Exit the King
American Players Theater - Touchstone

Eugene Ionesco called Exit the King his “attempt at an apprenticeship in dying,” but at American Players Theater, it is mastery of the process toward the inevitable end. Ionesco maintained “we’re all of us dying men who refuse to die” as his King tries to do. Suspense comes not from what will happen but when and especially how.

The Guard at the King’s Throne Room (Casey Hoekstra, humorous as he tries making serious announcements) guides us into the play and provides briefings of its public scenes.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Blue Room, The
Whitebox Art Gallery

Arthur Schnitzler (Austrian) wrote La Ronde (German title “Reigen“) in 1897, but it was so scandalous that it wasn’t formally produced until 1920, in Berlin. Schnitzler was charged with obscenity—it was too much even for the Weimar Republic—and he withdrew it from production.

La Ronde, need I say?, focuses on sex. It’s the rare example of a play without structure that works perfectly, and this is so because of its concept. There are ten scenes, each centering round the act of sex.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Everybody
Pride Arts Buena

Long before the advent of self-help books, people looked to Morality Plays for advice on how to live in a manner ensuring a fair and just reward in the afterlife—however you define that term.

The earliest of these in the English language was the 1495-vintage Everyman, an allegorical narrative recounting its hero's final journey and his struggle to find a companion to accompany him beyond the grave.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Recruiting Officer, The
American Players Theater on the Hill

“Be All You Can Be” promises the sign over a recruiting booth in Shrewsburg, England, September 1774. It is, of course, a trap to get gullible men to fight the French—or any other thing their nation and officers choose. The set’s a lively market in a village next to the water and a ship. Here Irishman author George Farquhar’s text will set up an edgy drama of love and war—but a comedy because its central couples end happily.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Music of the Night, The
Florida Studio Theater

The Swingaroos  have audiences swinging and swaying to their jazzed-up versions of songs from 1925 to their own 2018 “11 O’Clock Number.” Their cabaret act gives just enough background of their songs and the composers, lyricists, and Broadway shows they came from to allow appreciation of their progress.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Screwball Comedy
Reuben Cordova Theater

Prolific Canadian playwright Norm Foster pays homage to classic 1940s film comedies like “The Thin Man” and “His Girl Friday,” in his new play Screwball Comedy, now in a U.S. premiere production at Theater 40, directed by Howard Storm.

Foster, who has had more than fifty plays produced since 1983, is a favorite of Theater 40, which has produced one of his plays in each of its seasons for the past several years.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Originalist, The
59E59 Theaters

We live in an age when our country is bitterly divided. It becomes more and more difficult to see the good in those whose political views are in direct opposition to our own. For this reason, The Originalist is very much a play for our time. As far as many in the audience are concerned, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (Edward Gero) could not have been more wrong on so many seminal issues. He was immovably opposed to reproductive rights for women, gay marriage, and gun control. He even called himself “a monster.” In spite of this, he was a quality human being.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Smokey Joe's Cafe
Stage 42

It’s not that I wasn’t listening to the radio during the 1950’s and 1960’s, but I just didn’t think that such songs as “Baby Baby,” “Poison Ivy,” “Yakety Yak,” and “Shoppin’ for Clothes” were connected to composers. Now I know that. But I actually didn’t know they were until 1975 when I saw the first Broadway production of Smokey Joe’s Cafe. After close to twenty-five years, a welcome revival is back Off Broadway.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Support Group for Men
Goodman Theater - Albert

However justified their current banishment from the spotlight, men are still half the population, and they are lucky to have a smart playwright like Ellen Fairey on their side. This premiere play assembles four—and later, more—of them in an apartment in Chicago's Wrigleyville district (the corner of Clark and Roscoe, if you want to be specific, as Fairey always is) where their attempts at conducting a quasi-Robert Bly consciousness-raising pow-wow are interrupted by the rowdiness in the street below.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Pamplona
Goodman Theater

After this solo show's premiere in 2017 was curtailed due to its leading—make that its only—actor taking ill mid-monologue, the immediate dramatic question at his comeback a year later was whether Stacy Keach would stay the course for the duration of Jim McGrath's 90-minute portrait of Ernest Hemingway on "a day when he didn't kill himself." Not only does Keach do so with energy undiminished, he navigates the contradictions of his persona's relentless pursuit of redemption through artistic productivity, whatever the cost (including four failed marriages, three wars, harassmen

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Blood at the Root
The Armory

