Private Peaceful
TBG Mainstage

The eyes, blue, innocent and frightened, stare out from under a World-War I helmet, impossibly young, a contradictory message of youth threatened by destruction. Adapted and directed by Simon Reade, who staged Broadway’s Journey's End, from the award-winning young adult novel by Michael Morpurgo (War Horse), Private Peaceful comes to New York's TGM Mainstage in this centennial year of the end of World War I.

You get everything you need when you enter the theater: a small cot, a man lying on it and your imagination.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Next Act Theater

As a poster child for the disenfranchised, one can’t imagine a better representative than the unloved and unwanted Hedwig, who stars in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Milwaukee’s All In Productions has staged a raunchy, funny and heartbreaking version of this rock musical. Or, as Broadway’s Alexander Hamilton might have surmised, here’s a guy who “never got his shot.”

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Sweat
Mark Taper Forum

Sweat is a strong, socially conscious play about the impact ruthless 21st-century capitalism has on the working class. Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play is set in Reading, PA., a once-thriving city packed with textile and auto-parts plants which gave tens of thousands of unionized employees well-paying jobs with benefits.

Sweat looks at what happened to those workers when their bosses decided to quit manufacturing in the USA and set up shop in cheap-labor, “right-to-work” countries like Mexico.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2018
Sixties Trilogy, A

see review under 60'S TRILOGY, A

60's Trilogy, A
New American Theater

A 60’s Trilogy digs deep into two of the ugly blemishes on our country’s history: racism and violence. Written by Tommy Carter, the three short plays artfully show the connection between race relations and the love of violence in the 60s: the bombings of black churches, the attacks on civil-rights marchers, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the brothers Kennedy. Oh, and let’s not forget the bloody war in Viet Nam, too.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations
Ahmanson Theater

A loud, slick, but enjoyable jukebox musical, Ain’t Too Proud tells the sprawling story of The Temptations, the male r&b group that went from the Detroit hood to the top of the soul charts in the Motown heyday. Led by Otis Williams (the charismatic Derrick Baskin), the group was one of the first black acts of its kind to ultimately cross over and find acceptance and success with white folks.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Motherfucker with the Hat, The
Gloria Gifford Conservatory

Life in New York’s lower depths is the subject of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherfucker with the Hat, which is now enjoying a successful run at the Gloria Gifford Conservatory in Hollywood. The play, which was first done in 2011 at NYC’s Public Theatre, looks at five friends locked into bizarrely dysfunctional relationships with each other. They’re a colorful, profane, blighted bunch, battling mightily to find a way to survive in their world, which is shot through with drugs, booze, and violence.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Tres Bandidos
Heartland Studio

You've got these three guys planning to rob a bank, see, but their plan is temporarily derailed by heavy rain and a dead battery in the getaway car, forcing them to take refuge in the kind of dingy Texas motor court where the rooms are so spartan as to resemble those in a monastery (with a crucifix on the wall by way of decor). In the absence of TV or radio to pass the time while avoiding the scrutiny of fellow lodgers, the would-be desperadoes are left to their own resources.

My Life on a Diet
St. Clement's Theater

Most famous people long in the tooth, if they are not dead, quietly retired, or resting on their well-earned laurels, tend keep a very low profile. You rarely even hear about them. But not the indefatigable, 85-year-old Renee Taylor, an Energizer bunny whose funny and bittersweet autobiographical one-woman-show, My Life on a Diet, is currently playing to full houses at St Clement’s Theater here in New York City.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Days to Come
Beckett Theater

The scene opens on a nice, comfortable, upper-middle-class living room. The walls are covered in patterned gray wallpaper, the furniture is well-used but not shabby, and the ceiling-high window with the to-the-floor drapes reveals a lovely autumn day. How could anything go wrong in such a cozy environment?

But then, things start to get out of whack. The two maids, both Irish, are tidying up and talking. The older one, who is Hannah (Kim Martin-Cotton), the family cook, demands that young Lucy (Betsy Hogg) hand over her money.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
August 26, 2018
This Prison Where I Live
Tenth Street Theater

Milwaukee’s Theater RED continues to surprise and delight local audiences with its eclectic play selection. Its current production takes on Angela Iannone’s play, This Prison Where I Live. Her title is taken from Shakespeare’s Richard II, , which Edwin Booth is rehearsing as the play begins. The setting is the late 1800s. Booth, in addition to being the most famous actor of his day, is also the brother of John Wilkes Booth.

