Julia Sweeney: Older & Wider
Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater

It’s really a stand-up routine, but it’s being performed at a major theater in L.A., so we can treat Julia Sweeney: Older & Wider as a theater event, especially since the show is now selling out at the Geffen’s black-box space, it marks a return to the stage for Sweeney after an absence of some fifteen years, though she has worked sporadically on TV in that time.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2019
Wonder Years, The: The Music of the Baby Boomers
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

You won’t find a more exuberant quartet than the singers-dancers at Florida Studio Theater’s Court Cabaret.  They’re re-creating how baby boomers brought us into a new era of new culture, and no more so than of music. They punctuate, with every “number,” Richard and Rebecca Hopkins’s chronicle of changes, starting with previously unheeded teenage musical preferences that are wielding influence even today.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2019
Nude/Naked
McCadden Place Theater

Nude/Naked, Paul Hoan Zeidler’s study of sexual and social pathology, is now in a world-premiere run at McCadden Place TheatER. The play looks at the intense, complex relationship between photographer Bennett Duquesne (Bjorn Johnson) and his daughter Addy (Sorel Carradine).  Although Bennett has earned kudos for his war photography (Syria) and his fashion shoots, he has become recently notorious for his graphic images of Addy, some of which involve nudity.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2019
Sweat
Asolo Repertory Company

Playwright Lynn Nottage for years interviewed—to use in her play Sweat— working class people in Reading, PA.  She dramatized what typical representatives of them went through economically, socially, and emotionally from 2000 to 2008. Though basically a chronicle, Sweat shows how individuals responded as workers to their one-factory town crisis and its effects on their personal relationships.

At Asolo Rep, projections of the era’s political situations over the realistic tavern where workers socialize indicate Nichole A.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2019
Nina Simone: Four Women
North Shore Center for the Performing Arts

Nina Simone is nowadays more often referenced for her historical significance than for her artistic accomplishments.

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, the daughter of ordained ministers and a recognized prodigy, her music education was hindered by the racial prejudice prevalent throughout the Southern United States in the mid-20th century.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
Father, The
Theater Wit

A number of playwrights have written about the troubles of adult children faced with elderly parents crippled by Alzheimer's disease and dementia, but how often do we see a play allowing us to witness the neurodegenerative process from the perspective of the afflicted?

We begin in a Paris apartment decorated in Mid-Century Modern, where a cantankerous old man complains of losing his wrist watch while his grown daughter apprises him of her plan to join her boyfriend in London.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2019
Girl in the Red Corner
The Den Theater

The tale of the poor boy who acquires confidence and self-esteem, often accompanied by fame and fortune, resulting from participation in athletic activities is a familiar trope in western literature. The formula applies to poor girls, too, but our heroine's deliverance from bankruptcy, divorce, unemployment, an alcoholic mother, a rebellious niece, and a sister's troubled marriage is not forged on traditional feminine accomplishments, but instead upon the gladiatorial sport of Mixed Martial Arts.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, A
Porchlight Theater - Ruth Page Auditorium

Those lamenting the reduction of the North American musical to pop-playlists augmented by the skimpiest of narratives can take heart from Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak. From a cluster of threadbare, overworked and potentially offensive genres, this talented duo has cobbled a frothy, witty, irreverent romp reaching across a century to address social customs yesterday and today.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
Amen Corner, The
WBBT Theater

“Amen” means “so be it” and in a corner of a small Harlem church where Margaret is pastor, members enthusiastically say and even sing the word.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
Dada Woof Papa Hot
Theater Wit

This play should be required viewing for anybody contemplating, however briefly, starting a family.

Wherever you happen to fall on the male-female, gay-het, single-married, young-old, Hallmark-Handmaid's Tale spectrum in your assessment of the Reproductive Imperative, Peter Parnell's survey of marital and procreative practices raises long-overdue questions best asked before all the little Nikkis, Zachs, Jareds, Ollies, and Lizzies are tasked with fulfilling the unresolved longings of their custodians.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
What We're Up Against
Raven Arts Complex

It doesn't take us long to separate the bad 'uns from the good 'uns at this generically stark corporate office: Stu is a swaggering, foul-mouthed, testosterone-spewing windbag who spends his time swilling expensive hooch and reviling his co-workers. Weber is his air-headed lackey, dispensing supportive flattery ensuring favor. Ben's support is less enthusiastic, employed as an apology for his sincere work ethic.

