Donkey Show, The
El Flamingo

Even Ricky Martin doesn't have anything on the Bard lately. An Oscar-winning 1998 film and more productions around the New York City area than can be counted are only a few ways you can catch Shakespeare in action. Subtitled "A Midsummer Night's Disco," this latest incarantion of Shakespeare's glory is a delightful surprise. With the aid of gloriously chosen disco classics of the 1970s (with the occasional `80s track thrown in), the tale is presented in a nightclub setting aptly named Club Oberon, where all of love's misunderstandings take their toll.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Far East
Westport Country Playhouse

Finally, a play! A. R. Gurney's Far East, originally produced at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts and presented at Lincoln Center earlier this year, is a rewarding piece of theater inspired by the plot of the opera, "Madame Butterfly," and the James Jones novel and film, "From Here to Eternity." Drama is chaos with control, and Gurney, who has written more than 25 plays, demonstrates the art of not only creating original material, but masterfully shaping it.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
First Picture Show, The
Mark Taper Forum

If the Gordons were painters, they'd be splatter-artists, the kind who hurl paint at a canvas and pray that it makes pictorial sense. In The First Picture Show, they not only deal with a big time-span -- the years 1893-1995 in the USA -- but attack a slew of subjects and themes: the making of silent films, the role of women and Jews in that era, history, racism, old age, sibling rivalry, censorship and religious fundamentalism.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Foreigner, The
Drury Lane - Oakbrook

The Foreigner is a silly, improbable play that comes across as a small comic masterpiece, thanks to a superb production at the Drury Lane Theater in Oakbrook Terrace. Larry Shue, who wrote the play, had the makings of a very talented playwright before his untimely death in a 1985 plane crash at the age of 39. Prior to the tragedy, Shue was an actor with three full-length plays to his credit, including The Nerd and Wenceslas Square. The Foreigner begins with a promising comic premise.

Richard Allen Eisenhardt
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Getting Any?
National Black Theater Festival

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Havel: The Passion Of Thought
Olney Theater

The Potomac Theater Project offers one of its strongest, most blistering evenings in its 12 years in Washington with, "Havel: The Passion of Thought," a "compilation" by artistic director Richard Romagnoli. Inaugurating Olney Theater's Mulitz-Gudelsky Theater Lab, the show -- first produced in 1991 at Middlebury College where Romagnoli is a professor - profits from the clean austerity of the high-ceilinged, wood-paneled black box space.

Barbara Gross
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Hinton Battle: Largely Alive
Apollo Theater

Hinton Battle - Largely Alive isn't a bad show, it's just unnecessary, a deficiently constructed solo for an excellent performer. Battle has been a leading musical comedy performer on Broadway and on the road for decades. He has just completed a run as a featured performer in the Chicago production of Ragtime. Battle's new one-man show at the Apollo Theater traces his life, from his childhood in Washington, DC through his education as a ballet dancer to his success on the Broadway musical stage.

Richard Allen Eisenhardt
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Hot Flashes
National Black Theater Festival

Hot Flashes was the first half of an evening called "Divas of Performance," brought to the National Black Theater Festival by San Francisco-based Cultural Odyssey. A mainstay of that company, Rhodessa Jones uses her 50th birthday as a pretext for celebrating the mixed blessing -- and the scorching curse -- of menopause. Clad in flaming red vinyl, Jones has exuberance to burn.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Forty-Second Street Workshop One-Act Festival (1999) - Series A
42nd Street Workshop

Maestro, which pays homage to Keaton, Chaplin and Leonard Bernstein, is performed entirely in silence, except for the sounds of an orchestra passionately playing a symphony, and equally passionately led by the Maestro, who, having entered with dignity and verve, bows to his audience, placed upstage, then faces his orchestra, in the direction of the actual audience. Gerber's baton doesn't miss a nuance, now gentle, now demanding, now almost losing control in his enthusiasm, and always appreciative of his players.

Diana Barth
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Forty-Second Street Workshop One-Act Festival (1999): Series B
42nd Street Workshop

In The Winning Ticket, sloppy employee Jimmy (David Allan Walker) is ecstatic: he's won the lottery, it's $37 million, and he's about to tell the stuffed shirt boss where to stuff it. Mousey secretary Stella (Elizabeth Ann Townsend) at first protects Jimmy, then avows her love and then hopes they'll quit together. Then...a highly amusing turnaround. The play's charming, funny, beautifully directed and acted, with a particularly winning turn by Ms. Townsend.