There are two things you should know before the start of Blood at the Root: First, one day in 2006, on a high school campus in Jena, Louisiana, an African-American female student running for class president sat in the shade of an oak tree on campus—a venerated site habitually that "snobs and cliques" occupied. The next day, three hangman's nooses dangled from its branches and, later, a cafeteria brawl resulted in a white male student being severely beaten and six black male students arrested.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Anything Goes
Westchester Broadway Theater

In 1934, the country was once again feeling hopeful, and why not? FDR had been elected President, prohibition was over at last, and the Depression looked like it might finally come to an end for the weary American people. So long, bad times; hello, Anything Goes. As in so many movies of the ‘30’s, reality was just not what the folks wanted. Hits of the era were “It Happened One Night,” and A Night at the Opera for their comedic value.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
Irish Repertory Theater

On a clear day, Melissa Errico, as the song says, outshines every star. On a cloudy one; well, it just doesn’t make any difference. The girl is luminescent. As Daisy Gamble, the unemployed chain smoker who will try anything, including hypnosis, Errico is kooky, earnest, adorable. As Melinda, Daisy’s former English self, who’s revealed through regression therapy, she’s stately, passionate, determined. The fact that Dr. Mark Bruckner (Stephen Bogardus), Daisy’s psychiatrist, falls hard for Melinda is the story upon which their plotline hinges.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
July 12, 2018
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
Irish Repertory Theater

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever was not a major Broadway hit in 1965. Trying again in 2011, a risky tweak did not pay off, even with Harry Connick, Jr. in a starring role. Yet, this musical about psychoanalysis, ESP and reincarnation is occasionally reincarnated on stage, not because of the wacky book by Alan Jay Lerner. What stands out are Lerner's brainy lyrics and Burton Lane's glorious music, creating a melodic score that brightens the foggiest day.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
I Got Troubles!
Crown City Theater

Angie’s Coffeehouse, “a magical place where folks can work out their problems,” is the setting for Art Shulman’s I Got Troubles!, now in a world premiere run at Crown City Theater in North Hollywood. Shulman, a veteran L.A. playwright/director, is known for his warm-hearted, upbeat dramas, and he doesn’t depart from formula this time around.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2018
Half Time
Paper Mill Playhouse

How often have we heard someone over 60 years old say, “When you become a senior you become invisible?” That may be all too true in some circles, but the seniors who audition to dance in the center court in the new musical Half Time are determined to make themselves visible in a most exciting and inspiring way.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Skintight
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center: Laura Pels Theater

Joshua Harmon's Skintight is a mashup of quirky, bittersweet, sluggish, and hilarious, tangled in the Roundabout Theater Company's production at the Laura Pels Theater. Harmon, who recently wrote Admissions and Significant Other, presents a family with provocative characters looking for love but vexed with personal predicaments with beauty, loss, and loneliness.

Audrey Hepburn once said, “The beauty of a woman, with passing years only grows!” but these are not comforting words for Jodi Isaac. Sharply portrayed by Idina Menzel, Jodi feels old.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
American in Paris, An
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

The city of light is ablaze with graceful music, lively movement and romance, thanks to An American in Paris, which is making its Milwaukee debut in the current Broadway series. This tender, sophisticated tale of love and loss is set in the early days following France’s emancipation in World War II. An American GI, Jerry (McGee Maddox), appears onstage and glances at the still-gorgeous city he wants to capture in his sketchbook. He tears up his train ticket for home once he spies a mysterious girl (Allison Walsh) on a crowded Parisian street.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Lonesome Blues
York Theater at St. Peter's Church

Sounds of blues tradition, R&B, gospel, soul, doo-wop, and rap resonate back through the years, treasured on recordings beginning in the 1920's and tweaked through the decades, reflecting the passage of time.

In an evocative production, the York Theater Company's world musical salutes Blind Lemon Jefferson in Alan Govenar and Akin Babatundé's Lonesome Blues, with Babatundé portraying the bluesman. Known as the "Father of Texas Blues," Blind Lemon Jefferson was the first popular male recording solo singer/guitarist of folk/country blues.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
I'll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers
Kimpton Journeyman Hotel - Ballroom

One of Milwaukee’s most interesting theater companies, TheateRED, collaborates with first-time theater group Untitled Productions for a show guaranteed to keep audiences laughing throughout: I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers. The show, making its Milwaukee debut, also introduces local theatergoers to a new theater space: the second-story ballroom at the Third Ward’s Kimpton Journeyman Hotel.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Property, The
Clurman Theater

Ben Josephson’s play The Property, presented by New Light Theater Project at The Clurman Theatre at Theater Row, centers around a weak-willed woman, Irene, whose tenant—he’s renting the cottage—offers an enticing alternative to her nerdy husband, Eddie. Her self-absorbed high-school son, Todd, is no comfort to her, and her overbearing ex-husband, Vernon—he’s returned after 16 years—is a liability.

