because whatever production he touches (whether to direct, choreograph or both) turns to gold.  He makes what could be a dated production of A Chorus Lineshine like new, its now-tarnished plot a freshly polished, and very moving, jewel.  He's assembled a talented cast that make the premise -- each individual Broadway gypsy is singular with a telling life story -- believable. 

Effie Mihopoulos
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Cry From The City Of Virgins, A
Japan Society

Even though there seem to be many outward differences, experimental theater in Japan coming out of the turbulent 1960s had a trajectory similar to that in the West. "Underground" playwright Juro Kara's seminal Cry of Virgins, in 1969, capped a decade of ferment in society and the arts. Here presented in its US premiere, this drama cum musical has passed through several revisions, the latest in 1993 for the Shinjuku Ryozanpaku Theater Company, which made its American debut with these performances at Japan Society.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Dead Monkey, The
Woolly Mammoth Theater

How the fur flies in Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company's reprise of Nick Darke's The Dead Monkey. Belligerent, lumbering Hank (David Marks) and wiry, talkative Dolores (Sarah Marshall) live in an idyllic California beach shack, envisioned by English playwright Darke years before he visited America in 1989 to attend the American premiere at Woolly Mammoth.

Barbara Gross
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Enter The Guardsman
New Jersey Shakespeare Festival - F.M. Kirby Theater

There is no denying the excitement and anticipation in the air at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival for the opening of Enter The Guardsman. New York paparazzi and major Broadway producers could be readily spotted among the usual shower of stars and friends of stars.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Fool For Love
McCarter Theater

To open her tenth season as artistic director of McCarter Theater, Emily Mann is directing Fool for Love by Sam Shepard, one of America's most forceful and intensely motivated writers. Whether or not it is Mann's wish to help us search out the metaphors, discover the symbolism, or consider the social implications in this vicious, yet no longer shocking, 16-year-old play, we may also choose to simply sit back and wallow in the mind-bending / body-battering material.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Footloose
Marcus Center For The Performing Arts

While Footloose is still kicking up its heels on Broadway, a touring version visited Milwaukee for a one-week run. It's easy to see why the show has taken a critical drubbing in New York; it has so many flaws it's almost cruel to name them all. A top-flight cast could have erased many of the show's weaker moments but, alas, this is a lopsided group. The "adults," mostly mothers and fathers of the high school kids who populate most of the show's cast, are polished professionals.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Full Gallop
Renaissance Theaterworks

Full Gallop is a fitting description for the life of the late fashion arbiter Diana Vreeland. From this one-woman show, one gets a full-blown picture of this sassy, opinionated woman who lived at full tilt and whose temperament was often as outrageous as haute couture. Diana spent most of her professional life as fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar and editor of Vogue. However, she is probably best remembered as a consultant for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Glass Menagerie, The
Rudyard Kipling

For its 55th anniversary, The Glass Menagerie is being offered by two different local companies. In February, the play will be done by the Louisville Repertory Company, but first out of the starting gate is the Roundtable Theater at the Rudyard Kipling in an earnest, workmanlike production that occasionally catches fire. Peter Howard's strong performance as Tom -- more angry young man than wistful dreamer -- shifts the balance of Tennessee Williams' play to him rather than to his clinging, bossy mother Amanda, who usually carries the show.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Groucho: A Life In Review
Westport Country Playhouse

Frank Ferrante has been impersonating Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx for well over 10 years, and not getting arrested for doing so. In fact, he's won many awards for his inspired and edgy recreation of that crusty vaudevillian, here in the U.S. and in London, and in 1995 issued a compact disk of this play, written by Groucho's son, Arthur and Robert Fisher.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Finnegan's Farewell
St. Luke's Church

A somber crowd files into the basement of St. Luke's Church, facing the stage which contains six chairs, a pulpit, a large papier mache three-leaf clover on a stand. A priest quietly approaches several in the audience, chatting about the deceased, Paddy Finnegan. It seems that Paddy had been painting the kitchen ceiling, and fell to his death, at age 62. Also approaching viewers is Brian, Paddy's youngest son, in his fireman's uniform. We express our condolences. It's remarkable how quickly audience members embrace the situation.