Sadly, it is Edwin’s brother who left a greater mark on the world by assassinating President Abraham Lincoln.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Gilbert & Sullivan Unplugged
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

The artists begin by promising “Gilbert and Sullivan as you have never seen and heard them before.” By this, they seem to mean renderings by singing multi-instrumentalists. They use banjos, guitars, tambourine, violin, viola, trumpet, flute, a saw, and more, including something in a little blue case that may contain computer-output or a kind of xylophone.

“Unplugged” apparently means the arrangements aren’t traditional, though the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas highlighted are the most popular: Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado, and H. M. S.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Pretty Woman
Nederlander Theater

Samantha Barks is every bit the Pretty Woman of any guy’s dreams. No wonder the buttoned-down, super rich Edward Lewis (Andy Karl) falls for her. She could be Keri Russell’s kid sister; beautiful, of course, but also wildly talented and with plenty of soul. Comparisons with the movie original Vivian, Julia Roberts, are inevitable. But while much of the dialogue remains the same, here Vivian is softer, more the eternal optimist who still believes her Prince Charming is out there.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Famous
11:11

Working out of its new and gaudily-refurbished home, the former Macha Theater, An 11:11 Experience has mounted an ambitious and elaborate production of Famous, the latest work by Michael Leoni, whose 2017 comedy Elevator was a smash hit in L.A. Leoni, who is partnered with Michelle Kaufer in An 11:11 Experience, also directed Famous.

The play portrays the last night of Jason Mast (Christopher Dietrick), a handsome young Hollywood actor who, in 1994, has just been nominated for an Oscar.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Paradise: A Divine Bluegrass Musical Comedy
Ruskin Group Theater

Paradise: A Divine Bluegrass Musical Comedy is a toe-tapping, laugh-a-minute, vest-pocket bluegrass musical about the Appalachian town of Paradise where, owing to the shutdown of the local coal mine, the population has shrunk down to 47 inhabitants, five of whom congregate daily at the seedy general store run by Louanne Knight (the sensational Kelsey Joyce) . The store’s been in Louanne’s family for generations, but even she sees no hope for the future and wants out.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Jersey Lily
Milwaukee Chamber Theater - Cabot Theater

History meets mystery in Sherlock Holmes and the Case of The Jersey Lily . For those not completely enamored with the tales of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, there is far more to watch than the famed detective as he solves another criminal case. Specifically, Holmes’ co-stars include real-life Victorians Oscar Wilde and the famous actress Lillie Langtry, known to her fans as “the Jersey Lily.” The Midwest premiere of Jersey Lily opens the Milwaukee Chamber Theater’s 2018-2019 season in the Broadway Theater Center.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Eight Nine Three/Ya-Ku-Za
Biograph Theater

See review(s) under 893/Ya-Ku-Za

893/Ya-Ku-Za
Biograph Theater

The line-up of plays at the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists' sixth National Conference wouldn't have been complete without at least one incorporating a fight into its narrative.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Skintight
Laura Pels Theater

I did not see Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews, which by general consensus is said to be his best play to date. But the last three Harmon plays that I did see, Significant Other, Admissions, and the still-running Skintight – it closes August 26th –each one a familiar mixture of comedy and drama that contains everything and the kitchen sink, come across less a play, more a TV sitcom in which the playwright’s comedic hand overrides most everything important that is being said. A shrinking violet Harmon isn’t.

Ed Rubin
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Shining City
Hudson Guild Theater

Conor McPherson’s 2004 play Shining City receives a splendid intimate-theater production at the Hudson Guild Theater, thanks to its superlative cast and direction. The production, which was seen recently at the 2018 Hollywood Fringe Festival, actually got its local start several years ago in a class at the Actors Studio, where two of its members, Brian Foyster and Eddie Kehler, did a scene from the play. Encouraged by positive response, Foyster and Kehler then raised the money needed to do the entire play in a commercial setting.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Newsies
Manatee Performing Arts Center - Stone Hall

Basically, Newsies tells a story, based on a 1899 historical situation, of down-and-out youth street-sellers of New York newspapers striking. They react against such various exploiters as publishers, jobbers, supposed social “refuge” operators, and even police. But as a musical, there have to be heroes who unionize, a love story, and both a mechanical and political male deus ex machina. Mainly, though, there’s dancing.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Yellow Face
Beverly Hills Playhouse

Fresh from an award-winning two-month run in San Francisco, Yellow Face comes to L.A. with several of its original cast members and director Rob Zimmerman attached. It’s a good thing, too, as it makes for a production which moves snappily and smoothly over its 2 ½-hour length, drawing laughs almost every step of the way.

