Downstate
Steppenwolf Theater

Whenever we hear the words "child molester," our imaginations immediately conjure the worst case scenario, but Bruce Norris asks us to consider the many different actions grouped under that particular label, as well as the varying circumstances leading to individuals being branding of with that stigma, the severity of punishment meted out on the perpetrators, the opportunity for exploitation by interested parties taking advantage and the illusion of successful re-integration into a hostile society.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2018
Final Follies
Cherry Lane Theater

Final Follies is a loose confederation of three plays by the late A.R. Gurney. Widely known as “Pete,” Gurney is now firmly affixed in the lexicon of celebrated American playwrights. He wrote from first hand knowledge about WASP cultural, gleaned from his experience growing up on the right side of the tracks in Buffalo, N.Y., a once affluent and important city.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2018
Hurricane Party
Cherry Lane Theater - Studio Stage

Drunken, promiscuous, brawling, foul mouthed. If there’s a worse stereotype of poor white people in the South, I’ve yet to see it. Yes, it’s true that Southerners along the coast do have a tradition of getting together to party during a hurricane, but if I were from that part of the country, I’d be deeply offended by this play.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2018
Unchained Melodies
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

Florida Studio Theater has a great audience pleaser with Unchained Melodies to start its new Winter Cabaret Season. Four energetic men give out four-part harmonies from doo-wop in the 1940s all the way to the titled and other representative songs of the ‘50s and ‘60s. With attention to groups proliferating along with social consciousness, FST’s show combines histrionics with historical commentary.

“Remember Then” begin the harmonizers in their properly formal black tux suits with sequined ties to match and starched white shirts. Shoes are shiny black. Nathaniel P.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2018
Indecent
The Biograph

The Klezmer band welcoming us to the auditorium promises a low-stress evening, but there are things you need to know before the play starts (and your playbill doesn't include a syllabus), so here they are:

In 1910, a play by a young Polish author named Sholem Asch premiered in Berlin, titled (in English) God of Vengeance. It was an immediate hit, touring throughout Europe for the next ten years and eventually making its way to the United States, where it enjoyed similar success in the Yiddish Theater flourishing on New York City's Lower East Side.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2018
Bernhardt/Hamlet
American Airlines Theater

Bernhardt/Hamlet is nothing short of a total triumph for Janet McTeer and company. This is theater at its best, full of passion, humor, and heartbreak. As the great diva of the stage, Sarah Bernhardt, McTeer shows us the many sides of this complicated woman. At the center of the drama is Bernhardt’s decision to portray arguably the greatest Shakespearean role, the tormented Prince of Denmark. She argues her viewpoint persuasively, but at the root is her feeling that she wants something new, something different—and she really needs the money.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2018
Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, A
St. Clement's Theater

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur is one of Tennessee Williams's later plays and not often produced although it exhibits Williams' beauty of language, his grace, and his search for human sensitivity and endurance. At the Theater at St. Clements, La Femme Theater Productions explores how four single women on one Sunday in Depression-era St. Louis, battle against the human loneliness reminiscent of previous Williams's literary ladies like Blanche, Amanda and Laura. It is essential Tennessee Williams, touching, delicate and yet earthy.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Eagle in Me, The: An Evening with Carl Sandburg
Tenth Street Theater

Program notes reveal that several years of effort have been poured into actor Jonathan Gillard Daly’s valentine to a famous American, The Eagle in Me: An Evening of Carl Sandburg. This aptly-named show allows us to have a bird’s eye view of the world around us, as filtered through the eyes of this famous Renaissance man.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2018
Tempest, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Except for many of its Shakespearian speeches, The Tempest being blown to 15000 students throughout Florida by Asolo/FSU’s Conservatory seniors has been adapted to become a three-part comedy. It’s enhanced by rousing music and beautifully choreographed dancing as well as some creepy crawling. The likeness- difference between it and Shakespeare’s play should give teachers a great way to approach teaching his.

