Kite Runner, The
Hayes Theater

Novels don’t always work well on stage, especially when there’s a first-person narrator. Plays rely on action rather than narration (“Show, don’t tell” is the rule of thumb) and contained plots over sprawling stories. Fortunately, Matthew Spangler’s adaptation of The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 best-seller about a young man’s harrowing experiences of growing up in Afghanistan and immigrating to the US after the Russian invasion, is sharply focused, conveying an epic and engaging plot without wandering or diffusing.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
August 2022
Oresteia, The
Park Avenue Armory - Drill Hall

There are some stunning images and moving moments in Robert Icke’s massive modern adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, paying in repertory with Hamlet at the Park Avenue Armory. But this nearly four-hour marathon indulges in too much extraneous dialogue and lacks the relentless, gripping action of the companion Shakespearean production.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
August 2022
New York State of Mind
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

A rambunctious rendering of songs by all-time favorite-in-every-genre composer and performer Billy Joel finds The Uptown Boys in sync with the Master’s rhythms, rimes, recitals at Florida Studio Theater’s Court Cabaret.  They may be rooted in New York experience and psychology, but Sarasota audiences don’t hesitate to clap and hum along as if every song also “belongs” to them.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2022
Beach People
City Garage at Bergamot Station

Beach People, the new play by Charles A. Duncombe at City Garage, turns cliches of beach life on their head. The main characters, Anna and Paul (Angela Beyer and Henry Thompson), lie sprawled out in bathing suits on their deck chairs under a hot sun (decor by Duncombe himself, a master designer). Behind them is a video screen showing clouds sailing by in a beautiful sky. He’s reading a book, but is it a traditional beach read, yet another hack thriller by James Patterson? Not in this play, it’s not.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2022
Smoke and Mirrors
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

Smoke and Mirrors was a hit for Florida Studio Theater’s 2000 summer season, but over two decades later one of its two authors has died and so has the play’s former novelty. Neither remaining writer Will Osborne nor FST director Catherine Randazzo with her excellent cast have been able to make the play work as successfully with a change of time frame and of character development. Everything takes too long to get even close to as funny as it was, and much about the staging just puzzles.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2022
Old Man and the Pool, The
Mark Taper Forum

The Old Man and the Pool is more stand-up comedy than theatrical performance but, hey, it was produced by a major theater company and was performed in the Mark Taper Forum, so respect must be paid. Also, this solo turn by Mike Birbiglia was consistently funny and engaging, making it a pleasure to write about.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2022
If I Forget
Fountain Theater

If I Forget, the provocative drama now in a West Coast premiere at the Fountain Theater, suffers from a split personality. The first act centers on Michael Fischer (Leo Marks), a professor of Jewish Studies who has written a book claiming that by continually harping on the Holocaust, the Jewish people have lost their values and identity.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2022
Into the Woods
St. James Theater

When a show is absolutely perfect, reviewing it becomes more of a challenge than if it were flawed. It’s not difficult to list a production’s shortcomings and how they detract from the experience, but enumerating superlatives makes your writing sound like a gushy, repetitive love letter. Well, here goes.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2022
Sense and Sensibility
Concordia University - Todd Wehr Auditorium

Few books have achieved the staying power of those by Jane Austen. Over time, “Pride and Prejudice’ and “Sense and Sensibility” have basically become an industry unto themselves. According to expert sources, the book of “Sense and Sensibility,” first published in 1811, has never been out of print. There have been too many film and TV treatments to list them all.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2022
Remembering the Future
Odyssey Theater

Remembering the Future, the new play by Peter Lefcourt now in a world premiere at the Odyssey Theater, mixes comedy with pinches of the paranormal to prepare a savory theatrical dish.

Lefcourt introduces us to a middle-aged couple, Greg (Michael Corbett) and Melissa (Tarina Pouncy), who were teenaged lovers forty years ago. An inter-racial twosome, they dreamed of fleeing racist Minneapolis for Paris, where he would become the white Charlie Parker and she would live a free and glamorous Left Bank life.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2022
King Liz
Geffen Playhouse

King Liz rips the lid off the world of professional basketball to reveal just how ugly and messy it is.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2022
Jersey Tenors, The: Part Two
Florida Studio Theater - Goldstein Cabaret

A Florida Studio Theater ad announcing a return of The Jersey Tenors after their successful 2017 debut mentions my TotalTheater review of their performance as “Terrific!”  There’s no reason to alter that assessment because it also applies to “The Jersey Tenors— Part II.” They simply wowed their opening night audience with their blend of operatic and mod, rock, and pop classics. 