It's not just a Boys' Club, however.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz Theater

Both script-wise and stage-wise, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at Florida Studio Theater is deeply involving. It’s more of a dramatized novel than a typical mystery play.  Its hero, who either is autistic or suffers from Asperger’s, is portrayed by an autistic actor. It’s full of mathematical reasoning but also of contradictions to it. It reveals neighbor and family relationships along with cosmic ones, all of which become interdependent.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
Inspector Calls, An
Wallis Annenberg Center - Bram Goldsmith Theater

The National Theatre of Great Britain’s successful 1993 production of An Inspector Calls is making a new swing through the USA in a production once again directed by Stephen Daldry. In its three-week stop at the Wallis, the play (by J.B. Priestley) dazzles with its technological wizardry: a toy-like, collapsing house on stilts, eerie war-torn landscape, gloomy storm clouds, nightmarish music and sound effects. If Hitchcock were a stage director, this is how he would have gone about mounting this play.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
American Son
Booth Theater

Some plays look at the world with a semi-engaged gaze, as if the playwright is already wondering what his characters’ troubles and longings will look like to critics watching a revival of the show twenty years hence. Other plays take the temperature of the times and, when things are burning, come away white hot and ready to shatter. American Son, by Christopher Demos Brown, falls into the second category.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
Linda Vista
Mark Taper Forum

The remarkable Ian Barford commands the stage in his role as Wheeler, a burnt-out but likable grouch,  in Tracy Lett’s new comedy, Linda Vista, now in an L.A. premiere at the Mark Taper Forum, under the direction of Dexter Bullard. Letts, Barford, and Bullard are longtime members of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, where Linda Vista was first performed two years ago.  Five of the six other actors in the play were also in the original production, which accounts for the polished and skillful acting on display at the Taper.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
Junk
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse

The searing cauldron of greed, dominance, power and treachery on Wall Street, so brilliantly captured in the Michael Douglas film, “Wall Street,” gets another look in Junk, Ayad Akhtar’s drama of life in the 1980s. Although not as precisely tuned as Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, Disgraced, Junk is a tautly conveyed, briskly paced drama that occasionally starts to believe the lies it spins.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
St. Nicholas
Goodman Theater

Before he emerged from his own alcoholic fog, Conor McPherson often wrote plays about drunks for drunks, their narratives winding back on one another in the manner characteristic of those whose universe spans the interior of their own cranial cavity, making his stories—while damn good stories—often hard to follow. What rescues this import from London's Donmar Warehouse from suffering a similar fate is its willingness to proceed at a leisurely pace allowing us to fully absorb every last savory detail of its progress.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
Doll's House, A: Part 2
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

There’s so much comedy in A Doll’s House, Part 2 that its serious essence might easily be overlooked.  Yet Asolo Rep’s production always clings to the play’s serious core, substantiating its achievement.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
Hand to God
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne Lab Theater

Despite being tagged as “profane but profound,” Hand to God is more of a puerile presentation of puppetry as a psychological retreat turned takeover. You won’t find God in the Texas small town Church basement setting except sometimes in side-of-stage projections simulating Christian images and a stained glass window bearing scriptural behavioral messages.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
Matilda
Todd Wehr Theater

There’s a new kid in town and, from the looks of it, she’s going to smash some box office records while she is here. Milwaukee’s First Stage has taken a giant leap in producing a full-length musical, Matilda, the Musical, with the help of original Broadway creators Tim Minchin and Dennis Kelly.