Diana Barth
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Forty-Second Street Workshop One-Act Festival (1999): Series C
42nd Street Workshop

In Charlie & Flo, the latter, an attractive widow (Celeste Mancinelli), meets her son Charlie's (Darien Scott Shulman) high school teacher Jerry (Bart Tangredi) and, after a slow start -- Flo can't readily forget her deceased husband -- sparks ultimately fly. Charlie, Jealous, cannot forgive his mother for "being unfaithful" to his deceased father. There are backs and forths between all, and ultimately a positive conclusion is reached. A nice, warm family story, well acted by the three plus Charles E.

Diana Barth
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Lower Depths, The
Royal Lyceum Theatre

Established in 1976, the RO Theatre of Rotterdam, one of three major Dutch theatre companies, never expected to present the Russian playwright Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths at the Edinburgh International Festival, but were persuaded to do so by the Festival's director, Brian McMaster. Director Alize Zandwijk certainly gets your attention, in this remarkable production that breaks every rule, while bringing startling emotional and violently physical elements into play. She changes much of the script and boils 16 characters down to ten.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Voices In The Dark
Longacre Theater

No genre with any merit completely dies out. Just when TV variety shows seemed to go the way of the dodo, oddball revue-style programs popped up all over cable, and radio melodramas have made a comeback of sorts in various cities. Television and movies were thought to have killed the live-action thriller, what with the darkness of a movie theater or the solitude of a living room thought to be more conducive to chills than a room full of jaded theatergoers.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
After the Fair
York Theater at St. Peter's Church - Citicorp Center

A Thomas Hardy story "On the Western Circuit" has been given a whirl around the musical theater genre. It is called After The Fair by its creators, and this miniature-sized musical is a bittersweet charmer filled with ironies, lovely tonal music, intelligent lyrics, and it's performed by a splendid cast of four. The haven't-we-heard-this-before plot concerns a virtually illiterate maid who, on her day off, has a fling with a dashing young man whom she meets at a fair. The time is 1890s England. After the fair, they must part but promise to write each other.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Aristocrats
Lincoln Center Festival `99 at La Guardia Theater

In a rural community in Ireland, the Catholic, once-wealthy O'Connell family molders in their decaying mansion. Outsiders on two fronts, they're amongst predominantly Protestant gentry, and they keep their distance from the lower class Catholics of the village. All have broken lives.

Diana Barth
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Arms and the Man
Producers Club Theater

Director Richard L. Sterne made his talented cast shine in a simple but effective production of George Bernard Shaw's comic classic about love and war at The Producers Club Theater. Sterne transferred Shaw's whimsical setting of Bulgaria to present day Albania but otherwise made few changes to the text. While it might be a bit early for Serbs and Kosovar Albanians to sit down to tea, the play's superb construction and language are a delight, and Shaw's message, that men are just as opportunistic in their politics as women are in love, as pleasantly cynical as ever.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
All in the Timing
Carolina Actor's Studio Theater

You've got to wonder why CAST has been hiding its light under a bushel for two years. The professional acting school finally gave its first public performance, spotlighting 19 of teacher/director Ed Gilweit's students. After seeing the half dozen sketches of David Ives's All in the Timing, teacher must be proud. Starting off, David Randal and Beth Burney give a nearly A+ rendition of Sure Thing. Rapidfire pacing, faultless contouring of characters, and impeccable timing make this wild succession of variants on boy-meets-girl a scream.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
All Night Strut
Drury Lane Evergreen Park

All Night Strut, featuring the music of the 1930s and 40s, is a lot of fun and a great way to introduce the younger generation to music you can come out singing. All Night Strut offers no plot or dialogue, just one song after the other. It's an ensemble piece, and the four very talented performers each get the opportunity for solos, duets, trios and quartets. Songwriters celebrated here include Duke Ellington, Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, George and Ira Gershwin and on and on.

Richard Allen Eisenhardt
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
As You Like It
Door Shakespeare

Shakespeare and the rural roads of Door County work well together.  And the green acres of the Bjorklunden Garden, located right on the Lake Michigan shoreline, is a perfect match for the Forest of Arden.  Shakespeare's paean to pastoralism and the power of love amid the trees, As You Like It, sits comfortably in the green  garden, with the only distraction the rustle of the wind in the trees, or the buzz of the insects that come out after dark.

Ed Huyck
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Brave, The
Atlantic Theater

The impetus for Sharman Macdonald's plot is a pleasantly intriguing one. Straight off the plane, a Scottish woman fends off a would-be Algerian rapist with a fatal karate chop. After innumerable contretemps and with the aid of three other Scots, the body receives a desert burial. In this North American premiere production, the scenario unfortunately becomes an awfully short clothesline on which to hang Scottish nationalism, feminism, anti-colonialism, and other worthy progressive causes.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Beatrice
6543 Santa Monica Boulevard

