Kingdom
The Den

Our paradisiacal realm might be a commercially crafted amusement park in Florida encircled by the hostile culture endemic to that gulf-rim state, but the magic empowering true love and lovers is no less efficacious for being cobbled from the gospel according to Batman and Walt Disney, augmented by folk wisdom, astrology, and Everglades voodoo.

The cataclysm in Michael Allen Harris’s Kingdom precipitating crisis, ironically, is the 2015 legalization of same-sex marriage.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2018
Girl Who Knew Too Much, The
Public Theater - Joe's Pub

“Every time I have sex I get into a relationship. Every time I get into a relationship I stop having sex. I found the Bermuda Triangle. It is between my legs. Everyone who goes there disappears out of my life.” (Penny Arcade from her Longing Lasts Longer).

After three years of touring her one-woman show around the world, the eminently quotable performance artist Penny Arcade, an uncanny, in-your-face, truth-telling Cassandra that people actually believe, is back at Joe’s Pub at NYC’s Public Theater.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
March 2018
Sell/Buy/Date
Geffen Playhouse - Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater

Another master of the solo show, Sarah Jones follows up on her Broadway hit Bridge and Tunnel with Sell/Buy/Date, a one-person play about sex and sexual politics, directed by Carolyn Cantor. Jones, who is both a writer and performer, approaches her themes from a feminist position but doesn’t lecture or rant. “When people come to the theatre, I want to provoke thought and laughter, not prescribe what they should think,” she explains in a program note.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2018
El Niño
The Met Theater

El Niño, L.A.’s bizarre winter weather pattern, (bursts of ferocious rain interspersed with blazing sunlight), is the symbol for Justin Tanner’s new comedy, now drawing laughs in its world-premiere run at Rogue Machine.  Tanner, a much-produced L.A.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2018
Tragic History of Dr. Faustus, The
Off the Wall Theater

There may not be any real devils in Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan-era classic The Tragic History of Dr. Faustus, but Off the Wall Theater director Dale Gutzman makes some devilishly clever choices in taking the audience into Faustus’ world.

The production begins in 1920s Germany, as a singer (Kristen Pagenkopf) entertains a party crowd. The guests sip wine delivered by a butler, and soon the good times seem headed towards debauchery.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Jackie Unveiled
Lovelace Studio theater

Write about kings and queens, urged Aristotle, and since celebrities are the closest thing we have to royalty (in the USA), it stands to reason that countless plays will be written about them.  The latest example is Jackie Unveiled, Tom Dugan’s solo show about Jackie Kennedy, starring Saffron (“Mozart in the Jungle”) Burrows, directed by Jenny Sullivan.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2018
Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill
West Coast Black Theater Troupe

A star of Broadway is portraying a legendary singer in 1959 in a Philadelphia dive of a nightclub. The reenactment will foretell the end of her career as she relates her life of body and soul abuse. There’s music with potent lyrics at every turn of her story. They’re what makes the performance of a biography special.

At WBTT, the Emerson stage is backed with red velvet curtains. The color repeats itself in shades on little lamps at the stage’s sides and on posts that define the space where tables and chairs bring patrons up close to the performance area.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2018
Hail, Hail Chuck: A Tribute to Chuck Berry
Black Ensemble Theater

Just to ascertain that we know where our journey starts, Black Ensemble raises the curtain on its latest revue, Hail, Hail, Chuck, with performances of two classics emerging from the Southern regions of the United States: Ruth Brown's "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean" and Jerry Lee Lewis’s "Great Balls of Fire." Both share a 12-bar, three-chord melodic structure and lyrics differing in their arrangement of verse and refrain.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2018
Anna Karenina
Lifeline Theater

Compared to his earlier “War and Peace,” Leo Tolstoy's thousand-page “Anna Karenina” may have been a light read for the Russian intelligentsia during the turbulent years before the revolution. However, while its tale of passion among the privileged continues to resonate in 2018, literary consumers today are more likely to encounter it within the abbreviated dimensions of its many adaptations—cinematic, operatic and balletic—making Jessica Wright Buha's tidy two-and-a-half-hour synopsis a welcome addition to the list.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2018
One House Over
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse

As playwright Catherine Trieschmann points out in the world premiere of One House Over, immigrants come to America in all shapes, sizes and nationalities. They also use different methods for coming to the U.S. It’s clear that Trieschmann sides with undocumented Mexican immigrants who wish to become legal citizens after spending a lifetime within our borders, creating a play that is timely as well as thought-provoking.