Previously, First Stage has limited its productions to about 70 minutes – a nod to children’s limited attention spans. That’s a tradition going back to 1987, the year First Stage was born.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
Crucible, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

The mise en scene of Asolo Rep’s The Crucible takes place in a closed-in, heavy wooden-walled room, that will become a metaphor for each scene to follow.  At first, the cast of 17th Century Massachusetts co-religionists, facing forward, file in to fill left and right aisles. Their minister leads his assembly in “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” until a crash and bolt of light scatters all into darkness.  Then the play begins in low light with the minister praying over an unresponsive girl in bed in her wooden-walled attic room.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
Book of Mormon, The
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

Not since The Book of Mormon’s national tour rolled into Milwaukee three years ago has the city seen such an irreverent, zany, sophomoric – and hilarious – brand of musical theater. Created by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone, The Book of Mormon is still going strong, almost eight years since it opened on Broadway at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
Misunderstanding, A
Ruby Theater @ The Complex Hollywood

Matt Chait is that rare theatrical animal, a playwright of ideas. The veteran actor/writer—and overseer of The Complex, a cluster of small theaters in Hollywood—takes on the controversy over the origins of life on earth in his new play, A Misunderstanding, now in a world premiere run at The Complex’s Ruby Theater. Darwinism and Intelligent Design duke it out in this drama, with both sides expressing themselves in lucid, impassioned fashion.

On one side is Prof.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
Ghosts
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts at its debut shocked all of Europe not only for its subject matter but for the new theatrical style of Realism. FSU/Asolo Conservatory’s different production is on a set full of abstracted elements and three huge colorful doors that seem at first to herald farce. Ghosts, of course, refer to legacies of immorality, hypocrisy, deadly secrets and disease.

An assured Carla Corvo manages to maintain Mrs. Alving’s control of her 19th century estate in Norway.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2019
King Kong
Broadway Theater

Obviously, Broadway was calling and here comes King Kong to the Broadway Theater, in all his gargantuan splendor. The gorilla superhero was one of the most famous movie monsters, premiering in a 1933 film, a remake in 1975 and again in 2005. On the theater stage, while the gorilla himself is fantastic, the musical is hardly razzle-dazzle.

A giant of stagecraft and puppetry, King Kong is the star in this spectacle, a chest-beating, teeth-baring colossal creature, with an earsplitting roar as he crashes through jungles of Skull Island in the Indian Sea.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Barney the Elf
Pride Arts Broadway

Marley isn't the sole casualty this yuletide.

Bryan Renaud and Emily Schmidt begin their story of Barney the Elf with the violent death of the North Pole's patriarch—Santa Claus, to us—in an industrial accident. Leadership of his toymaking empire reverts, not to his widow, but to their son, who promptly inaugurates policies designed to increase the productivity of his elvish staff to the detriment of its morale.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Clueless
Signature Center - Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theater

For those who loved Clueless, the 1995 cult movie starring Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd, watched the TV series (1996-99) based on the film, and perhaps read all twenty-one of the Cher young adult books, well, Clueless is back, this time as a two and a half hour, acrobatically dance-heavy, in-your-face, over the top, teenage hormonal-exploding, fun-filled, six-piece band-backed musical. And that’s saying a mouthful!

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Hellcab
Raven Theater

The Famous Door Theater's Hellcab that opened in 1992 and didn't close until nearly ten years later was big, loud, and rude—hey, that was "Chicago-style" acting in those days, and the twenty-three passengers making the hapless hackie's Christmas eve anything but merry and bright were played by nine actors, switching off personae at adrenaline-pumping velocity. The 2010-2016 Profiles Theater revival, on the other hand, opted to cast each role with a different actor, who would then have to make the most of their few seconds onstage.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Doll's House, A: Part 2
George Street Playhouse

Nora slamming the door at the end of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House has to be one of the most famous exits in all dramatic literature. It stunned and excited audiences in 1879 enough to insure the popularity of this decidedly verbose play over the years. It continues to be a challenge for the actor playing Nora.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Holiday Inn
Paper Mill Playhouse

Forgive me if I am not playing fair when I say that this absolutely delightful production of Holiday Inn has the sparkles even if it is not generating quite the same sparks that made it the best Broadway musical of 2016.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Winter's Tale, The
Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey

You can really feel the chill of winter in the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey's production of Shakespeare partly morose, partly magical A Winter’s Tale. The affection and attention given to the Bard’s late-in-life play is obvious in the direction of Bonnie J. Monte. It may be considered a lesser work, but it has remained an audience favorite. Whether or not it is the best choice for a holiday entertainment is a matter of taste.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Old Woman Broods, The
Trap Door Theater