The expertise is reflected in the script as well, which is the work of the esteemed playwright David Henry Hwang, who remains the only Asian-American writer to have succeeded on Broadway (with M.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Turn of the Screw, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

The Turn of the Screw is essentially still a narrative, as the frame of Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation of Henry James’s Gothic mystery indicates. Although the story is acted out in scenes occurring mainly over six days, there’s little actual drama. A readers or chamber theater production would beg the audience primarily to use imagination, whereas this version draws attention to how clever the actors are—or not.

A narrator (The Man, Brian Owen) says how he was inspired to tell what he had learned from a sister who knew about a governess.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Lady Demands Satisfaction, The
City Lit

Sooner or later, every playwright writes a comedy utilizing motifs paying homage to Plautus, Aristophanes, and Shakespeare; these encompass such knotty bits as cross-gender disguises, thwarted lovers, straitlaced elders, and eccentrics of all stripes. Since Arthur M. Jolly's career boasts multiple contributions to the Babes With Blades repertoire, it's no surprise that his latest play (and third-time winner of the company's Joining Sword and Pen competition) should emerge part Mel Brooks, part Richard Lester, and a big part Looney Tunes).

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Rick Stone: The Blues Man
Black Ensemble Theater

Since its debut in 1976, Black Ensemble Theater's fortune has rested on its docudramas celebrating the influence of African-American entertainers on our national culture, pursuant to "eradicating racism through art." After generating such good will for so long, isn't it about time that this bold theater company was given its own musical revue?

The gently "meta" framing device for this autobiography-on-stage is a humble one, absent the usual hoofers in yards of mylar and sequins.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Other People's Money
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

For a period piece, Other People’s Money is almost as current in its dealings with business practices as it was in the play’s era, the late 1980’s. Though a now rare Problem Play, it hasn’t gone out of fashion with its way of dealing with a major issue. It benefits from both author Jerry Sterner’s dynamic dialectic and forceful direction by Jason Cannon.

The Problem: a traditional small Rhode Island factory, vital to its workers’ and town’s life, is being targeted by a Wall Street mogul, Lawrence Garfinkle.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Rockin' Down Fairytale Lane
Westcoast Black Theater Troupe Theater

WBBT artistic director and founder Nate Jacobs is sending children to adult audiences Rockin‘ Down Fairy Tale Lane with the help of the troupe’s Joey James. Editing the musical comedy’s book has made all the difference to an earlier version and brought a good lesson for all. It’s that everyone who goes beyond self will be joined together with others in good spirits, here exemplified in song and dance.

I can’t remember a time when everyone in a relatively large cast was as perfect as everyone on stage and the musicians off stage in WBTT’s summer ’18 show.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Head Over Heels
Hudson Theater

Head Over Heels is an important show; because it’s lighthearted fun, this fact may have escaped several people, but not the cheering crowd in the audience yesterday. Rather than pedantically delivering the message of equality and love for all, the casts starts the show with a rousing song and dance routine which declares “We Got the Beat,” and by gosh, they definitely do.

It’s no doubt a unique idea to pair the music of 1980’s pop group The Go-Gos with Sir Philip Sidney’s “The Arcadia” from 1590. To be fair, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Harvest, The
The Den

The Book of Mormon mocked the Church of Latter-Day Saints, but Samuel Hunter recognizes fully the confusion inherent in the melding of youthful restlessness with a creed as mystical in its rituals (ecstatic chanting, for example) as it is rigid in secular dynamics exacerbated by the environmental isolation of rural Idaho. To be sure, the call to evangelism may serve as an escape route, but the way is hard for those confronting the complexities of a global culture after a life of contemplative seclusion.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Linda
Steep Theater Company

There's a starring role for an AARP-eligible actress in Penelope Skinner's 2015 play, currently making its regional premiere at Steep Theater, but only if a female artist of sufficient stature can be found whom audiences will welcome in a role hearkening to sexist stereotypes dating back nearly a century.