One House Over is being produced by Milwaukee Repertory Theater in conjunction with the Geva Theater in Rochester, NY.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2018
Surely Goodness and Mercy
Redtwist Theater

The publicity synopsis may read like a listing for the Hallmark Channel, but playgoers should not be hasty in dismissing Chisa Hutchinson's Surely Goodness and Mercy as simplistic sentimentalism. The belief that optimistic endings are incompatible with intelligent arguments is only one of the popular misconceptions debunked by this prolific author.

Our story's hero is 12-year-old Tino, whose mother died, literally, taking a bullet for him—trauma remanding her orphaned son to the reluctant care of his ill-tempered Aunt Alneesa.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Outgoing Tide, The
Tenth Street Theater

From the title to the sounds of migrating geese heading south for the winter, one expects this play to be about death and renewal. Playwright Bruce Graham doesn’t disappoint, as his moving and poignant The Outgoing Tide traces how one man takes control of his own destiny.

That man would be Gunner, a fast-talking, wisecracking man in his early 70s.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Hunchback of Notre Dame, The
Class Act Productions

For over two decades Class Act Productions has astonished audiences in The Woodlands, Texas with the quality of its performances while becoming one of the most widely recognized and honored youth theatre programs in the nation.

Skillfully directed by company founder/producer, Keith Brumfield, last weekend’s stunning performances of The Hunchback of Notre Dame at The Nancy Bock Performing Arts Center, made it clear those accolades are well-deserved.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
In the Body of the World
City Center - Stage 1

The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler’s groundbreaking play, first came to the attention of New York audiences when it opened Off Off Broadway in 1996. Since then, it has been published in 48 languages and performed in over 140 countries. Fashioned from some 200 interviews that Ensler conducted among woman in all walks of life and ethnicities, the play openly deals with sex, sex work, body image, love, rape, menstruation, female genital mutilation, masturbation, birth and orgasms, all subjects that the playwright, performer, and activist is still involved with.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
In the Body of the World
City Center - Stage 1

"A mother’s body against a child’s body makes a place. It says you are here. I have been exiled from my body. I was ejected at a young age and I got lost...For years I have been trying to find my way back to my body, and to the earth." For writer Eve Ensler, the return back to her body and to the earth began with cancer.

Ensler (The Vagina Monologues), centers her new play, In the Body of the World, in the core of her body.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
School for Wives, The
City Garage Theater

Moliere’s venerable comedy, The School for Wives, which was first produced in 1662, gets a makeover in City Garage’s version of the play. Freshly translated by Frederique Michel and Charles Duncombe and performed in modern dress, this School doesn’t seem creaky at all; in fact its satirical attack on male chauvinism and arrogance has a special relevance these me-too days.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Southern Gothic
Windy City Playhouse

In some circles, this literary genre would be called "immersive" theater, in others, "fly-on-the-wall" drama. The important thing to remember is that flies don't always remain in the same spot on the same wall.

As in Alan Aykbourn's House & Garden, Leslie Liautaud's play progresses in simultaneous real time over several locales, and as in "mosh pit" staging, audience members are free to roam the performance space at will.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Brothers Size, The
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Thetaer

For most Milwaukee theater audiences, The Brothers Size will be an introduction to the work of talented newcomer Tarell Alvin McCraney. Although hailed as among America’s brightest new playwrights, McCraney has had only one other play, In the Red and Brown Water, produced here in conjunction with a local university several years ago.

Given this fact, one cannot assume that local audiences will be well-versed in Yoruba culture, which is the source for McCraney’s trio of plays.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Memphis
Hobby Center

Every so often a great musical comes along with an opening number that is so spell-binding it seems like it should be a grand finale. That is the case currently with the extraordinary Theater Under the Stars production of the Tony Award-winning show, Memphis: The Musical, now playing at Sarofim Hall in Houston’s Hobby Center.

Led by sensational vocalist, Warren G. Nolan Jr.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Constellations
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne's Lab

After a traditional cute meet, a man and woman begin, through stops and starts, to relate to each other nontraditionally in parallel worlds in a universe that accommodates different times, places, motivations, actions and reactions. A dark blue background holds stars. Lights flicker or flash to sounds, designating each variation of the same humans’ relationship. According to string theory, an infinite number of these could take place.

