Romantics Anonymous
Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

None could be sweeter of all the musicals I’ve seen in the last few decades than Romantics Anonymous or the chocolate I got to eat as the show began. Heroine Angelique was making her spectacular batch of candy. Too bad hero Jean-Rene’s candy from his failing Chocolate Factory isn’t selling like special limited chocolates from Mercier’s provincial shop.

What if Angelique and Jean-Rene could get together? Well, the delightful musical that debuted in the intimate San Wanamaker Playhouse makes it happen...but not right away.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Cruel Intentions
Le Poisson Rouge

Sometimes the experience of being with an audience that is largely half your age and that knows not only more than you do about what we are about to see but knows every line and situation as if it was “Casablanca” can be amusing as well as eye-opening. Such was the case with me and my companion at the press preview of Cruel Intentions, a stage adaptation by co-creators Jordon Ross and Lindsey Rosin of the cult 1999 film that is now entertaining its fans at (le) Poisson Rouge, a nightclub in Greenwich Village.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Meteor Shower
Booth Theater

Meteor Shower is like a high school kid who just works way too hard to be liked. The cast is outstanding; Amy Schumer is simply adorable, Laura Benanti is more beautiful than ever, Jeremy Shamos perfectly captures the nebbish husband, and Keegan-Michael Key nails the self-involved visitor. But every line, every movement, is so hammered home that the show soon becomes more tedious than entertaining.

The premise is cynical to the extreme.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Farinelli and the King
Belasco Theater

With Farinelli and the King, British actor Mark Rylance has a play he can sink his teeth into, and who better to draw out a play's juicy nuances? An Academy Award and three-time Tony winner, Rylance brings this engaging holiday gift to Broadway after a dazzling 2015 run at Shakespeare’s Globe in London.

With her first play, composer Claire van Kampen presents an amplified version of the life of King Philippe V of Spain (1683-1746), keeping intact the essence with certified details but adding her individual byroad of eccentricity.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
BLKS
Steppenwolf Theater

The language of Aziza Barnes's BLKS is Dirty Girl-Talk — not the phallocentric banter favored by male writers who fancy themselves the predominant theme of women's intimate conversations, but observations couched in gynecological vocabulary and delivered with a take-no-prisoners candor to make Kia Corthron sound like Georgette Heyer.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Sammy
Black Ensemble Theater

If you were given two days to abandon your partner and marry someone of your own "color" or suffer bodily harm, would you do it? If the presidential candidate you supported asked you to postpone your wedding until after the election, would you grant his request? If you were the headliner at one of the top hotels in Las Vegas, but your family was refused lodgings thereat, would you abide by your contract?

Those inclined nowadays to dismiss Sammy Davis, Jr.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Scrooge in Rouge
Tenth Street Theater

In Tandem’s co-founder and veteran director Jane Fleiller does it again with Scrooge in Rouge, a comedy loosely based on Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Rouge is basically a campy send-up of the timeless Christmas tale, with a hilarious twist. Only three actors (out of a large cast) failed to show up for a cast dinner party on the evening prior to opening. So they are the only ones who escaped the food poisoning that made the others ill.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Farinelli and the King
Belasco Theater

What more can be said in praise of Mark Rylance? He’s won three Tony Awards (for Boeing Boeing in 2008,  Jerusalem in 2011, and Twelfth Night in 2014). He has an Oscar for best supporting actor for “Bridge of Spies” (2015). And in 2017 he was knighted by HRH Prince William for his contribution to drama. He has the capacity to reach audiences, no matter what role he undertakes. As King Phillipe V of Spain, he is a monarch who teeters on the border of madness and very often seems to go over the edge.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Hold These Truths
Sheen Center for Thought and Culture

In 1942 President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which mandated the detention of Japanese-Americans in prison camps. A University of Washington student named Gordon Hirabayashi chose not to obey either the “order for evacuation” to a camp or the curfew that Japanese-Americans were subject to. With the help of the ACLU he fought his case as far as the Supreme Court, where the judges decided unanimously against him. Later, he declined to return an oath of allegiance that Japanese-Americans alone were required to return, and he was again convicted.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Arsenic and Old Lace
Off the Wall Theater

Long before there were TV shows such as “Dateline” and “20/20” – heck, before TVs were a staple of American households – there was Joseph Kesselring’s charming, oddball comedy, Arsenic and Old Lace.