The play is essentially plotless.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Murder for Two
Florida Studio Theater - Keating

A tour de force for two actors, Murder for Two engages them in solving the mystery of who killed a famed author of murder mysteries. Tuned in to summertime audiences’ love of light plots and musicals, they deliver a tour de farce that pleases overall despite activity overkill.

Primarily as policeman Marcus Moscowicz, Paul Helm hopes for promotion to detective by uncovering “whodunit.” He comes to assume it’s someone who’d be revealed a villain in author Whitney’s new novel, as have others in his works.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Tarzan
Atlanta Lyric Theater

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fictional character Tarzan was a cultural sensation when it was first appeared on the scene in magazine form in 1912, and then as a popular novel in 1914, both titled “Tarzan of the Apes.” Becoming a big hit with the public, the Chicago-born Burroughs (1875-1950) went on to write an additional twenty-five Tarzan sequels over the next half century. On a frantically productive, life-long roll, Burroughs’ also penned some fifty Sci-Fi and Western novels.

Ed Rubin
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Our Very Own Carlin McCullough
Geffen Playhouse

Who should control the life of a young tennis prodigy is the question that lies at the heart of Our Very Own Carlin McCullough, Amanda Peet’s drama which is now in a world-premiere run at the Geffen Playhouse. The play, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, came out of the Geffen’s development program and is the rare (and welcome) example of a major L.A. theater taking a chance on a new work.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Long Day's Journey into Night
Stratford Festival of Canada - Avon Theater

The intensity of tortured love between the four Tyrones in Eugene O’Neill’s tenderly intimate and brutally heart-wrenching autobiographical tragedy, Long Day’s Journey into Night, would be repulsive if it were not so humane, bizarrely, and sometimes even comically self-aware, and so believably eloquent and poetic. It is a supreme challenge for actors and directors, and a modern masterpiece.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Golden Girls, The: The Lost Episodes: Volume 2
Mary's Attic

In the annals of North American comedy, the television series providing the source material for this camp-drag parody was conceptually daring in its own right—not only did The Golden Girls’s central characters consist exclusively of elderly single women living apart from their families in an era of economic prosperity that saw the rise of single-generation ghettos dubbed "retirement villages," but the cessation of childrearing duties also conferred on these matriarchs a license to speak their minds on issues of the day with a candor often shocking their sheltered offsp

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Log Cabin
Playwrights Horizons

Sunday, June 24 saw a massive parade celebrating gay rights, part of New York City’s Gay Pride Week 2018. It was the perfect time to cover Log Cabin. As usual, Playwrights Horizons presents us with a play that is original, thought provoking, and not always comfortable.

The year at the beginning is 2012; we end up in 2017 through delineated projections, “A short year later.” During this time, two couples explore their friendship, beliefs, and attitudes about gay equality and the world around them.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Hello, Dolly!
Shubert Theater

Most people who know Hello, Dolly! may not realize that Dolly is an Irish woman who married a Jewish merchant. The show is based on a one-act farce originally written in 1835 and made into a full-length play in 1842. In 1938, Thornton Wilder adapted the 1842 version into an American comedy entitled The Merchant of Yonkers. It lasted 39 performances on Broadway. Fifteen years later, after Wilder had extensively rewritten the play and renamed it ”The Matchmaker,” a new production was mounted.

Scott Bennett
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Music Man, The
Stratford Festival of Canada - Festival Theater

Opening night at Canada’s great Stratford Festival was abruptly cancelled just as a glittering crowd had assembled for the gala premiere of a new production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, starring Martha Henry as Prospero. A phone call announcing a bomb threat could not be ignored. Fortunately, the next night’s opening performance of the feel-good musical The Music Man, lavishly re-staged and dazzlingly re-choreographed, restored the festive tone of the week of new productions.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Cyprus Avenue
Public Theater

The Public Theater has brought across the Atlantic Cyprus Avenue from The Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and The Royal Court Theatre, London. David Ireland has written a 100-minute piece that starts as a black comedy and morphs into serious tragedy.

In late middle age, poor Eric, a Protestant in Belfast, has been having trouble sleeping. The insomnia triggers a psychotic episode, and we watch as his delusion develops. He has a new granddaughter, Mary Mae, who looks like Gerry Adams, the Catholic political leader (and, some would say, terrorist sympathizer). No!

