Bump
Venice Theater - Pinkerton

Apparently much of Bump, this mostly intriguing and fun piece, is the result of improvisation, probably by the two stars. And star they do as they mime and play the cute heart out of a not-so-cute meet followed by a cuter one. Also a few different kinds of partings that might have happened anywhere on earth that has a Walmart.

Eliana begins by sitting and waiting and wondering that will eventually come full circle and have her end similarly but not identically. A buzzing insect and butterfly in a book get her out of her chair.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Madwoman of Chaillot, The
Off the Wall Theater

Playwright, novelist and diplomat Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944) was one of the most important men of his generation. Part of his legacy is the satiric The Madwoman of Chaillot, which is being staged by Off the Wall Theater. While set in the crazed, madcap world of Paris’s artistic Chaillot district, the play also makes important points about government corruption, greed and corporate mishandling.

In this version by director Dale Gutzman, the play is (on the surface) as crisp and refreshing as a glass of iced tea on a sizzling summer day.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
But I Can Move
Venice Theater

The program blurb for But I Can Move states: “Two artists share their own cultural boundaries, specialties, changes and pleasure through text and movement performance.” The cultural differences do not come through easily, but the movement and some text both spoken and projected in English help explain what the artists were trying to accomplish.

Movement is the highlight of the presentation, much aided by lighting and shadowy pastel projections in which what appear to be trees predominate.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Addams Family, The
Venice Theater

I’ve heard that Tacoma Musical Playhouse won first place in the last American Association of Community Theater’s competition among musical and play presentations. It’s The Addams Family -- first production at the ACCT Worldfest 2018 at Florida’s Venice Theater Stage--shows why the group has been and is going to be hard to beat any time. It’s community theater perfection. In my opinion, it would be very competitive with professionals.

Although there’s not a miscasting in the screwy bunch of characters, Rafe Wadleigh is a superlative competitor for best actor.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Carole's Kings
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

Carole King, with her voice or her pop songs or both, dominated the airwaves as well as everywhere musical theater appeared in the last part of the last century. Carole’s Kings now dominates an intimate stage at Florida Studio Theater to strike up its summer cabaret series. And striking it is, presenting a variety of vocals and their relationship to Carole King’s entire career achievements.

It may seem a different kind of treat to hear a woman’s career explained and her songs sung by men only.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Crossing Delancey
The Players

As a motion picture, “Crossing Delancey” was a standard pop comedy with simple romance. An unexpected hit in the contemporary film world of action blockbusters, its animation is of the human kind. It’s heavy only on Jewish urban life, characters, conversation, and comic references. They come together with universal sentiments in the stage version and make for enjoyable light summertime theater.

If there is a problem, it’s that Susan Sandler’s theatrical script is still mainly a cinematic one. Theatrical blackouts separate the multitude of scenes, slowing activity.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Skeleton Crew
Geffen Playhouse - Gil Cates Theater

Skeleton Crew is aptly titled. The social drama by talented newcomer Dominique Morisseau deals with the death of a Detroit auto factory whose workers are about to be dumped on a scrap heap. The play, now in a West Coast premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, is set in 2008, the year of the big economic crash in the USA. The human consequence of capitalism’s catastrophic failure falls on the four African-American workers, all of whom are brilliantly acted by the play’s cast.

June 2018
Royal Family of Broadway, The
Barrington Stage Company - Boyd-Quinson Mainstage

The Royal Family of Broadway at Barrington Stage is the first smash hit of the 2018 Berkshire Season. When word gets out, this is sure to be the hottest ticket in town. Be warned: this world-premiere musical will be around only through July 7, 2018. After that, as the title states, if all goes well, it’s Broadway bound.

This show has everything and then some. For this all-in production, Barrington Stage Company has bet the house. They have done it before and may well do it again. What’s not to like in an old chestnut, theater about theater, by George S.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Long Day's Journey into Night
Bram Goldsmith Theater

Just a little over a year ago, the Geffen mounted a local production of Long Day’s Journey into Night (with Alfred Molina and Jane Kaczmarek) , but that hasn’t stopped The Wallis from importing a British production of the same play, this one starring Jeremy Irons and Lesley (“Phantom Thread”) Manville. It comes to us from the Bristol Old Vic via the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Can it be that Eugene O’Neill is suddenly a hot playwright?

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Dan Cody's Yacht
City Center - Stage I

Privilege, wealth, education, the tensions of haves and have-nots, all provide rich fodder for dramatic theater. Dan Cody's Yacht, Anthony Giardina's latest Manhattan Theater Club production at City Center Stage 1, is set in two towns just outside Boston, working-class Patchett and upscale Stillwell.

