Sisters in Law
Annenberg Center - Lovelace Studio Theater

Sisters in Law looks at the volatile relationship between the first two female Supreme Court justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Tovah Feldshuh) and Sandra Day O’Connor (Stephanie Faracy).  The play by Jonathan Shapiro, which is now running at The Wallis, is a kind of feminist manifesto.  Ginsburg and O’Connor may have had their differences but they both managed to stand together when it came to the issue of equal rights for women.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Surveillance Trilogy, The
Reuben Cordova Theater

In The Surveillance Trilogy, now in a world premiere production at Theater 40, Leda Siskind looks at all the ways Big Brother has control over us. Each of her three short plays deals with an ubiquitous (but secret) government power which wreaks havoc with our personal lives.

”Until All of This Is Over” is set in 1953, at the height of the McCarthy Era when many people suspected of being a communist were put under surveillance by the FBI.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
That's Amore
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

Florida Studio Theater’s Court Cabaret once again holds a hit tribute, this time to the career of singer and actor Dean Martin.  That’s Amore is not only the title of the show and one of Dean’s most memorable hit songs but also the reaction of the FST audience to both. Cast and musicians succeed in duplicating the various impressions Dean himself made.

Catherine Randazzo ably directs three men who catch the essence of Dean in song and patter as well as Emily Dennis, who represents his wives, lovers, and the women in his songs.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Bat Out of Hell
City Center

“You have to go over the top to see what’s on the other side.” So says one of the bizarre, cartoonish characters in Bat Out of Hell, the musical based on a series of rock albums recorded by the singer Meat Loaf. In this show, they definitely go over the top, but you may not want to see what’s on the other side.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Bernhardt/Hamlet
Goodman Theater

Even if Theresa Rebeck and the 21st-century champions of all things feminine and feminist had not declared it so, Sarah Bernhardt would have been one extraordinary female. A bona fide superstar of the gilded age stage with a string of hit shows and international A-list paramours, this was a woman who could do whatever she wanted—including display her trim nethers in “breeches” roles during an age when proper ladies were forbidden to reveal their ankles. When Bernhardt decided to take on the coveted role of Hamlet, however, even her supporters feared she had gone too far.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Betrayal
Bernard B. Jacobs Theater

Performing a Harold Pinter play is a delicate balance—to borrow a phrase from the similarly difficult-to-mount Edward Albee. Pinter’s cryptic characters with their numerous pauses and minimalist dialogue can come across as icy or frustratingly inscrutable.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Romeo and Juliet Adapted
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

The setting is a classroom that becomes Verona as a “lesson” given by a Prince of a teacher has her students becoming involved in an educational drama. Tyler Dobrowsky’s lively adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet fits well into a class period-time in schools throughout Florida, the main venues for an FSU/Asolo Conservatory tour.  It’s helped immensely by youthful actors of the major characters and direction in tune with them.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Sunday
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

In Jack Thorne’s Sunday at the Atlantic Theater, a group of twentysomethings meet on the day in question for a monthly book club discussion, drink too much vodka, and reveal their insecurities and emotional wounds. Shy, lonely Marie (a weirdly magnetic Sadie Scott) has just lost her publishing internship, while her more confident roommate Jill (vibrant Julianna Canfield) is moving ahead in the same industry and has a solid relationship with wealthy Milo (appropriately smarmy Zane Pais).

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Fern Hill
59E59 Theaters

While Broadway’s The Height of the Storm gives an unflinching, brutal look at the aging process, Michael Tucker’s Fern Hill, at 59E59 Theater after premiering at New Jersey Repertory Company, offers a rosier slant on the same subject. Once again, we are in a well-appointed kitchen of a country house where the mature occupants are facing difficult life choices (designer Jessica Parks is responsible for this elegant eatery). But this time, the solutions are relatively easy, and the outlook is full of fun and mirth with only a few bumps in the road.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Height of the Storm, The
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Reality is a slippery proposition in the plays of French dramatist Florian Zeller. In both The Father and The Mother, the title characters are lost in a maze of conflicting and confusing circumstances. So is the audience since everything is seen via the protagonists’ perceptions which are altered by dementia or mental illness. Zeller’s latest work, The Height of the Storm, translated by Christopher Hampton, is now on Broadway at Manhattan Theater Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater, after hit runs in Paris and London.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Fires in the Mirror
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror is almost closer in tone to a film documentary than live theater. Two actors—the very talented Marti Gobel and Elyse Edelman—do a terrific job of bringing forth 26 roles in this 100-minute production. Under the direction of Marcella Kearns and C. Michael Wright, the women tackle more men’s roles than women’s roles, and switch races and ages, as well.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Dear Evan Hansen
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