Intended as a post-modern fairy tale, a magically-real fable about the impact of fate on love and sex, Beatrice tries awfully hard to dance on elfin feet.  But thanks to weak, silly dialogue, over-the-top acting and directing, the play keeps taking elephantine pratfalls instead.  Circle X, the company responsible for the production, reveals a possibly fatal weakness for arch, twee material (such previous productions as The Rover and In the Sherman Family Wax Museum suffered from the same ailment).  Set in a lush garden populated by twittering birds and L

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Beauty Queen Of Leenane, The
Steppenwolf Theater

Martin McDonagh is a brilliant 28-year-old Irish playwright who has a great future ahead of him.  He was recently represented on Broadway with The Lonesome West, and Northlight Theater in Skokie did an excellent job with his second play, The Cripple of Inishmaan.  His most celebrated work, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, is set in the small impoverished town of Leenane, County Galway.  Maureen, played by Laurie Metcalf, is a 40-year-old virgin who cares for her aging mother.  Mag, played by Aideen O'Kelly, is manipulative and always complaining.  At first s

Richard Allen Eisenhardt
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Becoming Adam
Children's Theater of Charlotte

The futuristic setting of Becoming Adam is a collective where conformity is prized and individuality is outlawed.  People don't even have names  In this synthetic Eden, our heroine finds a book and convinces the man she fancies to read it. As in the biblical story, his eyes are opened irrevocably, and he becomes human.  For their temerity and turpitude, they are expelled from their commune.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Big River
Media Theater

The 1985 Tony Award-winning musical, Big River, is rarely revived. This limited-tour mounting by Rockwell Productions shows that it's a viable work and a crowd pleaser for family audiences. The story is the classic Mark Twain tale of Huckleberry Finn, with music and lyrics by the late Roger Miller. Huck narrates his adventures, starting in the Missouri home where he is being raised by his aunts because his mother has died and his alcoholic father has abandoned him.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Blithe Spirit
Peninsula Players Theater In A Park

The playbill for the Peninsula Players' production of Blithe Spirit notes that the play is "a witty comedy by Noel Coward." That certainly is the truth. One-liners and bon mots fly from the characters' mouths. But it is the actors that carry the day in this sometimes rough and slow-moving production of the show. The Coward chestnut—or is that war horse?—is a comedic take on the afterlife and haunting spirits. It's all about a seance gone horribly wrong that brings back the wife of writer Charles' dead wife, Elvira.

Ed Huyck
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Brutality Of Fact
Actors Theater of San Francisco

Contemporary American life -- heaven help us -- is reflected in Keith Reddin's quirky, funny yet sad, tale of a mixed-up family.  Mother Val (Niki Hersh) appears to have Alzheimer's, believing one of her daughters, the feisty Maggie (Catherine Castellanos), is dead.  Val is abetted in this belief by daughter Jackie (Rachel Klyce), a religious nut who passes out Watchtower pamphlets to hostile neighbors.  Maggie drinks, and after attending an AA meeting, is befriended by an all-too-friendly lesbian (Susi Damilano).  Jackie's ex husband Harold (Paul D'Addario), who is trying t

Diana Barth
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Camino Real
NJSF - F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater

First produced in 1953, Tennessee Williams's Dali-like, surrealistic play was a daring choice for artistic director Bonnie J. Monte and company, as well as a challenge to the audience. However, for serious theatergoers, the play was fascinating—a wild, metaphor-filled world in an unnamed South-American country populated by fictional and historical personages such as Don Quixote, Casanova, Marguerite de la Camillias, Lord Byron and Esmeralda, all under the control of the ominous Gutman, who announced each block or segment of the Camino Real.

Donald Collester
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Camino Real
NJSF - F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater

Set designer Harry Feiner's haunting evocation of a decaying town is the first thing we see as we enter the Shakespeare Festival's new Kirby Theater.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Children Of Eden
Central Piedmont Community College Theater

Boy, the Almighty sure knows how to make an entrance!  Before our eyes, he creates the world and paradise, breathes life into his children, sets the rules, metes out the punishments.  Through the first generations, concluding with Noah's sons, we watch God withdrawing from his creation.  John Caird's audacious book, playful and penetrating, presumes to tell why the withdrawal occurs.  Through his interaction with mankind, God comes to terms with the fact that his children will disobey and displease him -- and develop their own concepts of right and wrong.  Bluntly put, God l

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Chinese Art of Placement, The
Woolly Mammoth Theater Company

Talk about a busman's holiday. When Woolly Mammoth Theater Company's founding artistic director Howard Shalwitz needs a break, he returns to his roots as an actor.  With the theater celebrating its twentieth season next year, he's dedicated two decades to providing cutting edge drama (including 20 world premieres), to the evolving Washington theater scene.  Although Shalwitz picks his roles carefully, he could not pass up a comic gem like Stanley Rutherford's one-man show, The Chinese Art of  Placement. 