The ‘bones” of this chestnut are so solid that Off the Wall Theater’s current production could hardly go wrong. Considering that one of Milwaukee’s best-known producers/directors, Dale Gutzman, is directing Arsenic, the show is a good fit for celebrating the company’s 18th season.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Children, The
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

Trust me when I tell you this is not a Date Night show. The actors are superb, the production is close to flawless, and it certainly is thought provoking. But any way you look at it, The Children is a major downer, and you will not leave feeling romantic. There is one set, a shabby little kitchen in a run-down cottage, somewhere by the sea, in England. The sound of the waves is clearly heard after the initial weird “2001: A Space Odyssey”-type music which opens the proceedings.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Violet
The Den

The sight greeting us upon our entering the Den's second floor auditorium is that of a plain wooden bench occupied by a shabbily dressed young woman with the face of an Appalachian angel. Soon after the play begins, however, we are directed to visualize—without the aid of masks or makeup—her fragile countenance distorted by a hideous scar sustained during a childhood accident involving an ill-secured axe-blade.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Little Red Cyrano
Strawdog Theater

According to Red Theater's playbill, the author of its play completed his script after grappling with issues of linguistic accessibility, cultural appropriation, and the female objectification shared by love-struck suitors and sexual predators alike.

His contemplations led him to conflate Edmond Rostand's 1897 swashbuckler, Cyrano de Bergerac, with Charles Perrault's 1697 adaptation of the folk tale we know today as “Little Red Riding Hood”—relocated for this world premiere production to a post-apocalyptic realm populated by human beings mutating into animals.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Heisenberg
Florida Studio Theater - Keating

What happens when, at a London rail station, a goofy gal plants a kiss on and then besieges a reserved older guy? It might exemplify physicist Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, because every action taken by either of the characters in Simon Stephens’ play has at least two possible outcomes. It’s fascinating to find out which occur and even maybe how they in turn affect their worlds.

On the surface, the play is a variation of a “cute meet” with some subsequent problems that will get eventually get resolved or not.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Frankenstein
St. Luke's Theater

How many works have been based on Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein?” Wikipedia (for what it’s worth) lists 39 pages in its “Works based on Frankenstein category” - novels, films, comics, video games. Mary Shelley accessed an archetype in our collective unconscious like few other writers.

Needless to say, not all of these adaptations are masterpieces. But stage adaptations of the novel promise, at least, to be rewarding; there’s a real dramatic conflict between Dr. Frankenstein and the Creature. And the musical is particularly right for this epic, operatic story.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Mad Ones, The
59E59 Theaters

The Mad Ones, a musical by Kait Kerrigan and Brian Lowdermilk appearing at 59E59 Theaters, takes its title from a line from Jack Kerouac’s book “On The Road”: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live…”. In fact, its central character, a young woman named Sam, carries a copy of the book around with her. She’s just graduated from high school. Her mother, Beverly, expects her to go to Harvard; her best friend, Kelly, expects her to go to a state college with her.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Black Glove, The
Gene Frankel Theater

August Strindberg wrote a children’s play? Strindberg? That great melancholic? So it would seem. August Strindberg Rep (Off-off-Broadway) has produced his final play, The Black Glove. It was written in 1909 and first produced in 1910. It was the fifth of his chamber plays but not usually included in collections of those plays. It’s rarely produced and was indeed written, purportedly, for children.

Strindberg’s best known for his expressionism, but this play is set in an apartment building - seven floors and 21 units with heat, electricity and telephones.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Mushroom Cure, The
80 St. Marks

The Mushroom Cure is an extended autobiographical monologue — 90 minutes — written and performed by Adam Strauss and directed by Jonathan Libman, currently playing at Theatre 80 St. Mark’s, Off-off-Broadway. It centers on Strauss’s attempts to treat his OCD through psychedelics, and his concurrent romance with a woman named Grace. The two stories are intertwined as Strauss explores psychedelics and the personal relationship. He meets Grace when he’s re-searching drugs, and she accompanies him to Martha’s Vineyard to take the magic mushrooms.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Parisian Woman, The
Hudson Theater

Despite the presence of sultry actress Uma Thurman in her Broadway debut, The Parisian Woman never heats up. Set in present-day Washington, the drama centers on Chloe (Thurman) and her husband Tom (Josh Lucas), a tax lawyer who is on the shortlist for a judgeship. The two have an open marriage, and she has lovers, two of whom we meet in the course of the play. When Tom learns that he won’t get the job, Chloe springs into action and uses her lovers to influence the appointment.

Elyse Trevers
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Cross that River
59E59 Theaters

It is not at all unusual for something special to be going on at one of New York’s most sophisticated theatrical venues, the 59E59 Theaters.

That tradition is beautifully continued with the current run of the brilliant Allan Harris musical, Cross that River, directed by Regge Life. Subtitled “A Tale of the Black West,” it weaves a cowboy tale that some may find surprising.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Miracle on South Division Street
Milwaukee Chamber Theater

Although playwright Tom Dudzick will never be the next Neil Simon, you can’t blame him for trying. With all the one-liners inserted into Miracle on South Division Street, it’s difficult not to imagine the clever dialogue for which the now 90-year-old Neil Simon is known.