Dear Evan Hansen is a heart-rending story about a teenage boy so filled with anxiety and loneliness that he makes mistakes he can’t easily fix. Then he gets caught up in social-media celebrity that it makes matters countless times worse. He manages to unravel it all before the show ends, but it leaves an already devastated family without the comfort that the teenage boy provided.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Keep it Brassy
Music Box Theater

If The Music Box Theater was revisiting some familiar territory during this third edition of its seemingly annual show, Keep it Brassy, it really didn’t matter. The musical selections were updated, the often hilarious comedy bits and sketches were original, and the talented regular cast of five is singing better than ever.

No wonder this ever-popular Houston cabaret continues to hold the #1 position in the city’s entertainment listings with TripAdvisor.com, even besting the Houston Symphony at #2 and the Alley Theater at #3.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Derren Brown: Secret
Cort Theater

How did he do that? You may keep asking yourself that throughout Derren Brown’s surprising and entertaining show at the Cort Theater. A popular performer in the UK, you can define him as a mentalist or magician, psychological manipulator or illusionist, but by the end, Brown’s showmanship will have captured your imagination and sent the two and a half hours sailing by with dazzling swiftness.

As for the “Secret” in the title, Derren Brown: Secret, I’ll never tell, but he will, eventually.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Play is a Poem, A
Mark Taper Forum

A Play is a Poem is theater lite.

In another age its six comic sketches probably would have been incorporated into a musical revue, making for a more balanced and enjoyably entertaining evening. Instead, A Play is a Poem’s sketches have been asked to stand on their own (though Nellie McKay does warble a few original tunes between scene changes in a dreamy, ditzy way). Isolated like that, the sketches seemed thin and a bit trivial, though they did draw lots of laughs from the opening-night audience at the Taper.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
West Side Story
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci powerhouse

It has been more than 60 years since the ground-breaking West Side Story revolutionized Broadway with its story of star-crossed lovers and gang warfare in the streets of New York. What could have been a faded relic gets a fresh, exciting perspective in the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s season opener of 2019-2020.

First off, director Mark Clements has cast the show very young, to better represent the world of high school students (and school drop-outs). The gang members look like kids who are trying to act tough as they find their way in the world.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Be Here Now
Theater Wit

Don't be fooled by the pop-yoga title, Be Here Now, or the deceptively New Age publicity image. In Deborah Zoe Laufer's universe, the road to enlightenment begins with a wholesale rejection of egocentric navel-gazing, not to mention "love" as defined by the romance industry.

Our play's setting is East Cooperville (as distinct from West Cooperville, and South Cooperville), located a mere hundred miles north of New York City.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Tiny Beautiful Things
Biograph

Once upon a time, there was an online publication called “Rumpus.” Its table of contents included an advice column, where readers could address queries pertaining to the literary topics constituting the magazine's focus, and have them answered by a curator identified only as “Sugar.” But in 2010, Sugar's pseudonymous voice underwent an abrupt change, as did the scope of her mission.

These events are not the story told in Nia Vardalos's Tiny Beautiful Things, however, but are simply a framing device.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Blue Stockings
The Den

In the printed text of Blue Stockings, the play is dedicated to Malala Yousafzi—the Pakistani teenage activist advocating education for women, who, in 2012, was wounded by armed assassins seeking to silence her. If that's not enough to illustrate women's long and hard-won struggle for academic parity, Jessica Swale's microcosmic account of how Cambridge University stonewalled on issuing degrees to its female scholars until 1948 (!) will make you a believer. Can I get a “you-go-girl"?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
In Circles
Odyssey Theater

The Odyssey Theater’s unique way of celebrating its fiftieth anniversary is to revisit seminal plays from 1967-71 which inspired the Odyssey’s artistic director, Ron Sossi, to start a company of his own.  One of those “golden oldies” was In Circles, the Gertrude Stein/Al Carmines avant-garde musical.  First done at New York’s Judson Memorial Church (where Carmines was a Reverend), the show later transferred to the Cherry Lane Theatre, where it ran for a year and won an Obie.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Sea Wall / A Life
Hudson Theater

Sea Wall/A Life, two extraordinarily powerful one act plays, presented in monologue form, are holding court at the Hudson Theater on Broadway. Fueled by strong reviews, and the star power of film and stage actors, Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge, it is one of the most deeply moving productions currently gracing the stage here in New York City.

