Frankenstein
Wallis Center - Lovelace Studio Theater

Some monsters never die.

Mary Shelley first wrote a novel called Frankenstein (Or the Modern Prometheus) back in 1818, when she was eighteen.  Basically a philosophical novel that was based on the ideas of her famous father, William Godwin, “Frankenstein” took the position that man is a tabula rasa, an unwritten entity shaped by environment.  Doctor Frankenstein, a young student, animates a soulless monster made out of cadavers by means of galvanism. Bad move.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Confessions of Lily Dare, The
Cherry Lane Theater

Charles Busch’s farcical The Confession of Lily Dare, presented by Primary Stages at the Cherry Lane Theater, features a strong female addressing her wrongs with murder. As in his previous satires such as The Lady in Question and Red Scare on Sunset, she is played in drag by the ever-inventive Busch with the aide of Jessica Jahn’s dazzling costumes and Katherine Carr’s wig design. (Rachel Townsend designed the sumptuous costumes for the rest of the company.) This hilarious spoof lampoons Hollywood’s trite attempts at depicting women’s tragedies. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Medea
Brooklyn Academy of Music - Harvey Theater

Euripides’s Medea, the unforgettable story of a scorned woman whose thirst for revenge drives her to slaughter her own children, has reverberated through the ages, transcending time and culture. Along with Hedda Gabler, it is the great role actresses long to play. Judith Anderson, Zoe Caldwell, Diana Rigg, and Fiona Shaw drenched Broadway in blood, with the first three winning Tony Awards. Maria Callas starred in a film edition.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
Pershing Square Signature Center

Quaint and laughable, a new musical version of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, produced by The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center Off-Broadway, shows that, at least in this case, thanks to shifting attitudes on sexuality, unabashed examinations of carnality have passed into the passe.  

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
West Side Story
Broadway Theater

When it was announced controversial director Ivo van Hove would be staging a revival of  the beloved  West Side Story, you could practically hear the screams of musical-theater purists. While many classic tuners have undergone significant reinterpretation—My Fair Lady and Oklahoma! being the latest—the classic street-gang remake of Romeo and Juliet has never been altered in a major way.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Kunstler
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne's Lab Theater

Into a college lecture hall in 1995 comes famous lawyer William Kunstler accompanied by Kerry,  an exceptional young female law student.  Outside can be heard protests against Kunstler speaking about his career.  Despite Kerry’s first urge to confront him with objections to it and him,  she introduces Kunstler. He takes over the podium and goes over all that made him celebrated, both positively and negatively.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Once on this Island
Hobby Center

I don’t usually assign my readers “homework” in advance of seeing a show, but it seems appropriate in connection with Theater Under the Stars’s current offering of the 1990 Broadway musical, Once on this Island, which is directed by Michael Arden and features the music of Stephen Flaherty, with book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens. I would suggest that prospective audience members prepare a bit before attending this somewhat unusual, one-act production (no intermission).

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Soldier's Play, A
American Airlines Theater

Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 and searingly focuses on the corrosive effect of bigotry in the military and American society at large. After a hit off-Broadway run presented by the Negro Ensemble Company, the suspense drama was adapted into a film called “A Soldier’s Story,” and then revived off-Broadway in 2005. Fuller skillfully wraps his unflinching observations on racial animus and its poisonous influence into a taut murder mystery that still feels shockingly immediate.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
No Wake
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

There was a heightened sense of anticipation as audiences filled into Milwaukee’s Studio Theater, in the city’s Third Ward. Milwaukee Chamber Theater was about to present the world premiere of Wisconsin playwright Erica Berman. The play, No Wake had received an overwhelmingly positive response when it first was presented as a staged reading in Madison, Wis. by Forward Theater. Now it was time to see a fully staged production, complete with sets, props, costumes, and so forth.

Luckily, the Milwaukee audience was not disappointed.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Tu Amaras
Baryshnikov Arts Center - Jerome Robbins Theater

After performing around the world, Bonobo, the internationally acclaimed Chilean experimental theater company, finally made its way to New York City’s Baryshnikov Arts Center, with Tú Amarás (You Shall Love), a socio-political offering with a surreal touch that examines what is an enemy, how do we create one, and how do we connect to others.