Dudzick’s premise is that every family is as unique as its members. (This also applies to Neil Simon as well. The family in The Goodbye Girl is far different from the one in Brighton Beach Memoirs.) Dudzick has learned from the best, and he is only a bit short of the goal.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Once on this Island
Circle in the Square

It’s a mistake to take Once On This Island too literally. It’s a fable, a story passed down through generations, a part of the local culture. In this case, that means the French Antilles, where the rule of the day seems to be the lighter, the better, and it’s an unwritten law that the poor folks on one side of the island don’t mix with the wealthy inhabitants who live over the mountain. All this is disrupted when a special little girl is adopted by a big-hearted couple. They call her Ti Moune, and they soon discover that she’s not like everyone else.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Parisian Woman, The
Hudson Theater

The play I wish I’d seen: a dialogue built around the conflict of the politically ruthless Jeanette (Blair Brown) and her ambitious yet naïve daughter, Rebecca (Phillipa Soo). Every time Brown begins to talk in The Parisian Woman, the energy level on stage increases, and the rather pedestrian plot seems much more interesting. Soo is an actress still fresh, and to some degree, an unknown quantity.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
SpongeBob SquarePants
Palace Theatre

I came to SpongeBob SquarePants a virgin, having never seen the animated TV series on Nickelodeon. I have since been deflowered, but not fully seduced, by this over-the-top, splashy, nonstop musical. While the production values are stellar, and the cast outstanding, for those ignorant about the characters, the show can be confusing and more than a little overwhelming. It’s a brightly colored, very loud, hellzapoppin event.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Buttcracker, The: A Nutcracker Burlesque
Uptown Underground

The Nutcracker has figured in the repertoire of family-friendly Yuletide-season relics ever since its premiere in 1892. The boldness of Tom Boi Theatricals’ gender-fluid casting can thus be said to represent a significant break from gilded-age protocol, as does its staging at the speakeasy-district Uptown Underground Cabaret. Oh, and if that isn't enough to alert holiday playgoers not to arrive expecting toe-shoes-and-tutus, the word "burlesque" appended to its title should provide sufficient warning.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Dickens Carol, A
Madison Street Theater

"Dickens was dead, to begin with," proclaims the conductor employed by London's South Eastern Railway—and yes, you heard that correctly.

It's said that drowning victims see their lives flash before their eyes, so when, at 9:39 p.m. on Christmas Eve in 1842, a faulty bridge-crossing signal sends the train plummeting into the icy depths of the Kent River and pinning Charles Dickens beneath a steel grate, his concussion triggers a series of disturbing visions.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Motown Christmas, A
West Coast Black Theater Troupe

A glorious gift to WBBT’s devoted fans, A Motown Christmas repeats earlier years’ special holiday revues with pleasing additions. Creator Nate Jacobs’s research turned up “seldom-heard Motown Christmas treasures” by Smokey Robinson (at least three), Stevie Wonder (“It’s Christmas Time”), and Marvin Gaye (“I Want to Come Home for Christmas”). But no favorite Motown or traditional songs are omitted from a show that lasts longer than usual but doesn’t leave audiences sated.

Motown melodies occupy most of the longer first half.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Cross that River
59E59 Theaters

Cross that River is a journey well worth taking for all theater lovers. It’s a rare and precious experience to find a play which is both thoroughly entertaining and thoughtfully enlightening.

At the center of the show is Blue, a former slave turned cowboy, who wants nothing more than to be free to live and love as he chooses. Allan Harris is a renowned singer, musician, composer, and as evidenced here, an actor who is by turns smart, engaging, and downright sexy.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Heart of Robin Hood, The
Wallis Annenberg Center

“There is no evidence for Robin Hood as a historical character, or for any attempt to set him up as such within at least three centuries of his alleged lifetime,” wrote Lord Raglan in his authoritative book, “The Hero—A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama.” But even Lord Raglan would have had the time of his life at The Heart of Robin Hood, the Anglo-Icelandic hoot of a show which just opened at The Wallis for a two-week run.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
bled for the household truth
Rogue Machine at The Met Theater

Bled for the household truth introduces us to the work of a gutsy new playwright, the Welsh-born Ruth Fowler (presently residing in L.A.) Her play, now in a world premiere production at Rogue Machine, looks at the weird, kinky relationship between Keith (Benjamin Burdick), an emotionally frozen man, and Pen (Alexandra Hellquist), a woman who is his complete opposite in behavior. A wealthy stockbroker living in a luxury East Village apartment (ingenious set by John Iacovelli), Keith advertises for a roommate who will be paid to stroll around his pad in her underwear.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Pride and Prejudice
Cherry Lane Theater

Jane Austen’s classic novel “Pride and Prejudice” has taken many forms, from lush romantic movies featuring actors such as Colin Firth to absurd sci-fi versions such as “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.” Now in the hands of clever playwright-actress Kate Hamill, it’s become a comedy. Pride and Prejudice at Primary Stages features eight talented performers, most of whom play several parts.