Chris Tipp’s usually nice-guy Roland is a beekeeper. Alexis Hyatt works at Cambridge U. in the astrophysics department.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, The
Annenberg Center - Bram Goldsmith Theater

Romance is in the air at the Wallis, both literally and figuratively. Kneehigh, the British company known for its imaginative and crowd-pleasing productions of such works as The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips and Rapunzel, has revived its 1992 version of The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk and brought it to the United States. In its stop at the Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills, Marc Antolin and Daisy Maywood take on the roles of Marc and Bella Chagall, one of the most loving couples in history.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Disco Pigs
Irish Repertory Theater

Every once in a blue moon, my mind is kidnapped by a play in which a great deal of what is being said by the actors—be it an accent, a foreign phrase, or a made-up language—no matter how hard I try to decipher what I am hearing, has words being delivered from the stage that are largely unintelligible.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Fusiform Gyrus
Talking Band

The pre-show of Fusiform Gyrus consists of a grey-haired man at a desk, with his head lowered. There’s a black back wall, which turns out to be a scrim, with scientific names for beasts written on it: thamnophis sirtalis, phengaris arion….

Fusiform Gyrus, the program tells us, is “a region in the brain that lights up with activity during brain imaging when people describe, and give names to living things.” At the show’s start, a second grey-haired man enters, and the two men, equally tall, laugh for no reason.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Rehearsal, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

At Florida State University/Asolo Conservatory, The Rehearsal is a double delight. It is a play within a play (much of Pierre Marivaux’s 18th Century The Double Inconstancy inside Jean Anouilh’s drama set in 1950s France), uniting the past and the modern. It is also one of the best acted plays I’ve seen by the Conservatory for Actor Training’s second year students.

It’s no accident that in French “repetition” has the same meaning of repetition or repeating, as in English, but relating to theater, it means rehearsal.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Fear and Misery in the Third Reich
The Den

After fleeing Germany in 1933, Bertolt Brecht made it his mission to warn us that a political faction therein led by a charismatic upstart named Adolf Hitler was up to no good. This he accomplished in a series of dramatic sketches illustrating the suffering of innocent people under the manipulative coercion of corrupt authorities—a theme explored in his earlier plays, but now attributed to a particular group of oppressors.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Breach: A manifesto on race in America
Biograph Theater

An unwritten rule observed by playwrights from antiquity to the present day is the wholesale denial of sex education as a factor in the psychological development of their characters—an omission making for plot progressions in which the plans of educated adults are upset by accidental pregnancies, babies are born on unwashed floors in public buildings, infants are diapered on cemetery grasslands, fatherhood is presented as an after-the-fact responsibility and motherhood, a before-the-fact vocation.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Hello, Dolly!
Crighton Theater

After a historically sad and troubling week for Americans aware of the tragic events in Florida, the abundant joy that is now being offered by the Stage Right Players production of Hello, Dolly! at Conroe’s gorgeous Crighton Theater, could not have come at a better time. It was a half-century ago when I first saw the show’s hit 1967 Broadway revival with its all-black cast, memorably headlined by Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Finding Neverland
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

Not nearly as bad as some of its Broadway reviews suggest, the mildly pleasant Finding Neverland filled the hearts of both children and adults at Milwaukee’s Marcus Center for the Performing Arts. Although the main characters/actors lack subtlety and nuance, both in reciting their lines and chirping through the uplifting lyrics, the show itself is an excellent touring vehicle. Credit for this goes to a truly magical director, Diane Paulus, and a talented team of creators.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Prelude to the Apocalypse
La MaMa

Prelude to the Apocalypse is an hour-long solo show written and performed by Blake Sugarman and presented by La MaMa.

Mr. Sugarman talks to us about the environmental crisis, and for the first half-hour or so, he remains seated behind a desk, speaking—and this is ill-advised—into a microphone. An hourglass sits on the desk, and its live image is projected on the back wall. There’s a large, handsome pile of trash bags upstage as well.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Isaac Babel and the Black Sea
Lab Theater

Acting schools are one of the last places in L.A. where one can see large-scale original productions. Basic economics and recent Actors Equity contract requirements dictate that state of affairs, resulting in a profusion of one- and two-person shows being mounted here (except in those small theaters which have gone non-union).