Giardina's inspiration came from “The Great Gatsby” where F. Scott Fitzgerald's wealthy image of Dan Cody's yacht motivated the social climb of wannabe millionaire, Jay Gatz. For Giardina, however, the lure is not a yacht but top-level and costly education.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Lysistrata Unbound
Odyssey Theater

The war of the sexes is fought on all fronts in Lysistrata Unbound, Eduardo Machado’s rewrite of Aristophanes’s two-thousand-year-old Lysistrata. Working with John Farmanesh-Bocca, artistic director of Not Man Apart Physical Theatre Company, Machado strips away the farcical aspects of  wives withholding sex from their warrior husbands and turns the story into a full-blown tragedy.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Opportunities of Extinction, The
The Den

The Mojave Desert, located in the southeast corner of California, encloses within its boundaries the lowest elevations and highest heat indices in North America. These conditions endow the landscape with preservative qualities rendering it a site of natural phenomena dating to prehistoric times. Among these are the Joshua Trees, wind-twisted xerophytic shrubs deriving their label from the sun-dazzled hallucinations of evangelical migrants, for whom the eerie cactus shapes resembled prophets beckoning them to the promised land.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Bat-Hamlet
The Cornservatory

"Sometimes a man has to dress a certain way to do what he must do" declares our hero as he reluctantly acknowledges a universe where corruption is so widespread that only by embracing its stratagems can its defeat be ensured. Whether uttered by Shakespeare's melancholy prince or DC Comics's masked crusader, the myth of the lone man forced into disguise to wage war against deception crippling the social fabric of his homeland is so culturally ubiquitous that Jordan Pulliam's conflation of Elizabethan tragedy with Depression-era graphic-noir thriller is but a short step.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Blanket of Dust, A
The Flea

In Richard Squires’s play A Blanket of Dust, presented at The Flea Theater by Delphi Film in association with Alfonso Ramos and Eve Pomerance, a woman, Diane, loses her husband in the 9/11 disaster. She’s convinced that the government is responsible for the catastrophe and campaigns to uncover the conspiracy. She’s a Senator’s daughter, so the issue becomes a family affair.

Years later, she becomes involved with Andrew, a book-store owner active in the dissident movement.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Manufacturing Mischief
The Tank

Manufacturing Mischief is “a puppet play by Pedro Reyes, written by Paul Hufker.” It’s not clear what those credits mean, but Mr. Reyes is apparently the progenitor. The show presents us with a discussion of artificial intelligence and other topics, and it’s really smart. We meet Steve Jobs, Noam Chomsky, Elon Musk, Ayn Rand and other luminaries. They’re woven together in a plot that’s just as complex and silly as it should be. It has something to do with a machine that materializes the author of whatever book is put into it—thus Marx, Rand, and some of the others.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Jungle Book, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

A multimedia spectacular, this Jungle Book is based on Rudyard Kipling’s original work of that title. Its plot, though, gives a modern view of Mowgli, a human raised as a wolf and torn between human and animals’ worlds. It transports us (aged 5 upward) from today’s New York City to a jungle and nearby town in Madhya Pradesh, India. Magnificent technical-staging means of transportation bring us to share in Mowgli’s worlds with its problems, happily with suggestions for solutions.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Revolutionists, The
The Greenhouse

The first thing we hear in The Revolutionists is a female quartet crooning a song extolling the value of "stories." The second is the ominous crunch of a guillotine blade. The third is a cheerful young woman dressed in fashions of the French Directoire, declaring, "Well, that's not the way to start a comedy!"

We don't know it yet, but Lauren Gunderson has just apprised us of the agenda for her latest play—a smart, eloquent, multiple-metatheatrical romp that gallops apace without ever leaving us in the dust of boring facts.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Secret Life of Humans
59E59 Theaters

In David Byrne’s Secret Life of Humans, Ava, a young scientist and lecturer, poses a pivotal question, "What does it mean to be human?" How different is it from the rest of the animal kingdom? Byrne's creative exploration of this basic question is inspired by the work of the late mathematician and scientist Jacob Bronowski, creator of the popular 1973 television series, “The Ascent of Man.”

Bronowski traced human progress with his optimistic view that was reflected in the TV series.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Falling Forward
Symphony Space

Ten-minute plays are very difficult to write well. Actually, all plays are difficult to write well, but ten-minute plays give playwrights a particular challenge. They need to create a reality quickly. Nonetheless, a ten-minute play can be great. After all, drama needs compression.

Falling Forward: An evening of ten-minute plays, from Athena Theater at Symphony Space, gives us 11 plays that succeed to various degrees. The scripts, which are mostly mediocre, are well served by some good acting.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Diana Tapes, The
HERE

Princess Diana was certainly a phenomenon. Wikipedia reports that 750 million people watched her televised marriage to Prince Charles in 1981. She was, of course, a media sensation until her death in a car crash in 1997.