With word of mouth religiously shouting hosannas, this starry-eyed production is already being touted (by those that tout) as a Tony contender in several categories, acting and direction (Carrie Cracknell) among them.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
August 2019
Chorus Line, A
Hobby Center - Mainstage

By way of full disclosure, let me first declare that the legendary, Tony Award-winning musical, A Chorus Line, has been a longtime favorite of mine since the brilliant Michael Bennett directed and choreographed its record-breaking initial run on Broadway years ago. During that period I had several joyful opportunities to see the show on The Great White Way.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Wild Women of Windale
Ceighton Theater

Who among us has not noticed the explosion, in recent years, of the growing industry of storage facilities designed to relieve us of the clutter of all our accumulated “stuff?” In my own family we sometimes joke about it, while all the while knowing it is really no laughing matter.

That fact notwithstanding, plenty of laughs currently emanate from Conroe’s elegant Crighton Theater. Before heading home to clean out those closets, why not drop by to enjoy this madcap comedy from Stage Right Productions, directed by Dinah Mahlman?

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Great Leap, The
Steppenwolf Theater

Nobody translates Chinese culture for clueless Yankees better than Lauren Yee, even if doing so demands a certain level of mythologizing. The most obvious of these may be the Hollywood myth of the pure-in-heart athlete overcoming obstacles to triumph in the Big Final Game, but we also tap into older sagas recounting the search of a young man born in mysterious circumstances to discover his true lineage, before we finish with our hero forever lost to the mists of unrecorded history.

Nobody writes better feisty-old-men roles than Yee, either.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Tony Danza: Standards and Stories
Cafe Carlyle

You gotta love the guy. He is Mr. Entertainment, a charmer who has done it all, or at least he has tried to. He is currently back at the Cafe Carlyle, ready and willing to revisit his previous sell-out show, Standards and Stories, to kick off the Fall 2019 season.

Danza's charisma is guaranteed to entertain. He shares stories, singing the American songbook standards to illustrate his journey from Brooklyn to Hollywood to New York and along the way, you can't help falling for the guy.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
On Beckett
Kirk Douglas Theater

Bill Irwin has utilized his many gifts as a performer to illuminate his love letter to Samuel Beckett, On Beckett, which has just opened at the Kirk Douglas after runs in San Francisco, New York, and Seattle.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations
Imperial Theater

When yet another jukebox musical was announced for Broadway, a collective groan could be heard by certain segments of the Broadway cognoscenti. Yet, Ain’t Too Proud, the story of The Temptations, stands on its own as a brilliant sparkler in the Broadway firmament, jukebox musical or not.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Betrayal
Bernard B. Jacobs Theater

It may take two to tango, but it obviously takes three for a triangle or, better, a ménage à trois. In director Jamie Lloyd’s insidious, corrosive, engrossing, icy revival of Harold Pinter’s provocative Betrayal, every twosome is silently observed by a third, often aggrieved, party. While Jerry, Robert’s best friend, is having a seven-year affair with Emma, Robert’s wife, it’s Robert himself who is the observant party, perhaps as eager to participate as he is to be a voyeur.

David Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Skintight
Geffen Playhouse - Gil Cates Theater

Another play about a dysfunctional Jewish family, but this one has a wrinkle: the family is  mostly queer.

The patriarch, Elliot Isaac (the always-solid Harry Groener), is a billionaire who lives in a lavish, ultra-modern house in Greenwich Village (towering set by Lauren Helpern) and has made his money in the shmatta trade: underwear, shirts, etc.  Born to Hungarian immigrant parents, he looks and lives like an English lord, attended to by two full-time servants (Kimberly Jurgen and Jeff Skowron).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Play That Goes Wrong, The
New World Stages

The mayhem begins even before the curtain goes up on The Play That Goes Wrong, a hilarious new comedy that transferred to Off-Broadway this spring following its Broadway run. As audiences search for their seats, stagehands are murmuring aloud about a dog that has gone missing. Onstage, more stagehands can be seen doing final prep work, such as trying to mend a broken mantlepiece. Even an audience member is recruited to help hold the set together during these last-minute adjustments.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2019
Songbook Summit 2019: The Andersons Play Louis Armstrong
Peter Norton Symphony Space - Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater

It seems to be becoming an annual musical celebration of the end summer as brilliant jazz musicians, Peter and Will Anderson, hold forth at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre in Manhattan’s Symphony Space on Broadway for yet another sensational concert in their increasingly popular Songbook Summit series. Last season’s sophisticated offerings featured musical tributes to Jerome Kern, Hoagy Carmichael, Jimmy Van Heusen, and Irving Berlin.