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2022
Orchard, The
Baryshnikov Arts Center

I seem to remember reading, in all of the hoopla surrounding the Baryshnikov Art Center’s Production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, somebody saying “Unlike anything that you ever saw before.” This talking head could also have said, as audiences were soon to find out, that this production, adapted, created, reimagined, and directed by Kiev born Igor Golyak, and starring Mikhail Baryshnikov, is a work of genius. Obviously, the great Chekhov is embedded deeply in their bones.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
July 2022
Richard III
Delacorte Theater

There have been female Hamlets (most notably Sarah Bernhardt, Diane Venora, and Ruth Negga), female King Lears (Glenda Jackson on Broadway and the West End), and even a female Richard II (Fiona Shaw). But the new Free Shakespeare in the Park production of Richard III is probably the first to feature an actress in the lead role of the most vile of the Bard’s villains.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
July 2022
Beautiful People, The
Matrix Theater

The Beautiful People is an ironic title for a play about two ugly, dumb, dangerous teenagers. They are the only characters in Tim Venable’s powerful drama which is now in a world-premiere run at Rogue Machine, directed by Guillermo Cienfuegos.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2022
Maytag Virgin
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

As a romantic melodrama involving two middle-aged. widowed high school teachers, Maytag Virgin certainly departs from a usual boy-meets-girl routine.  Using a clothes dryer and a statue of Mary, Mother of Jesus, to launch into the couple’s differences upon meeting is novel. So is how the question is posed as to whether or not they’ll adapt to living next to each other. Author Audrey Cefaly does, though, give them a readily understood affinity:  both are Southerners.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Two and a Half Breaths
Chain Theater

“What is it to become a word? To become or even create an emotion that doesn’t exist…at least not yet? How much power does the artist have to convince and make one believe? How much potential does movement theater actually have? In this world? Now. These questions have been the driving force in writing this piece.” – Playwright Bridgette Loriaux

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Corsicana
Playwrights Horizons

At a recent Off-Broadway production, the gentleman behind me was complaining vociferously during intermission and occasionally during the show itself that he enjoyed “fun” shows like Company or Funny Girl, not the depressing dreck he was forced to sit through that particular evening. My first impulse was to turn around and tell him if he was so unhappy, he could just leave. But then I realized that plays like Corsicana can be challenging, but if one is patient and takes these plays on their own terms, their rewards are great.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Birthday Party, The
City Garage at Bergamot Station

Harold Pinter came to fame in 1958 with the production of his debut play, The Birthday Party. He went on to become one of the stalwarts of the modern theater, up there with Beckett, Ionesco, Osborne, and Albee. Now City Garage has revisited The Birthday Party in a splendid production that captures Pinter’s specialty as a playwright: grotesque naturalism wrapped around a core of menace and depravity.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Tanner, The
The Broadwater

The Tanner dramatizes what the movie “Braveheart” left out in its depiction of the battle between Scotland and England back in medieval times. “Braveheart,” in typical Hollywood fashion, was all about a swashbuckling hero (Mel Gibson as William Wallace) leading the Scots to glorious victory over the bad Brits. The Tanner deals with the same battle but in a non-glamorous, more truthful way.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Thom Pain (Based on Nothing)
The Broadwater

Thom Pain (based on nothing) is exactly the kind of play one hopes to see at a fringe festival. It’s offbeat, strange, unsettling, yet brilliantly original and compelling.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
What the End Will Be
Roundabout - Laura Pels Theater

Late in …what the end will be (sic), Mansa Ra’s combination sitcom and soap opera about three generations of gay black men, Keith Randolph Smith as the patriarch Bart Kennedy delivers an impassioned plea to his stubborn son Max to allow him to take the drastic step of assisted suicide to end his misery from Stage 4 bone cancer. The details are excruciating in their exactness, down to the feeling of pain and ache in every part of his body, even the fingernails. Smith does not overplay the horror but gives the speech with directness and simplicity.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
King James
Mark Taper Forum

The vicissitudes of friendship are explored by Rajiv Joseph in his latest play, King James, which is in a world premiere run at the Mark Taper Forum.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Funny Girl
August Wilson Theater

While the spirit of Shakespeare hovers over but does not smother the new off-Broadway musical, Fat Ham, the specter of Barbra Streisand haunts and suffocates the new Broadway Funny Girl. I was finally able to take in the first revival of the 1964 bio-tuner of legendary comic Fanny Brice after many delays due to COVID outbreaks among the cast.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Fat Ham
Public Theater

The premise sounds like a SNL sketch: Hamlet updated and set at a contentious African-American family’s barbecue. But James Ijames’s scintillating rift on Shakespeare’s greatest play doesn’t settle for easy laughs and obvious spoof. Fat Ham used the template of the Melancholy Dane’s tragedy as a jumping-off place for a bizarre, inventive, and complex portrait of parental expectations, youthful angst, toxic masculinity, the legacy of violence, and the quest for true identity.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Bedwetter, The
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

As you might expect, any musical from the pen of the notoriously profane comedienne Sarah Silverman has more than its share of what we used to call dirty jokes. But The Bedwetter (Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater), the new musical based on Silverman’s memoir of her traumatic childhood, is also an insightful and moving depiction of dysfunctional family dynamics, a little girl’s triumph over insecurity and the healing power of comedy. It’s also pretty damn funny.… and dirty.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Tommy on Top
Pride Arts

We are in Hollywood, on the eve of the Academy Awards ceremonies, in a hotel room decorated in a pastiche of 20th-century glamor, where Tommy Miller—hitherto the cute-but-dumb star of giggly-gross teen-sex comedies, but tonight, a Best Actor nominee for his performance in a highbrow dramatic film—might just be on the brink of a new career as a serious artist.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Orchard, The
BAC/Jerome Robbins Theater