Diana Barth
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Freak Of Nature, The
Greenwich Village Center

It is sometimes difficult to imagine how fresh these short plays must have seemed to Luigi Pirandello's contemporaries. Surprise and even shock cap a brisk spin through dangerous mental terrain leaving audiences intrigued. Director Slava Stepnov joined three one-acters using the author's own statements about his art, delivered engagingly by Leonardo Torres Vilar.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Kat And The Kings
Cort Theater

I wonder which is more disappointing, a musical that stays blah from beginning to end, or one that catches fire early on but later finks out on its promise of glory. In the latter instance, certainly we're grateful for the sequences that ignite; after all, even legendary musicals have their moments of time killing and less-than-inspired music making. On the other hand, knowing what could have been and then watching the authors settle for an easy pander can be particularly grating.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Idea Of North, The
HERE

A little-known side of the reclusive Canadian pianist Glen Gould is his series of radio documentaries, "Solitude Trilogy," for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the 1960s. Michael John Carley has transformed Gould's first installment, The Idea of North, about the experiences of five people in Canada's northernmost reaches, into a captivating stage piece.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Big Top Machine
Collective Unconscious

Garnering a well-deserved award for Overall Excellence - Solo Show, this tour-de-force by Kevin Augustine was a frequent sell out at the New York International Fringe Festival. Augustine is an inspired creator and performer who moves easily from text to mime to bunraku-style puppetry (with the aid puppetry assistants Josh Cohen and Anna Kramer in black from head to toe). Big Top Machine captures some of the less glamorous aspects of the traditional circus.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Beauty Queen Of Leenane, The
Steppenwolf Theater

In Mag and Maureen Folan, the protagonists of The Beauty Queen Of Leenane, Martin McDonagh has created what may be the most unpleasant mother and daughter since A Taste Of Honey. These two harridans languish in a Sam-Shepard-With-Brogues family dynamic characterized by a torpid malaise whose only amusement is derived from annoying one another.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Beneath The Necessity Of Talking
National Black Theater Festival

After intermission at Divas of Performance, the high priestess of the choreopoem came with fresh gifts for her true believers -- and with a ceremonial pretension worthy of her high ministry.  Two divine dancers, Mickey Davidson and Imaniye Payne, added sublime movement to her words.  With scant new poetic material, the ethereal choreography was needed to stretch Shange's latest to a full 30 minutes.  Large patches of Spanish, French, and lists of historical figures deepened the mystery but not the meaning of all we saw in Beneath The Necessity of Talking.  Ntozake Sha

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Cabaret
Warner Theater

Outside the Warner Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue, ticket holders wilted in the August heat, waiting for the doors to open. But once inside the theater, where Cabaret has finally arrived after a two-week hold-over in Chicago, "everything (was) beautiful." Or the seedy equivalent. The meticulous road show production is decadent, naughty, and, oh, so much fun. Originally constructed in 1924, the sumptuously refurbished Warner Theater is the ideal setting for the pre-World War II German Kit Kat Klub, designed by Robert Brill.

Barbara Gross
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Camping With Henry And Tom
Horse Cave Theater

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine sent fairy-tale characters "into the woods" in their stylish musical of that name. Playwright Mark St. Germain used real-life people from history to do the same in his Camping with Henry and Tom with results alternately humorous, poignant, and thought-provoking. Based on an actual Maryland camping trip taken by President Warren G. Harding, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison in 1921, St.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Can-Can
Chanhassen Dinner Theater

Although it is generally thought of as one of Cole Porter's weaker efforts, 1953's Can-Can show racked up almost 900 performances in its initial Broadway outing. And the bad rep is certainly not owing to Porter's score, which includes such standards as "C'est Magnifique," "Allez-Vous-En," "It's All Right with Me," and "I Love Paris." No, it is the Abe Burrows book that is the heavy in the case.

Michael Sander
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Diary Of Black Men, The
National Black Theater Festival

If this brilliant piece hadn't already been staged Off-Broadway, I'd be saying it needed to be transported there posthaste. The script deals powerfully with a full range of top-shelf issues facing African American men. But first the species is defined -- six different ways by six different men, all of them telling us why he is what black women truly want.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
De La Guarda: Villa Villa
Daryl Roth Theater

When I saw this dazzling show last summer, it was like being in the midst of a rave set during a hurricane. You never knew when the mood would change or what would fly at you next. It was exhilarating to behold, and the Argentinian cast kept things at a feverish pace. Unfortunately, the show has settled into a bit of a groove lately. The cast is now mostly American and lack the balls-out electricity of their predecessors. The feeling now is one of watching the rave outside your back window, at a comfortable distance.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Don't Dress For Dinner
Stage Right Theater

A lot can be lost in the translation when you have an American cast playing a British adaptation of a French farce. The complications in Don't Dress For Dinner are premised on a husband and wife who have both arranged at-home trysts with their respective paramours on the same evening, a mistress whose name is very similar to that of the cateress hired for the occasion, and a set having five doors -- three of them leading to bedrooms -- more discussed than slammed.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Europe
Mary-Arrchie at Angel Island

Since anybody can style himself an expert on any war, David Greig's proposing to tell us about Eastern Europe is probably no more invalid than the generic characters who populate the Irish playwright's flagrantly emotional look at another country's troubles: we have the blustering stationmaster, clinging to the illusion of order his occupation provides. The wise old teacher, patiently waiting for Decency and Good Sense to prevail.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 1999

Pages