Our heroine is Swan Cosmetics senior executive Linda Wilde, whose "True Beauty" marketing campaign targeting the over-fifty demographic has earned millions for her employers and now spurs her to freely boast of her happiness at being, herself, 55 years old.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2018
Straight White Men
Helen Hayes Theater

As you arrive at your seats at the Helen Hayes Theatre for Straight White Men, expect blaring rap music, a silvery mylar stage curtain, and two character actors roaming around the theater, chatting with the audience and offering ear plugs. Just before the show, they take the stage and introduce themselves as Ty Dafoe, a transgender native American, and Kate Bornstein. She says, "Me, I’m a Jew from the Jersey shore.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Blood Knot
American Players Theater - Touchstone

Family relationships can be a knotty business, if one considers the rivalries, tiffs, childhood pranks and taunts that can leave lasting scars even into adulthood. Add race into the mix and you have Blood Knot, Athol Fugard’s 2012 play about South African life under apartheid.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Smokey Joe's Cafe: The Songs of Leiber & Stoller
Stage 42

Is it okay to enjoy a musical without a message? Yes!!!

Jeannie Lieberman
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Defacing Michael Jackson
Stage 773

This early play by Aurin Squire has been produced only once before, and that's a shame. A childhood memory play, Defacing Michael Jackson rejects issue-focused mass appeal to instead depict a moment as specific as it is pivotal in deciding the fates of the youths living in the squalid ghetto of Opa Locka (Florida) who look to rock superstar Michael Jackson for deliverance from the hostilities born of differing races, genders, sexual orientations, intellects, wealth and methods of (mostly bad) parenting.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Fire in Dreamland
Public Theater - Anspacher Theater

The play opens with ocean noises; a striking young African-American woman in a trench coat is weeping. She turns to the audience and implores us to listen to the story of a movie she reveres. The film focuses on a terrible fire in 1911 that struck an amusement park on Coney Island called “Dreamland.” No humans, but several animals died.

A handsome stranger approaches the woman, and his less-than-charming opening line is to tell her, “You have shit on your face.” He wipes away the runny mascara, and his touch seems to electrify her.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Blood Knot
American Players Theater - Touchstone

The scene is a single-room hut of thrown-together, uneven boards in the non-white Korsten outskirts of Port Elizabeth, South Africa. This home is the scenic metaphor for its inhabitants, two half brothers.

Morris is mixed race—half black but could pass for white. Zachariah is definitely black. Morris keeps this home for them. Zachariah works in a hard, menial job outside. They’re saving to perhaps buy a farm.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Born Yesterday
American Players Theater - On the Hill

A little learning may indeed be dangerous, and in American Players Theater’s production of Garson Kanin’s modern classic, Born Yesterday, two relevant dangers get amplified. One is to the bribing, conniving, self-involved “businessman” Harry Brock when his mistress learns how he gets his money and power over even our government. Another danger is a warning by journalist Paul Vertel that we citizens must learn and act on how to protect our democratic rights against demogogues like Harry and those he controls.

In the swank D.C.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Straight White Men
Helen Hayes Theater

Families. Can’t live with ‘em; can’t kill ‘em. In the case of the three brothers and their father in Straight White Men, the balance teeter totters between the two extremes. It’s Christmas time, as you can easily tell by the named stockings hung on the mantel over the fireplace. Sons Jake (Josh Charles, beloved of “The Good Wife”) and Drew (the ridiculously handsome Armie Hammer) have come to spend the holiday with their father, Ed (Stephen Payne). They’re also curious about what’s going on with their brother Matt (Paul Schneider).

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
My Life on a Diet
St. Clement's

Most women, and not a few men, can readily identify with My Life on a Diet. Been trying to shed that weight since age eleven? Check! Remember the Scarsdale Diet, made famous by the fact that author Herman Tarnower was shot and killed by a jealous ex-mistress? Sure! And what about the myriad other diets Renee Taylor mentions? Yep, been there, done that. But once Renée Taylor starts dropping names, that’s where our shared experiences part company.

Most poignant and effecting is her remembrance of her good friend, Marilyn Monroe.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
As You Like It
American Players Theater - On the Hill

American Players Theater On the Hill’s 3/4 thrust stage backed by trees makes a natural setting in the foreground for Duke Frederick’s Court and later, with a few wagons of small trees upstage, the Forest of Arden. As You Like It’s been updated by director James Bohnen to 1870, but he highlights a current concern, the empowerment of women. Foremost of them is Rosalind.

Expressive Melisa Pereyra gets to assume Shakespeare’s longest woman’s role as a radiant, intelligent, charismatic Rosalind.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2018

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