I’ve always failed to see what there was to admire in this woman. She was not a Cinderella, and if she was exploited for her pedigree, she apparently did not object. After all, she was Lady Diana before she was Princess Diana. She was killed returning from an evening of clubbing in Paris—at the age of 36—with a man not her husband.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
There's Blood at the Wedding
La MaMa

There’s Blood at the Wedding uses puppets and “performing objects” to relate the deaths of six innocent Americans killed by police: Philando Castile, Amadou Diallo, Sandra Bland, Sean Bell, Justine Damond, and Eric Garner. (To be fair, Sandra Bland’s inexplicable death may have been a suicide after she was jailed for not using her directional when she changed lanes.) It’s created, designed and directed by Theodora Skipitares and presented by La MaMa and Skysaver Productions.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Always...Patsy Cline
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

Patsy Cline may have died young, but she and her music still live impressively—for the third time at Florida Studio Theater—in a musical about her relationship to number-one fan Louise Seger. Just as Seger’s enthusiasm for country-western vocalist Cline helped propel her to fame, Susan Greenhill’s Louise acts as an irrepressible conduit to audience appreciation of Meredith Jones’s Patsy.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Our Lady of 121st Street
Pershing Square Signature Center

There is trouble at the Ortiz Funeral Home Funeral Home. Flower arrangements bank the open casket, chairs are ready for expected viewers in respect to the late beloved nun, Sister Rose. But where is the corpse, Sister Rose?

In Our Lady of 121st Street, playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis has fashioned a dark, insightful and strangely hilarious local slice of life at the Signature Theater. Detective Balthazar has been sent to the Ortiz Funeral Home to investigate.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
June 2018
Damascus
Strawdog Theater

Crime writers claim that inexperienced killers are easy to catch because they only plan up to the moment of the murder, neglecting such post-op measures as escape routes or disposal of evidence, so that even if suicide wasn't part of the original mission, confusion during the aftermath often drives them to view self-destruction as the only way out of the emotional turmoil.

This principle is what locates us, five minutes into our play, inside an airport shuttle van making its way from Minneapolis to Chicago.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2018
Seafarer, The
Irish Repertory Theater

“Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul to waste”

Scott Bennett
Date Reviewed:
May 2018
Marlowe's Fate
Studio Theater

It is late afternoon on May 30 in 1593 at the house of Eleanor Bull that is both a tavern and rooming house in Deptford, England. A small group of men meet to deal with a problem one of them has caused with the Privy Council of Elizabeth I; that man is Christopher Marlowe. It has been decided that Marlowe, the man, must die, but Marlowe, the poet and writer, must live. How this is to be accomplished is what we are about to learn, and, importantly, the reasons.

Scott Bennett
Date Reviewed:
May 2018
Anna Christie
Lyric Stage

During a recent visit to Boston, we attended one of the final performances of a riveting production of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie which closed on May 6, 2018. It was the first of four of his plays to win a Pulitzer Prize (the fourth was the iconic Long Day’s Journey into Night, which was produced and won the award posthumously).

The Lyric Stage production, directed and adapted by Scott Edmiston, attempted to tighten and contemporize the compelling but cumbersome 1921 play.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
May 2018
Children of a Lesser God
Studio 54

Joshua Jackson, starring as James Leeds in the revival of Children of a Lesser God, has to be one of the hardest working actors on Broadway. Not only does he speak and sign his own dialogue, he must also speak and sign for Sarah, a deaf former student who becomes his wife. In fact, at one point in the second act, James even complains of arm cramps. Jackson, who is known to TV audiences from “Dawson’s Creek” and “The Affair,” is surprisingly good, evincing a broader range of emotions and ability than his TV roles have shown.

Elyse Trevers
Date Reviewed:
May 2018
Mean Girls
August Wilson Theater

Tina Fey, of “SNL” fame, can do no wrong. She’s a comedy writer and a TV and movie actress. Now she has adapted her 2004 cult movie "Mean Girls" into a rollicking musical, one that been nominated for several Broadway awards.

High school was always a challenge, but it's even harder for Cady (Erika Henningsen) who has come from Kenya where she was homeschooled. Cady goes from a jungle of wild animals to a school of human animals whose pack is led and ruled by Regina George. An Alpha animal, Regina is gorgeous and imperious with two loyal followers.

Elyse Trevers
Date Reviewed:
May 2018
Travesties
American Airlines Theater

Be sure to bring a dictionary and a copy of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest with you when you attend the Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties. Starring the masterful actor Tom Hollander, the play requires rapt attention. It’s not a play to see at night if you are tired. The lines are often sometimes rapid-fire, and there are jokes and gibes, puns and plays on words. If you aren’t listening carefully, or like me are taking notes, you might miss some gems.