Early in The Old Woman Broods, the Old Woman referenced in the title complains about the "dregs" muddying the bottom of her teacup. On the page, Polish playwright Tadeusz Rozewicz’s splenetic 1969 diatribe—translated in 2004 by Chris Rzonca and Krystyna Illakowicz—comes off as the dregs of Absurdist Theater, the post-World War II literary movement once much-imitated, but nowadays a quaint relic of midcentury irreverence.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Winter Wolf, The
Otherworld Theater

Introducing children to the concept of death is a slippery proposition: Consider the shock of discovering that the security engendered by long games of peek-a-boo promising infants that losing sight of a parent's face is only a temporary condition was a falsehood from the beginning.

The science fiction/fantasy literary genre offers a modicum of respite from the immediacy of our emotional response to descriptions of irrevocable loss, but the necessary analogies of its universe to our own can unleash crippling real-life dread, all the same.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
To Kill a Mockingbird
Shubert Theater

Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird was a national favorite book and film, widely read and watched. When it was first scheduled for production on Broadway I wondered, a bit skeptically, if it would stand the test of Broadway. Would the story of racial prejudice during the Great Depression come across as a sepia-colored memory piece out of touch in this tech-heavy millennium?

And those precocious children being played by adults, how is that going to come off?

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The
Classic Stage Company

“Every day I read the play. I think I hear the words these words on CNN as I read them on the page… It is fitting that it reminds us of the choices that are available to us in relation to the way the world can go… Classic plays have politics at their heart—you take a play like Richard III or the Scottish Play—they’re warnings. And there’s a warning in Arturo Ui. This is a time for theater to say something; if we’re not screaming and shouting now, when are we ever going to do it?” —John Doyle, Artistic Director of Classic Stage Company.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Love Actually Live
Bram Goldsmith Theater

It’s a mish-mosh, but a delicious one.

Anderson Davis and his For the Record Company have made a specialty of turning well-known movies into stage musicals. After working out of a small theatre in Los Feliz, where they adapted things like “Boogie Nights,” Davis and FTR have now teamed up with The Wallis in tackling Richard Curtis’s immensely popular 2003 rom-com, “Love Actually.” A new theatre hybrid is the result. Love Actually Live is part film show, part jukebox musical.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Network
Belasco Theater

A significant satire, an imaginative director and a powerhouse star, odds are good that you're in for a compelling show. With Network, you will not be disappointed.

Originally written by Paddy Chayefsky, Network was an acclaimed 1976 film with memorable actor, Peter Finch, playing the doomed TV commentator, Howard Beale.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Straight White Men
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Stage

Its title has lately brought the curious to the play Straight White Men as if it’s something new and daring. It’s mainly, though, a pretentiously melded lot of old stuff. At a Christmastime family reunion, a widowed traditional father hosts three sons. Each is in some way dysfunctional. That they are straight and white is not of basic import to their dramatic interaction. Not even to the world outside their father’s house.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberly
American Stage

In two American playwrights’ sequel to the novel “Pride and Prejudice,” American Stage has a Christmas comedy aimed to please readers of the book, fans of two movies, or the more recent extended TV episodes made from it, or all of these. But those who know nothing of Jane Austen’s iconic work can enjoy an introduction to her characters in situations two years after the novel’s end. However, the enjoyments may be different.

Unlike the novel, the play does not revolve around Elizabeth (Lizzy) Bennet, now mistress of her husband Darcy’s inherited great estate of Pemberley.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Familiar
Steppenwolf Theater

In theatrical combat, a scene of comic violence occurring in a dramatic context is called a "Moliere-and-Curly" fight. By that definition, Danai Gurira has written a Moliere-and-Curly play, its family squabbles transpiring within a Minnesota community on the eve of their daughter's wedding to a WASP missionary. Ah, but this time, the bride's relations are African immigrants, from Zimbabwe, and when was the last time you saw the words "African" and "comedy" in the same sentence?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2018

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