Performed for three days (February 13-15, 2020) in Spanish with English subtitles, it played to full houses.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Thoroughly Modern Millie
Crighton Theater

It was not your normal Saturday night at the beautiful Crighton Theater last weekend in downtown Conroe, Texas. As might be expected, the current Broadway musical revival of Thoroughly Modern Millie, from the resident Stage Right Productions Company, was full of many charms from the eager cast of local talent, with lively direction from Manny Cafeo.

That’s the good news, so let me be more specific. The cheerful musical has music by Jeanine Tesori & lyrics by Dick Scanlan (and the latter also collaborated with Richard Morris on the book).

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Book of Mormon, The
Ahmanson Theater

Back in L.A. for the fourth time, The Book of Mormon continues to draw big audiences and big laughs, thanks to its cheeky satirical attack on the Mormon religion and African superstition.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Dead Man's Cell Phone
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

A great deal of life emanates from Dead Man’s Cell Phone as FSU/Asolo Conservatory Actors advance mysteries and romance.  The death of the constantly ringing phone’s owner causes a stranger, at a cafe table next to him, to pick it up and answer it. What will she make of that connection?

Instead of the phone isolating Jean, she becomes involved with the family of the dead man (Christopher Hayhurst’s impressively immoral Gordon). There’s his pseudo-religious Mother, Mrs.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Soldier's Play, A
American Airlines Theater

Who shot Sergeant Vernon C. Waters?

Suspects were plentiful at Fort Neal, a segregated Army camp in 1944 rural Louisiana. Did the blame go to bigoted white officers? Someone in Waters’s unit? The big money pointed to the local the Ku Klux Klan, but underneath, The Soldier’s Play proves it was Waters’s heavy drinking and corrosive racial hatred that led to his murder.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Roan @ the Gates
Stage 773

Have you heard the story of the woman who put duty to country and truth above her own happiness? Uh-huh—didn't think so.

This is because accounts of extraordinary females are likely to be framed in circumstantial speculation attributing their subject's courageous deeds to the influence of mentorly father-figures or, at the least, maternal impulses rooted in nesting behavior—motives distinct from those of men, whose achievements are more often assumed to be based in matters of principle.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Revenge Song
Geffen Playhouse - Gil Cates Theater

Revenge Song is a campy, bawdy musical about a real character, a bad-ass woman named Julie d’Aubigny, who lived in 17th century France and was openly bi-sexual.  Played by the fiery, multi-talented Margaret Odette, Julie had affairs with both men and women, loved to fight duels, beat a murder rap, and became a famous singer, star of the Paris Opera.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Into the Breeches
Florida Studio Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Set in a modest community theater in 1942, Into the Breeches involves women taking Shakespearean roles traditionally played by men. Why?  Like those characters, suitable townsmen are off fighting a real war.  The play is supposed to be funny—but it’s not funny-peculiar, only partly funny-ha-ha, and mostly funny-silly-stupid.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Grand Horizons
Helen Hayes Theater

With a wild dive into one family’s love and marriage, Beth Wohl’s promising new play, Grand Horizons, makes its Broadway debut at Second Stage’s Helen Hayes Theater. An accomplished cast explores a family relationship with poignancy and stabs of sit-com humor, unearthing staleness and random impulsiveness, wacky consequences and endurance.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Grand Horizons
Hayes Theater

Bess Wohl’s cheerful, vigorous new play, Grand Horizons has a lot on its mind. True, it trades in humor that would be at home in TV sitcom territory with its tale of a dysfunctional family in which everyone is a comedian. But also true, it says several pertinent things about marriage, parent-child relationships and, of course, love. The Second Stage production is also slickly acted and directed on an attractive, purposefully generic set.

It begins with a bang.

David A. Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Lion King, The
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

No musical has weathered the past two decades as well as The Lion King , which brings its 2020 North American Tour to Milwaukee. And no musical can rival Lion King in its grandeur, its creativity or its financial impact (see below).