The instigator of the major plot is Prospera, who has escaped her brother Antonio’s takeover of their kingdom.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, A
Theater at St. Clement's

The set features shabby-not-so chic furniture, crowded together and covered with lots of flower patterns. In other words, largely the cliched vision held by many urban Northeasterners of how Southern people live. In fact, this is St. Louis, 1937, deep in the heart of the Great Depression. People are doing what they can to survive and, if possible, to rise above their situation. A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur is so quintessentially Tennessee Williams, it’s almost a parody of itself.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Nap, The
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Q: Do you like snooker? A: I don’t know, I’ve never snooked. But enough joviality. A large problem for The Nap to overcome is that most Americans have never heard of snooker, much less do we understand the rules of the game. It’s tough to absorb why a snooker tournament is so important to people in Britain and around the world. So…forget about it. As it turns out, the game itself is just a platform from which the laughs and the somewhat convoluted plotline are launched.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Frankenstein
Lifeline Theater

Two hundred years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, struggling with grief over a series of untimely deaths in her immediate family, told the story of a man's audacious attempt to overcome mortality by creating a human being in his own image. His hubristic proposal does not end well.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Not for Sale
Batey Urbano

It's not your imagination. The scenic design looks familiar because you just walked to the playhouse through its real-life counterpart in Humboldt Park's Paseo Boricua. To be sure, the imposing Puerto Rican Flag sculptures at Western and Division are missing from the stage, replaced by a sign re-christening the promenade "Dr.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Old Clown Wanted
Odyssey Theater

The Odyssey has opted for a major dose of European avant-garde theatre with its current production of Old Clown Wanted, written by the Romanian-born Matei Visniec and directed by his fellow-countryman, Florinel Fatulescu. (The English adaptation is by Jeremy Lawrence).

Visniec, who is little known in this country, had to flee Romania during its Communist years because his poems and plays were deemed subversive. He was given political asylum in France in 1987, but moved a year later to London, where he worked for the Romanian section of the BBC.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Taming of the Shrew, The
Off the Wall Theater

William Shakespeare must be smiling down on local theater impresario Dale Gutzman these days, as Gutzman’s Off the Wall Theatre continues its production of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Gutzman demonstrates a lot of guts for staging such a play as Shrew in the middle of the Me Too movement, but he seems to make the 400-year transition from Shakespeare’s time to ours look easy.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Because I Could not Stop: An Encounter with Emily Dickinson
Pershing Square Signature Center - Romulus Linney Theater

Emily Dickinson was a woman ahead of her time. She didn’t feel the need to marry, to have kids, to be known as a Good Christian Woman who went to church every Sunday. Instead, she chose to inhabit her own world filled with joy, sorrow, passion, and poetry. Her own imagination was world enough.

This production features a very different interpretation of the writer, and one I find difficult to grasp.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
In the Heights
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse Theater

Although Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights is getting more attention these days thanks to the Seismic shift which occurred after he wrote Hamilton, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater proves that there is much to enjoy in this enchanting, salsa-inspired musical.

Set in the Spanish-speaking barrio of New York’s Washington Heights, Miranda and his artistic team bring characters vividly to life. The main character is Usnavi, which Miranda himself played at the Richard Rodgers Theater on Broadway.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Twenty-Six Pebbles

(see review(s) under 26 Pebbles)
http://www.totaltheater.com/?q=node/8067

26 Pebbles
Reuben Cordova Theater

The horror and heartbreak of the 2013 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School are dramatized skillfully and powerfully in 26 Pebbles. The play, written by Eric Ulloa and directed by Jules Aaron, has transferred to Theater 40 after premiering at The Human Race Theater Company. Ulloa based his play on the interviews and research that he conducted in Sandy Hook.

September 2018
Date Reviewed:
Willard Manus
Cake, The
Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater

The Geffen, under its new artistic director Matt Shakman, is one of the few major theaters in L.A. to pay attention to the excellent work being done in the smaller theatres in town. In a departure from its previous policy of presenting only plays which had been successful in New York or Chicago, the Geffen has invited the Echo Theater Company to remount its 2017 hit, The Cake, in its Skirball Kenis space.