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Humans, The
Ahmanson Theater

The Humans came to L.A. with a slew of theatre medals on its chest: successful regional and Broadway productions, a 2016 Tony Award for best play. It also drew big laughs during its opening-night performance at the Ahmanson. So why in the world didn’t I love the play, the way just about everyone else around me did?

Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t hate or even dislike the play, just found it to be disappointing and somewhat underwhelming.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Request Stop
Venice Theater

Staged in the round (actually in a rectangle), Harold Pinter’s Request Stop provides an intimate “in the ring” experience of being at a side of a bus stop where diverse characters will await transportation. The wait is full of Pinteresque pauses, sudden actions, frustrations. The people waiting are of different sexes, ages, and probably social and economic statuses. They stay apart and get together, are cordial and the opposite, and—it is safe to say—have different personalities and desires.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Stone of Patience, The
Venice Theater

Basically a danced drama, The Stone of Patience is as enigmatic as its title. Dramatic movement, sometimes with clicking-like tap sounds but mostly thunderous music, suggests violence. Predominantly solemn black-haired women, costumes, and curtains suggest action to be mourned. So a white dress on a woman character has her stand out in marriage (seemingly forced, thus rape) and, when the dress is rolled up on her belly, a pregnancy. Almost unbelievably, this activity may be the lightest part of the presentation.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Othello
Delacorte Theater

What a strange set of inexplicable choices director Ruben Santiago-Hudson has made in The Public Theater’s production of Othello at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park! He has, first of all, cast a black actor in the role of Roderigo. There’s no point in Othello’s being a black man if he’s not the only black man in the story. The entire subtext of racism that runs through the play is lost, and Brabantio’s outrage at his daughter’s marriage is ill-explained. The beating of the play’s heart has been stopped. This is Shakespeare victimized by political correctness.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Monochrome
Venice Theater

Monochrome deals with belonging, striving to belong, bullying, rejecting, and being rejected. There is an unaccepted person in each scene along with the people who reject. The usual reject has a Chaplinesque quality. That’s the rare distinguishing characteristic of any in the group of players. Music does convey changing moods, however.

Costumes seem to be a bit ragged but are fully bland in color and design. They could be the dressing choice of any people who do not have distinct personalities or, even more important, true character.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Pichanga

Cristian Lopez appears as a young South American Football (that is, Soccer) player who gives many observations and personal perspectives on his life and activities in a poorer neighborhood on the periphery of Santiago. Marking off various areas of the intimate stage, Lopez makes lines in salt on the floor to represent a connection between the games of football/soccer and of life in his area of Chile.

The title word “pichanga” has various meanings of which three seem to apply here.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Spirit and Sworded Treks
Venice Theater

Maria Cheng refers to her one-woman show as “an ongoing spiritual journey.” It combines her explorations of life with her talents of teaching, dancing, tai chi, speaking, choreographing, authoring/storytelling, and arts administration. She makes it all look easy in Spirit & Sworded Treks during which she also artistically wields the titled weapon.

Backed by a projected circular religious symbol, Maria Cheng takes off on about five phases out of eight of her full presentation.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
One of a Kind
Venice Theater

A twist on a coming-of-age play, One of a Kind has Eden Bar anticipating writing in her dull diary about the 16th birthday she is about to celebrate. It comes, and with it, her trip to the government Personality Office. There she’ll receive her Personality Definition with which to leave childhood and become an adult.

On the big day, Eden meets discouraging judges who act like bouncy office workers ready to be clowns. Made-up faces—and for some huge dark rimmed glasses—give them definitiveness.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Michelangelo da Caravaggio
Venice Theater

Like Caravaggio’s paintings come to life, the staging of Michelangelo da Caravaggio comes off as a series of tenebrous tableaux beginning and ending the master’s typical actions. Most are so graphic that, although all the dialogue is in Italian and in no way translated into English, much can be understood via visuals. All are either colorful or the result of interplay between light and darkness.

The play’s beginning assumes that a woman stabbed Caravaggio fatally. Then he’s shown at the start of a play-long flashback wielding his paintbrush.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Antigone
Venice Theater - Pinkerton

The play Antigone by Sophocles and its story are classic. In a modern Slovanian language adaptation, it is contemporary in its concern with young women’s status and development as well as governmental politics. In its presentation, it is up to date, as well, in use of projections and cell phones for messaging and picture taking.

Jakob Podjavorsek cold-bloodedly dominates as Creon, the absolutist ruler who’s decreed the corpse of his defeated foe Polynices must ignominiously lie unburied.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018

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