Elyse Trevers
Date Reviewed:
May 2018
Carousel
Imperial Theater

“When You Walk Through A Storm” has always been one of those overly-sentimental overdone songs that make me cringe … until I heard the glorious voice of Renee Fleming as Aunt Nettie singing it in the revival Lincoln Center of Carousel at The Imperial Theater. It was like hearing an angelic hymn. Never have I heard the song so beautifully sung.

Elyse Trevers
Date Reviewed:
May 2018
Long Reunion, The
Manatee Performing Arts Center - Bradenton Kiwanis Theater

The Long Reunion actually contains five special, funny, sometimes frazzled meetings of three friends after their high school class reunions for a 25th anniversary of their graduation. Then and every tenth year afterward, each meeting also draws the friends closer in a different way—into a dangerous environment.

In their riverside restaurant meeting place, the friends first gather for their 25th year after leaving Manatee High. Their personalities apparently haven’t changed, but circumstances have.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2018
Mind Reader
Greenhouse Theater Center

Mentalism—more commonly called "mind-reading"—may be the most invasive of the bamboozle-based arts. Sleight-of-hand locates its unknown factors securely within the objects undergoing manipulation (a person who disappears from inside a box, for example, is understood to accomplish this feat exclusively in that particular box). Clairvoyant sightings occupy a milieu safely distanced by time, past or future. The prospect of the last boundary protecting your individual privacy dissolving into a portal facilitating disclosure of its secrets, though—now that's disturbing.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2018
Summer
Lunt-Fontanne Theater

What? Another jukebox musical? On the surface, singer-songwriter Donna Summer is an ideal subject for a jukebox musical. She sold more than 140 million records worldwide during her career, winning five Grammy Awards and releasing 32 hit singles, 14 of which reached the Top Ten. So why isn’t the new musical Summer: The Donna Summer Musical better?

Elyse Trevers
Date Reviewed:
May 2018
Saint Joan
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Who was Saint Joan? Subject of many books, movies and plays, The Maid, as she was sometimes called, has been a fascinating historical figure. Defying her gender and station, she was able to rally the French troops and lead them to victory over the British soldiers.

Was she mad or did she really hear the voice of God?

Elyse Trevers
Date Reviewed:
May 2018
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Lyric Theater

With Jack Thorne's original, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the renovated Lyric Theater is experiencing a spectacular takeover in the realm of J.K. Rowling's multi-book cosmos featuring Harry Potter, Muggles, Puggles, and Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. While the theatrical two-part stage continuation presents the world of amazement and fantasy, the core of the story comes down to the personal world of family, friendship and change presented in two performances.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
May 2018
Gentleman Caller, The
Cherry Lane Theater

Just as Tennessee Williams called his first great work, The Glass Menagerie, a “memory play,” playwright Philip Dawkins (Charm) patterns his new Abingdon Theater Company production, The Gentleman Caller, as a memory play. True enough. The events in both plays are narrated by one of the lead characters and rely on memories.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
May 2018
Urinetown
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

“What kind of a musical is this?” wails Little Sally (Kaylee Annable), a distraught orphan who appears onstage as a cross between Annie and Raggedy Ann in the musical, Urinetown. At first, it seems that the downtrodden townspeople have risen to reclaim their right to pee without paying a price by overrunning the locked public restrooms controlled by an evil corporation, the Urine Be Good Company. But then things start to turn sour. “Well, reminds the show’s narrator, a crooked cop name Officer Lockstock, (Rick Pendzich), this isn’t a happy musical.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2018
Days are Shorter, The
Pride Arts Buena

Contrary to popular stereotype, women's midlife crises are not always easily remedied with hormone supplements and jewelry. Sometimes it takes a full-blown visitation by a spectral succubus or two to dispel the unsettling prospects of encroaching bioturbulence making the cosmological confusion of puberty pale in comparison.

Our reluctant voyager is 53-year-old Julia, a once-hopeful photojournalist who now lies about her age when on assignment for the lesbian "walker" service providing her income. Ex-spouse Pax (age 58) is an attorney considering a change of career.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2018
Soft Power
Ahmanson Theater

East collides with West in broadly satirical fashion in Soft Power, the David Henry Hwang/Jeanine Tesori musical now in a world-premiere run at the Ahmanson. Directed by Leigh Silverman, the show—which prefers to call itself “a play with a musical”—uses big brushstrokes to paint its comic picture of two super-powers, America and China, competing for cultural and political dominance. Hwang, who was commissioned by CTG to create this show for the company’s 50th anniversary season, based some of his script on personal experience.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2018

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