The play, written by Bekah Brunstetter and directed by Jennifer Chambers (director of the Echo’s playwright’s lab), was inspired by the Masterpiece Cakeshop vs.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Goat, The, Or, Who is Sylvia
Rivendell Theater

However steadfastly we may support the right of all people to love, couple and marry as they choose, most communities still designate a few zones "no-fly" to winged Cupid—children below a certain age, for example. Likewise forbidden are erotic activities involving live animals. Furry or feathered consorts may sleep undisturbed at the foot of your bed, but if your Fido or Felix crawls beneath the covers, you risk the censure of cohabitants, peers and legal authorities.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Keep it Brassy 2
Music Box Theater

The talented cast on stage at Houston’s popular nightclub, The Music Box Theater, included most of “the usual suspects,” minus cast regular, Cay Taylor, who was out of town.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Pippin
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

Traces of the 1972 original pervade Pippin as presented by the Skylight Music Theater. The most visible of these traces involve original choreographer/director Bob Fosse, who brought a somewhat sinister sexuality to this otherwise innocent tale of a youth who struggles to find his place in the world. Fosse’s sensuous, signature touches dominate the choreography (adapted here by Christal Wagner) which appear in almost every scene.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
I was Most Alive with You
Playwrights Horizons - Mainstage Theater

The moral of this story is never say that things can’t get any worse; they definitely can. The bright spot in a world filled with tumult is that I was Most Alive with You is riveting theater. Craig Lucas’s writing, Tyne Rafaeli’s direction, and most notably the sheer brilliance of the cast combine to leave the audience spellbound. By the end of the play, we’ve been so drawn in we hold our breath awaiting the outcome.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Laura Benanti
Sarasota Opera House

Initiating what is to be a continuing program of Cabaret By the Bay, Laura Benanti proved an audience charmer at Sarasota Opera House. Fittingly, her often soaring soprano was the prevalent source of her charm. Her accompanying narrative mainly brought her life up to date as a Broadway star and as a happy wife and mother of a little girl beginning to toddle.

Benanti’s introduction had her supplying context for three songs she sang in the lead role of Amalia Balash in She Loves Me, for which she was nominated for Tony and Drama Desk awards.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Phantom
Westchester Broadway Theater

What splendid voices! Matthew Billman as the Eric, the Phantom, and Kayleen Seidl as the luminous ingenue Christine Daee fill the theater with their glorious singing. It’s enough to just sit back and enjoy the sound. After all, even in this alternative version to the Broadway smash, Phantom of the Opera, we all know the basic story. The horribly disfigured Eric hides out beneath the Paris Opera House (If we miss the locale, there’s a huge sign hanging above the stage). Young, impressionable Christine captivates him with her stunning voice.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Savannah Sipping Society, The
Crighton Theater

It’s hard to believe that Stage Right Productions has just completed its first decade as the resident company in Montgomery County’s crown jewel, the historic and beautiful Crighton Theater. But if the current production opening the 11th season is any indication, the next ten years look to be a rollicking good time. The play in question is the uproarious comedy, The Savannah Sipping Society, by Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope, & Jamie Wooten.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
UK Underdog
Zephyr Theater

The world is not a pretty place in UK Underdog, Steve Spiro’s one-man show, now in a world premiere at the Zephyr Theater, admirably directed by Ann Bronston. Spiro grew up in a tough, working-class section of London, a sickly Jewish kid who was bullied in school not only by the students but the teachers. It didn’t get much better as he got older and had to deal with anti-Semitism and thuggery practically wherever he went. It wasn’t until he took up kung fu and learned how to defend himself that his enemies left off.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Hair
Geva Theater - Mainstage

I wondered how the old love-rock musical would play these days for an audience of younger folk unfamiliar with Hippie rebellion, flower children,‘60s rock music, and a more feminine long-hair style and slovenly tie-dyed clothes-styles. For that matter, I wasn’t so sure how the now-rather-old folks, mostly more establishment, would regard it. I saw its original New York Public Theater production and Broadway Premiere, and loved most of the many others I saw in many places; so I knew that all they had to do was start singing “Let the Sun Shine In,” and I’d be in tears.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Agnes
59E59 Theaters

Catya McMullen is a strange and interesting playwright. In the emotional storm that is Agnes, the men she has written are complex, usually appealing, and at times, difficult to understand. The women are, for the most part, mean spirited and driven by misplaced attachment, lust, and the need to dominate. They yell a lot. And everyone swears none stop; counting the f-bombs is an exercise in futility. Their sexual pronouncements are cold and totally devoid of sensuality.

Charlie has an excuse for his detachment; he’s on the autism spectrum.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
American Saga: Gunshot Medley: Part 1
Met Theater

The horrific history of slavery in the USA is laid bare in American Saga, Rogue Machine’s last production at the Met Theater (the company will move to the Electric Lodge in Venice this fall).