The North American Tour alone has been seen by 20 million theatergoers. Globally, the show has been seen by more than 100 million people. The Broadway production is still going strong, and the show is also doing well in London’s West End, Hamburg, Tokyo and Madrid.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Light My Fire
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

A thorough journey through ‘60s and ‘70s music, Light My Fire indeed rekindles memories for the majority of Florida Studio Theater audiences and enlightens those younger. All seem to respond to a trio who act out lyrics while singing in the styles of major performers of the times and sometimes even kidding them.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Bug
Steppenwolf Theater

Sure, Steppenwolf now occupies an auditorium as big as an auto showroom, the play's seedy Oklahoma motel room now looks more like a Coachella Valley efficiency-condo, and playgoers who know Tracy Letts only as the Pulitzer-winning playwright of August: Osage County are seeing a considerably milder version of Bug, the 1996 drama noir that ensured its author was no one-hit wonder—but there’s nothing we can do about that, and David Cromer can still make a helluva mickey-finn lemonade out of big-budget lemons.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Small Fire, A
Next Act Theater

For better or worse, a debilitating illness can change a long-term marriage in myriad ways. That’s the focus of Obie Award-winning Adam Bock’s A Small Fire , in a production by Next Act Theatre. Emily Bridges, a hard-driving business owner in her 50s, must come to terms with “a new normal” after being inexplicably robbed of her senses in this thought-provoking and well-acted play.

A Small Fire was first produced in 2011 Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. Since then, it has been produced at several regional theaters across the country.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Soldier's Play, A
American Airlines Theater

“They still hate you” are the last words of drunken Army Sergeant Vernon C. Waters (David Alan Grier), fatally shot twice by people or peoples unknown. So begins Roundabout’s stirring revival of Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Soldier’s Tale, which takes place in 1944.

Whodunit? Was it the KKK? Was it one or more of the local rednecks who live near the segregated Louisiana base? Could it have been one of the sergeant’s own men, exacting revenge for all his bitter bullying and put-downs? It’s up to Capt.

David Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse

This isn’t the first time Milwaukee audiences have gotten a glimpse of the punk/rock musical, Hedwig and the Angry Inch. In the past few years, it has been performed by local companies both large and small. But this Hedwig is distinctive in more ways than one. For instance, the set designer (Scott Davis) has recreated the feel of an underground nightclub from the moment the audience steps into the lobby. And this version delivers a Hedwig who is more audacious and outrageously funny than one recalls from previous productions.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Tasters, The
Rivendell Theater

When we think about assassination—as who hasn't, in recent years?—we usually think of firearms, or edged blades, but history has evidenced repeatedly the efficacy of virtually undetectable toxins in the hands of those who prepare their masters' food. That's the premise of Meghan Brown’s The Tasters, a portrait of three female prisoners assigned to sample the epicurean meals destined for the Great Leaders of an unnamed country.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2020
Jagged Little Pill
Broadhurst Theater

No one just walks in Jagged Little Pill, the fiery, busy new musical based on Alanis Morissette’s 1995 recording. Mostly angrily, they twist and turn, writhe on the floor, even walk backwards as hurriedly as they do forwards. The rag-tag ensemble’s frantic perambulations, as devised by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s movement and choreography, indelibly reflect the anxiety and rebelliousness of youth.

Morissette’s pinpoint lyrics, along with the infectious music she co-wrote with Glen Ballard, outweigh Diablo Cody’s barely connective musical.

David Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Until the Flood
Kirk Douglas Theater

Soon after the killing, in August 2014, of black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer, actor/playwright Dael Orlandersmith traveled to Ferguson, Missouri to interview townspeople about the tragic occurrence.  Now she has used this research to put together a one-person show, Until the Flood, which is on tap at the Kirk Douglas Theater and directed by Neel Keller.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
My Name is Lucy Barton
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

My Name is Lucy Barton written by Elizabeth Stout and published to a chorus of hosannas in 2016, is now a one-woman, two-character play, running through Saturday, February 29, 2020 at Manhattan Theater Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway. Adapted from the book by Rona Munro and directed by Richard Eyre, Lucy Barton stars Laura Linney, an actress whose every outing (be it film, stage, or TV) seems to elicit a cascade of unanimous raves. Tellingly so, her Playbill bio lists countless nominations and acting awards.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Stop Kiss
Pride Arts Buena