David Dow Bentley III
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
9 to 11 Minute Plays and Stories: Inspired by the Events of 9/11
Loft Ensemble Theater

For three years now a group led by the L.A.-based Michael Hennessey and Elizabeth Regen has been marking the anniversary of 9/ll by mounting an evening of readings that honor the many victims of that tragic event.

This year’s presentation of 9 to 11 Minute Plays and Stories featured eleven actors reading pieces written by people who were directly involved in 9/ll (Regen’s father, for example, was one of those who died as a result of exposure to the toxic Twin Towers site).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Betrayal
Bernard B. Jacobs Theater

With director Jamie Lloyd at the helm, Harold Pinter's calculation of the emotional dissolution of a marriage is as cool as its pale setting by Soutra Gilmour. The curtain rises slowly, the characters move leisurely across the stage, creatively lighted by Jon Clark. A mood is set with Pinter's minimalist language forming a measured passage between lives, laden with deceit and tension.

Pinter's 1978 play, Betrayal, begins with a bitter taste sometime after the end of Emma's (Zawe Ashton) and Jerry's (Charlie Cox) seven-year affair.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
2 Pianos, 4 Hands

See reviews/articles under "Two Pianos, Four Hands"

Two Pianos, Four Hands
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

The title of this show may be accurate, but it doesn’t do justice to this funny, heartrending tribute to the piano and those who devote their lives to its mastery. 2 Pianos, 4 Hands is so much more than two pianists (“4 hands”) serenading the audience with a compilation of classical and contemporary tunes (although the pianists do that, too). It takes audiences through a roller coaster of emotions, many of which will be familiar to piano students, piano teachers, parents, and almost everyone who has picked up an instrument at some time.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Latin History for Morons
Ahmanson Theater

John Leguizamo has been successfully doing one-man shows (Spic-O-Rama, Mambo Mouth, etc.) for thirty years, thanks to his writing and performing skills.  A large, charismatic presence on stage, he knows how to capture and hold an audience’s attention—and make it laugh and, on occasion, shed a few tears.

All of his many gifts are on display at the Ahmanson, where he has just opened in a new solo show, Latin History for Morons, well-directed by Tony Taccone.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Who Loves You
Florida Studio Theater - Goldstein Cabaret

As dynamic as the early Four Seasons and Frankie Valli whom they imitate, the performers of Who Loves You transfer their energy to their audience with music and movement.  When the group gets to Dion and the Belmonts’ “Teenager in Love,” those listening become spontaneous singers joining in. The program greatly spurs many to reliving their younger days or discovering earlier or later somethings good they’ve missed.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Tootsie
Marquis Theater

There may be funnier musical comedies on Broadway than Tootsie, but don’t tell that to the audiences lining up outside the Marquis Theater. They are here for entertainment, with maybe a little bit of a message thrown in. And they’re in the right place: Tootsie is born to please.

Based on the 1982 film starring Dustin Hoffman, the story was originally concocted by Don McGuire and Larry Gelbart. They created a smart, insightful look into a woman’s world—from a man’s perspective.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2019
Howard's End
Theater Wit

Classroom curricula usually group E.M. Forster with the Victorians, ignoring the undercurrent of imminent social upheaval simmering below the surface of the complacent universe that preceded the irreversible destruction of World War One.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2019
Boogieban
Chicago Dramatists

The phenomenon we now call post-trauma stress disorder was first employed in dramatic literature by Sophocles circa 441 BC.

So extensive a history of tragedy based in revelation of long-concealed atrocities has rendered audiences justly familiar with the narrative arc evidenced in this Akron, Ohio import, but playwright D.C. Fidler's mission is to tell us a story, by gum—two stories, in fact—and he sees no shame in enlisting every available assisting factor toward its completion.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2019

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