Set in a North Carolina graveyard (simple but effective set by Priti Donde), the play brings to poetic life the stories of three of the black folks buried there, circa 1850-1860. Author Dionna Michelle Daniel has those folks speaking to us (and each other) as if they were still alive, using language that is rich and powerful in expression and feeling.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Untranslatable Secrets of Nikki Corona, The
Gil Cates Theater

The Geffen takes a pratfall with The Untranslatable Secrets of Nikki Corona, the Jose Rivera play now in a world premiere production. Directed by Jo Bonney, the play owes its creation to a magazine article Rivera read ten years ago dealing with a Minneapolis company “whose service was to connect people who want to send a message to the other side. I instantly knew it was a play, but I didn’t have characters or a story for some time,” he explained in a program note.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Homos, or Everybody in America
Pride Arts Broadway

A now-somewhat shopworn literary device for introducing dramatic narrative is to propose a montage of ambiguous remarks whose significance would, presumably, be later revealed.

Playwright Jordon Seavey devotes a full three-quarters of his play to this text-in-a-blender approach, even as his protracted preamble name-checks a plethora of 2006-11 New York City trail-markers—dating apps, wine bars, fizzy bath products, the changing profile of Williamsburg—conferring names on peripheral personnel, while reducing its protagonists to collective stereotypes.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Oklahoma!
Hobby Center

There is bittersweet irony in the fact that the supremely joyful current Oklahoma! production from Theater Under the Stars began its run at Houston’s Hobby Center on this past week’s September 11th anniversary of one of the most tragic events in American history. With the musical being skillfully directed here by Kevin Moriarty, what better way to lift the spirits on such a somber occasion than to present this magnificent edition of the classic Rodgers & Hammerstein tuner, now celebrating its own 75th anniversary?

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
School Girls, Or, The African Mean Girl's Play
Kirk Douglas Theater

A girls’ boarding school in the hills of central Ghana, circa 1986, is the unusual setting for School Girls, Jocelyn Bioh’s plucky comedy, now in a West Coast premiere at the Kirk Douglas. The play, which ran off-Broadway last year and was originally developed at The New Black Fest at the Lark, 2016, pokes fun at the way young African females are obsessed with notions of beauty, skin color, and self-worth. School Girls also delves into the struggle for power between two of the students at the school (which is supported by white missionaries).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Heartbreak House
Lion Theater

A snappy cast under David Staller's direction presents George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House as a delightful comedic romp but enough slashes of black and gray to be as pungent as Shaw himself. An anti-war/anti-political greed polemic in the form of a farce, Shaw wrote the play before World War I and re-re-wrote it for its first staging in 1920 when the horror of the war was no longer fresh in the public eye.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Feathers of Fire: A Persian Epic
Kaye Playhouse

Shadow puppetry holds flat, almost two-dimensional puppets behind a screen. A lamp behind them projects their moving shadows on to the screen, and we, the happy audience, see the shadows form the other side. “The Cambridge Guide to Theatre” tells us that shadow puppetry in the Middle East was used to avoid the censors:

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
R.R.R.E.D.
DR2 Theater

There’s real talent on the stage. The performers in R.R.R.E.D. all have great voices, and they do their best to entertain. Matt Loer, late of The Book of Mormon, brings an endearing Jack McBrayer quality to GJ, who’s just happy to serve his disagreeable leader, super belter Victoria (Katie Thompson). Even wearing a ridiculous wig, Marissa Rosen brings joy to her big number, explaining herself in a wince worthy message, “I’m not pregnant, just fat.” Kevin Zak cheerfully soldiers through a laudable, but wildly off topic, endorsement of gay rights.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Days to Come
Beckett Theater

The Mint production of Lillian Hellman's Days to Come is a smart, relevant play burdened with plotlines that are its undoing. Hellman focuses on two major problems, a family-run labor strike threatening a brush factory, which is the major industry in the small town of Callom, Ohio. At the same time, it zeroes in on the personal problems of the family that owns the factory. The complexity blurs the focus of each side. Resolution is slow coming and hard to nail down.

While relevant in the Depression days of 1936, Days to Come was a box office disaster.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
songs for nobodies
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

The title of Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s season opener, songs for nobodies, , reminds one of the famous poem by the late Emily Dickinson. “I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too?” If there’s a lesson to be learned, this musical revue teaches us that “nobodies” deserve our attention as much as celebrities do.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2018

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