What could be more romantic than love at first sight, unless it's love poised on the verge of bloom, only to suffer calamity before its opportunity to blossom? Love that refuses to surrender, though! Love that stubbornly thrives, stunted but steadfast, to ultimately triumph over adversity—now that's romantic! It's no impediment, either, when the lovers are young, hip, relentlessly charming women whose affections reflect an indisputable social message.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Sunday Evening
The Greenhouse

This world premiere English-language presentation of a 2009 "Best Play" award-winner in its native Bulgaria opens on a modest beachfront house during a cold, rainy Southern California day in 2005 where Nick and Rose are drinking their fourth bottle of wine since noon. Nick is venting his anger and pain at having discovered a cache of chastely intimate correspondence between Rose and a former co-worker.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Killer's Head

(see listing under UNSEEN HAND / KILLER'S HEAD for 2020 Odyssey Theater production in Los Angeles, CA.

Unseen Hand, The / Killer's Head
Odyssey Theater

Two of Sam Shepard’s lesser-known plays, Killer’s Head and The Unseen Hand, are brilliantly performed by the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble as part of its ongoing “Circa ‘69” season of “significant and adventurous plays that premiered around the time of the company’s inception.”

Directed by Darrell Larson, produced by Ron Sossi and Bo Powell, the two plays have been brought to life in vigorous fashion, thanks to the expert acting by the members of the Ensemble, starting with Steve Hovey.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Grand Horizons
Helen Hayes Theater

Few performers can endow the simple culinary acts of making a sandwich or ladling gravy with as much meaning as Jane Alexander. The reserved, precise manner she pours out the brown sauce for mashed potatoes or the laser-beam side-eye she gives a non-communicative spouse as she spreads peanut butter speak of every slight and grievance in a 50-year marriage.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
My Name is Lucy Barton
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Lucy Barton is alone in her hospital room, a victim of complications from an appendectomy. She can look out the window at the New York skyline and, more particularly, at the Chrysler Building. And she can escape, if that’s the word, into her memory of her Illinois childhood as New York morphs into bucolic acres of corn and soybeans.

And so begins My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout’s loving one-woman memoir, adapted for the stage by Rona Munro and starring a radiant Laura Linney.

David Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Beauty of the Father
Manhattan Theater Club

Nilo Cruz's Beauty of the Father, now at Manhattan Theatre Club, is about a Spanish painter who converses with the ghost of Federico Garcia Lorca, the young man he is sexually involved with, his long-lost daughter whom he deserted as a child, and the woman friend with whom he shares his house.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
January 2006
American Son
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

A gripping drama of race relations, American Son exposes prejudices that spawn mortal problems of communication among black and white people in an important spectrum of society.  When an 18-year-old goes missing, there’s more at stake than finding him.

In a bleak waiting room of a Miami police station, with a huge curved window showing thunderous outside rain, Kendra Ellis-Connor  (handsome, tailored, African American Almeria Campbell)  anxiously attempts many times to get son Jamal on his cell phone.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Woman in Black, The
McKittrick Hotel

The Woman in Black, derived from Susan Hill’s suspense novel by Stephen Mallatratt, makes its long-delayed New York City debut. Set in the Hidden Club Car pub in the atmospheric McKittrick Hotel, where the immersive Sleep No More has been playing for the past several seasons, Woman is an intermittently entertaining ghost tale which takes quite a while to get to its goosebump-inducing chills.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Sunday Dinner
Reuben Cordova Theater

A family meal turns into a day of reckoning in Sunday Dinner, now in a world-premiere run at Theater 40.

Written and directed by Tony Blake, the play deals with the secrets of a working-class family in the Bronx, secrets which are revealed during the course of a sumptuous Italian luncheon (you can just about smell the lasagna).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Lifespan of a Fact
Florida Studio Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

A young boy has jumped from a Las Vegas Hotel observation deck to his death.  Emily, editor of a struggling quality magazine, gives recent Harvard grad Jim his first assignment. He’s to fact check the suicide story by top-flight author John. His by-line, Emily hopes, will attract more readers and advertisers. Jim dives into his job, notices scores of fishy details, and visits John to point out his factual deviations from truth. 

John always insists he’s written not an article (most often factual journalism) but an essay (that usually allows personal interpretations).

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2020

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