The prospect of the great ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and Jessica Hecht, one of our most versatile and expressive actresses, in a new adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s classic The Cherry Orchard was an exciting and irresistible prospect. But The Orchard, director-conceiver Igor Golyak’s sci-fi deconstruction of this beloved portrait of a Russian landowning family displaced by overwhelming change, has so much going on that the passions, humor, and sorrow of the original are almost obliterated. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Rock & Roll Reignited: With Not Fade Away
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

From Tribute Extravaganza to Four Piece Band, the musicians and vocalists ending a national tour at Florida Studio Theater’s Court Cabaret revive Rock & Roll classics for its stalwart fans and bring “sizzle” to create new ones. The show’s creators take center stage, adding narration to performance. Flanked by bass player on one side; drummer on the other, they do spread “reignited” sound.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Epiphany
Lincoln Center - Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

At a recent Off-Broadway production, the gentleman behind me was complaining vociferously during intermission and occasionally during the show itself that he enjoyed “fun” shows like Company or Funny Girl, not the depressing dreck he was forced to sit through that particular evening. My first impulse was to turn around and tell him if he was so unhappy, he could just leave. But then I realized that plays like Epiphany can be challenging, but if one is patient and takes these plays on their own terms, their rewards are great.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Call Me Elizabeth
Zephyr Theater

Call Me Elizabeth is the creation of Kayla Boye, a vivacious and gifted young actress who brings Elizabeth Taylor to life in a one-woman show which just closed at the Hollywood Fringe Festival.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Collected Stories
Redtwist Theater

Nobody ever lost money printing the legend instead of the facts. At what point, however, does one person's first-hand experience become another's second-hand recollection, and who has the right to engineer the transformation? Donald Margulies may have raised his questions in 1996’s Collected Stories, but the morality of hearsay as fodder for artistic confabulation continues to spark contention.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
West
Broadwater Second Stage

West is a Welsh drama which is noteworthy for its glorious use of language and its touching, true story of a marriage. Written by Owen Thomas and starring Gareth John Bale and Gwenllian Higginson, the play, which comes to Hollywood Fringe from a successful U.K. tour, opens in a rural area of Wales, where a shy, young  farmer (Bale) falls in love with a local lassie (Higginson). They marry and do their best to survive on the patch of land he inherited from his grandfather.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Hood
Asolo Rep - Mertz Theater

Robin Hood’s story has long been enjoyed by people of all ages. At Asolo Rep it’s modern and musical, performed for teens on up. Within scenic and fictional frames, Hood uses abundant staging elements, starting with an overall tiered cage holding musicians on sides and actions centrally, often lit for special effect. Huge puppets are characters. Tableaus designate places. Shadow theater sequences appear in traditional black and white or against shiny red backgrounds. The human actors come on as themselves.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Magnolia Ballet, The
The Den

Ignore the play's title. Ignore the publicity photo, too. In fact, you can ignore almost 15 of the 95 minutes (and exactly which 15 are up to you) that Terry Guest allots his self-described "ghost story" and still have enough provocative questions left over for three classical myths, two terpsichoric concerts, and half a dozen rounds of slam poetry.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Much Ado About Nothing
Marquette University

Centuries before television created “Seinfeld,” which was often called a comedy about nothing, something similar was written by William Shakespeare. Its title, Much Ado About Nothing, may indeed sound like an episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s TV comedy. But this comedy is among Shakespeare’s most-produced works, and its currently touring Wisconsin state parks by the established Summit Players Theatre.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Beowulf
Broadway Studio

John Heimbuch does a splendid job bringing the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf to life in a compact, exciting way. His solo show, now running at the 2022 Hollywood Fringe Festival, is a classic bit of storytelling, with the actor standing alone on a small, bare stage and weaving a theatrical spell with his charismatic vocal gifts.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Houses of Zodiac: Poems for Cello
The Broad

Is it a dramatic work, a dance recital, a cello concert, a film show? All of the above, and more, is the answer to that question.

Houses of Zodiac mixes various art forms to explore the intersection of mind, body, and nature. The ground-breaking, experimental production “brings word, movement, music, and image together to illuminate from within the verses of four poets: Pablo Neruda, Brenda Shaughnessy, Natasha Trethewey, and Anais Nin,” the creators explain in a helpful program note.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Belfast Girls
Irish Repertory Thaeter - Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage

I am always amazed by the work coming out of the Irish Repertory Theater, be it the acting, directing, plays that they chose to mount, or the ultra-savvy utilization of their two stages, whether with casts of one or two or ensembles of twenty. After making a goodly number of wonderful plays available via live streaming during COVID, the Rep made a perfect choice to return to live theater with Ken Barry’s Autumn Royal, The next, Belfast Girls, proves another sure-fire winner.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
June 2022
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
Ruskin Theater

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner still packs a punch. It might not be as powerful as it was back in 1967 when the movie first came out, but it hits hard enough as a stage adaptation to register strongly.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2022

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