With few changes, (the dropping of some minor characters) the story remains the same. Hamill plays Lizzie Bennet, one of several daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Bennett.

Elyse Trevers
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Blue Suede Shoes
Florida Studio Theater - Goldstein Cabaret

From “Rock Around the Clock” to “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” both performers and audience at Florida Studio Theater’s Goldstein Cabaret are reacting with a beat to the predominant music of 1950s and 1960s. The Blue Suede Shoes revue goes musically and historically speaking from rock and roll’s birth to a multifaceted maturity. Personalities dominate throughout along with the heftiest hits.

The three dynamic male singer-musicians narrate “Good Rockin’ Tonight” and then “Rock the Joint” telling how the first rock song was actually “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
I Saw My Neighbor on the Train and I Didn't Even Say Hello
Redtwist Theater

It's been said that unhappy families are unique in their afflictions, so what could be unhappier than a middle-class, middle-America, mostly-middle-aged clan so undistinguished that their author doesn't even deem them worthy of a surname? Is it any wonder that they look to strangers for affirmation of their existence?

Grandmother Daphne is never without her quart-sized flask of whiskey, her electronic cigarettes, and an unending stream of pessimistic diatribes.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Wild Boar
Chicago Temple

Every dictatorship boasts of the peace and stability enjoyed by its subjects, compared with the dissent-fueled unrest prevalent in unruly democracies.

After violent upheavals of foreign invasions and internal strife, what person wouldn't willingly sacrifice a few individual rights in exchange for the protection of firmly established leaders? As recently as 1997, when the British colonial city of Hong Kong ceded its sovereignty to mainland China, the first task of the new regime was to eradicate evidence of its predecessors.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Latin History for Morons
Studio 54

John Leguizamo’s play, Latin History for Morons, has a niche audience, but Leguizamo’s talent and charm appeals to almost everyone. That’s why the show that played to sell-out audience at The Public Theater recently moved to Studio 54. The performer treats the audience like a slow class and, as the teacher, he must teach us about the illustrious world history and contributions of Latinos.

He first sets to learn the history himself and is astounded when he learns about the contributions that Latinos made over the years.

Elyse Trevers
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
M. Butterfly
Cort Theater

Playwright David Henry Hwang made an auspicious Broadway debut in 1988 with M. Butterfly. The play and its original two stars — John Lithgow and B.D. Wong — received deserved awards and accolades. Almost thirty years later, the play remains overflowing with ideas and enigmas. The plot cannot help but grip an audience with its strange and thoroughly engrossing fictionalized account of a true newspaper story about a French diplomat, convicted of passing top secrets to a spy over a period of 20 years.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Tiny Beautiful Things
Public Theater - Newman Theater

Sincere but why? That is how I responded to the dramatic form given to a stream of popular inter-active on-line advice columns originally written by Cheryl Strayed, a non-professional known to her network of help-seekers as “Dear Sugar.” Some of these have been adapted from her book for the stage by writer/actress Nia Vardalos (“My Big Fat Greek Wedding”) who stands in for Strayed.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Oedipus El Rey
Public Theater

Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus El Rey is one of the more exciting of the new plays to open Off Broadway so far this season. A collaboration between The Sol Project and the Public Theater, it is a strikingly new approach to Sophocles’s classic tragedy, Oedipus Rex. Alfaro, making his New York theater debut, has twisted and turned the famous plot just a bit and transported the original’s horrific romantics from ancient Greece to contemporary South Central Los Angeles. That the old story resonates quite remarkably for us today is due, of course, to the playwright’s skill.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Secret Mask, The
Next Act Theater

Milwaukee’s Next Act Theater sometimes presents a holiday show that looks like anything but a warm-hearted testament to the love and joy of Christmas (and related holidays, such as Hanukah, etc.). Not so fast. Although it would be easy to brush off the U.S. premiere of Rick Chafe’s The Secret Mask as an anti-holiday show, that would be short-changing this excellent production.

Two grown men – a father and son – come to know each other after the 70-something father suffers a stroke in the Canadian city of Vancouver.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2017
Office Hour
Public Theater

Bang! Bang! Bang! You’d better get used to that sound if you plan to experience Office Hour at the Public. There’s not much gunfire in the beginning, but just wait. It’s there.

The production begins with three college teachers in a room with three pendant lights above. David (Greg Keller) and Genevieve (Adeola Role) are warning Gina (Sue Jean Kim) about a student named Dennis (Ki Hong Lee). Dennis is clearly not quite right, to put it mildly.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
November 2017

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