Barbara Gross
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Communicating Doors
Peninsula Players Theater In A Park

During intermission at Peninsula Players Theater's Communicating Doors, members of the Peninsula Players audience tried to puzzle out the play's twisted time frame. Was Phoebe, the not-so-young prostitute, being threatened in 2019 or 1999? Were Ruella and Jessica, the threatened wives of Reece, talking in 1999 or 1979? And what was up with the mad killer, Julian, following them through time? Communicating Doors isn't easy to sum up. The Alan Ayckbourn play is part thriller, part comedy and part time-travel epic.

Ed Huyck
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Corpus Christi
Artswatch

Can it be that Terrence McNally's controversial Corpus Christi, his "gay Jesus" play in which the Christ-like hero is homosexual, has been performed nowhere else in this country except Louisville, Kentucky, nearly a year after its contentious opening last October at New York's Manhattan Theater Club? Gilbert Parker, McNally's agent, confirmed that the work will be done at the Edinburgh Festival this year but knew of no other U.S. performances besides director Don Cox's staging in Louisville of this homophobia challenging, poster play of the culture wars.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
De La Guarda: Villa Villa
Daryl Roth Theater

Since opening last year, this irresistible Argentinean import has become a celebrity hangout and a must-see for out-of-towners. The company's motto, "We're not trying to be profound, only to get out on the surface," pretty nicely sums up their fast-paced production. Subtitled "Villa Villa" (meaning "Improvise!), De La Guarda is a multi-media event as exhilarating as the trendy film "Run Lola, Run" for its succession of strong images with staying power.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Dear Liar
Irish Repertory Theater

Adapted from the correspondence of George Bernard Shaw and arguably his greatest love, the famed actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Dear Liar consists primarily of the actual letters read (acted out would be more accurate) by the two performers. Shaw had seen Mrs. Campbell in London in several plays, fell in love with her across the footlights and began a correspondence with her. The implication is that the relationship went much farther, but that element is left ambiguous. One critic felt Mrs. Campbell was the only woman who threatened Shaw's marriage.

Diana Barth
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Dear Liar
Irish Repertory Theater

Apparently George Bernard Shaw was as prolific a letter writer as he was a critic, author, and journalist. His more romantic side blossomed notably in the voluminous correspondence he had with the equally droll and witty Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the noted diva actress who had the greatest triumph of her career as Eliza in Pygmalion, the play Shaw wrote for her.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Don't Dress For Dinner
Stage Right Theater

For the final show of its 98-99 season, Stage Right Dinner Theater presents Don't Dress for Dinner, a British farce written by Marc Camoletti and adapted by Robin Hawdon. Set in the elegant living room of a French country house, the play introduces us to Bernard and Jacqueline, a very proper, upper-crust couple who happen to be carrying on separate clandestine affairs.

Dan Vosburgh and Gayle Kirshenbaum
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Firebugs, The
Viaduct

In studies of post-WWII European dramatists, scholars tend to prefer the more accessible satires of Friedrich Durrenmatt to those of Max Frisch -- or could it be that the protagonist of The Firebugs is a humble citizen, disturbingly similar to ourselves? Certainly, Gottlieb Biedermann (whose name translates "God-Love Everyman") is not a monster: his transgressions are petty, his intentions benevolent, his concerns private -- all adding up to a vision so myopic as to make him a perfect pigeon for the arsonists to whom he extends his hospitality.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Fool Me Once
American Folklore Theater

Fool Me Once is like an evening spent around the campfire, telling tall tales. But my camp mates were never the caliber of storytellers as the cast and creators at American Folklore Theater. And that makes Fool Me Once -- which premiered in June at Peninsula State Park -- an intoxicating night under the stars, listening to stories. American Folklore Theater is a perfect setting for campfire tales. The theater, a decades old institution in Wisconsin's north woods, performs under the stars in Peninsula State Park.

Ed Huyck
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
How I Learned To Drive
Florida Studio Theater

Within an environment of autos, their parts, and everything `60s that can be associated with them, in pastels scratched out from beneath an inky surface, we witness Li'l Bit's ride down her life's highway. Born to a family that assigned nicknames on the basis of genitalia, Bit boasts an outstanding bosom, whose most ardent admirer is Uncle Peck, a pedophile who'll co-map her journey.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
How I Learned To Drive
Summerfun Theater

Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, which has won a slew of prestigious drama awards including a l998 Pulitzer, explores the causes and effects of an incestuous relationship on the lives of a young girl (Li'l Bit) and her Uncle (Peck). Narrated by the l8-year-old Li'l Bit, the play presents multiple perspectives through a series of flashbacks spanning the 60s and 70s, which allow the viewer to construct their own understanding of what occurred.

Kathryn Wylie-Marques
Date Reviewed:
July 1999

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