Thus it was good to see thirteen actors listed in the program of Isaac Babel and the Black Sea, which is now in a world-premiere run at Stella Adler Lab Theater. Sometimes one yearns to see full-blown paintings, not just intimate portraits.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Glass Menagerie, The
freeFall Theater - Mainstage

How can a production present a classic play in a new light? The Glass Menagerie at freeFall Theater may show how. Here, Tom Wingfield recalls the action of the plot via his memory but by performing magic. Director Eric Davis seems to think that because author Tennessee Williams was gay, Tom is too. So he wanted to escape his repressive mother and environment but also to seek lovers at sea. Shall we test?

Williams ordered a picture of the missing Wingfield father who “fell in love with long distance” always to look down on the family room.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Two-Fisted Love
Odyssey Theater

“To see what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”

Dorothy Parker’s telling line came back to me as I sat through Two Fisted Love, David Sessions’s dark drama, now in a world-premiere run at the Odyssey and directed by Jules Aaron.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Cyrano
Jarvis Square

What you need to know about Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac is that there are these two guys—one is a smart, talented, sensitive, athletic rock star, but ugly (or thinks he is), and the other is a hunky airhead—who are both in love with the same girl. Since the brainy guy wants the girl to be happy, he helps the dummy woo her (not being too bright, herself, she falls for it).

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Skeleton Crew
North Shore Center for the Performing Arts

This grubby industrial break room, with its cold fluorescent-tubing lights and peeling walls, is beginning to look disturbingly familiar to Chicago playgoers, given the recent proliferation of plays depicting gritty low-level working conditions. If this is unsettling, maybe it's because, as union steward Faye reminds us, "Any moment, any one of us can become The Other"—transformed from the person handing panhandlers spare change out the car window on the exit ramp to the one holding the sign.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Water by the Spoonful
Mark Taper Forum

There are enough demons in Water by the Spoonful to fill the realms of Pluto.

In Quiara Alegria Hudes’s 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, now running at the Taper, just about everyone in the seven-person cast is battling a severe psychological problem, beginning with the more-or-less main character Elliot (Sean Carvajal), an Iraq war vet with PTSD and a gimpy leg. Then there are Fountainhead, Chutes & Ladders, and Orangutan (Josh Braaten, Bernard K.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Shakespeare's Greatest Hits
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

A projection for a long run is a good thing, because in its first week, an already revised Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits does not seem to be in final form yet. Its title may be misleading: There are only three lyrics written by William Shakespeare. And they are superior to enough of the others in later music presented here to make one wish Shakespearean plays had been culled for more.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Rhinoceros
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

I've long wanted to see Ionesco’s Rhinoceros produced in English. After attending Asolo Rep’s production directed by Frank Galati, I’m still waiting. I should have been warned. Galati had said in a local interview that he, with permission of Ionesco’s estate, was turning three acts into two. That’s changed more than one French play since the ‘50s.

Galati also “tried to prune the text so that it would have efficiency and momentum, not...returning and reflecting and repeating, but moving on and on.” Sometimes a motif gets lost in the process.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Ironbound
Gil Cates Theater

The drama sizzles and crackles in Ironbound, Martyna Majok’s powerful play now on tap at the Geffen, directed by Tyna Rafaeli. Majok, daughter of a Polish-born working-class woman, grew up in an industrial corner of New Jersey whose factories and mills once supported large numbers of immigrants. Now, in this post-industrial age, the factories and mills have been abandoned— the people who worked in them as well. Against that bleak, grim backdrop—symbolized by Tim Mackabee’s looming factory wall—Ironbound tells its pungent, black-humored tale.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue
Kirk Douglas Theater

Center Theater Group has mounted Quiara Alegria Hudes’s 2007 play Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, at the Kirk Douglas as a way of introducing L.A. to her trilogy of related plays, one of which, Water by the Spoonful, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. (Spoonful will open in a week’s time at Mark Taper Forum, followed by The Happiest Song Plays Last at Los Angeles Theater Center).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Nice Girl
Raven Theater

A woman 38 years old in 1984—when this play purports to be set—would have been born in 1946 and graduated from high school circa 1964. Since we are told that she was her family's second child, her now-"nearly 70" mother would likely have married during the mid-1940s. This hypothetical timeline is important because Melissa Ross has a penchant for infusing her rom-com sensibilities with a hazy ambience suggesting narratives of far earlier vintage.

The target of the title sobriquet, Nice Girl, is Miss Josephine Rosen.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2018

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