I Sing!
Maverick Theater

I Sing! is the type of show that will have the real New York cynics vomiting in the aisles. Could a show be so unassumingly straightforward and unabashed about being a sentimental musical? For those of us who have yet to succumb to the "Everything sucks!" philosophy, I Sing! is one big sweetheart of a show.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
June 2001
Actors Alliance Festival 2001
St. Cecilia's Playhouse

Actors Alliance San Diego's Actors Festival, an annual event, includes 24 plays, most of them new, many being showcased for the very first time. Each play is performed just twice, with itinerant Actor Todd Blakesley serving as the Festival Artistic Director. The schedule is hectic, mixing new works by talented local playwrights with works by McNally, Bradbury, Mamet, and Dr. Seuss.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2001
American Iliad
Victory Theater

Donald Freed, a rare writer of political drama, returns to the subject of Richard Nixon, a character whose dark, twisted soul he unraveled in a previous one-man play, Secret Honor. This time around, Freed works on a larger canvas, one filled with portraits of such personages as J. Edgar Hoover, Clyde Tolson, JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Black Elk and Horatio Alger. The play takes place in Nixon's mind during the last 3 or 4 minutes of his life and is a reverie, a reflection, on America in the last century.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2001
Art
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts

For a substantial sum, Serge buys a white-on-white painting; his two best friends' reactions and assessments nearly blow them apart. On the surface that's what Art is about. What it is, however, is itself art.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2001
Crimes Of The Heart
Second Stage Theater

Not quite a must-see but certainly a reminder of what made Beth Henley so special way-back-when (i.e., before all the imitators). Her two great skills: effortlessly moving a scene from one tone to its complete opposite, and taking a situation of believable awfulness and mining it for (still-hilarious) comic effect.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 2001
Eli's Comin'
Vineyard Theater

Right off the bat, I have to say that Eli's Comin', the long-gestating Laura Nyro project currently performing at the Vineyard Theater, has the best voices anywhere on a stage right now. The four leading females (Judy Kuhn, Mandy Gonzalez, Anika Noni Rose and Ronnell Bey) make every note their own, throwing in a healthy dosage of blues, R&B and rock to Nyro's beautifully crafted tunes, all of which sound better with age. Unfortunately, enthusiastic praise will have to cease there, because otherwise, Diane Paulus' "music-theater piece" never achieves lift-off.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
May 2001
Ensemble Studio Theater Marathon 2001: Series C
Ensemble Studio Theater

Series C of the Ensemble Studio Theatre's 2001 One Act Marathon has one great play, one awful one and two that are pretty good. Invitation to a Funeral by Julie McKee, about two women at the funeral of their common ex-husband, is written with rare wit, directed with impeccable timing by Deborah Hedwall, and performed by two brilliant actresses, Kathleen Doyle and Susan Pellegrino, each with the underplayed comic performance of a master. It's the last of the four on the program, and I'm still smiling a day later.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2001
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The
Minskoff Theater

Swiftly-paced and agreeable rendering of Twain's tale, recommended for family outings. Passable tunes and okay lyrics are secondary to can't-miss storyline, inspired settings (by designer Heidi Ettinger), and nicely-staged climactic man-hunt in the cave. If only the Minskoff weren't such a barn, with the orchestra sounding like a car radio and the actors appearing to sing a quarter-beat behind because of the acoustics.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 2001
Blast!
Broadway Theater

More sedate (mercifully) than you’d expect a brass n’ drum extravaganza to be, Blast! has numerous moments of charm and good humor to go with its precision drills, banner juggling, and object twirling.

Apart from the opening “Bolero” and a zany “Officer Krupke,” Blast! isn’t exactly memorable or even exciting, but the music can be pretty, and most of the time our eardrums are spared the usual Broadway assault.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Anatol
Powerhouse Theater

The always adventurous BNTC took on a difficult challenge with this play, if only because its theme -- the impossibility of faithfulness in male/female relationships -- cuts against the American party line, which treats infidelity as a cardinal sin. Arthur Schnitzler, an assimilated Austrian Jew writing in the 1920s about the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, rejects such a notion. In his view, infidelity is the norm, monogamy an illusion, which means men and women can't help but betray each other.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Bat Boy: The Musical
Union Square Theater

The pastiche score isn't one for the ages (though you'll remember the "Hold me, Bat Boy" refrain), but this is cleverly crafted, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink kitsch that grabs an audience and never lets go. And if you think - as with so many musicals - the second act will run out of ideas and steam, you're in for an invigorating surprise.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Bat Boy: The Musical
Union Square Theater

A few weeks ago, I remarked to a friend that I was deeply envious of anyone who got to see the megabomb musicalization of Carrie years back. There's something exciting about a live show that appears destined to flop hard; in fact, in theater communities, they are even more memorable years later, long after the latest sham revue musical has won the Best Musical Tony. Bat Boy the Musical looked like one of those shows -- on paper anyway.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Bachelors, The
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

The Milwaukee Repertory Theater has undeniably scored another hit with the latest effort by the comedy team of Fred Alley and James Kaplan.  This is the same duo who previously struck comic gold with Guys On Ice, about life in a Wisconsin fish shanty, and Lumberjacks in Love, a far- lesser tale of life in the Wisconsin woods.  Their new musical, The Bachelors, probes the same general territory -- how man's idyllic existence is changed forever when a woman comes around.  Although this territory is so worn it's almost disintegrated into dust, director Jeff

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Good Thief, The
45 Bleecker

Generally absorbing, downbeat hostage story of an Irish hoodlum (a convincing Brian d'Arcy James) in over his head.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Bells Are Ringing
Plymouth Theater

While not among the evergreens, Bells Are Ringing has enough pleasures to be a legitimate example of the "good old days" of Broadway musicals.  Tina Landau's proficient but bland revival simply has the bad luck to be up against a lively crop of spring shows and suffers by comparison. Taken on its own terms, however, this Bells certainly entertains.  Faith Prince and Marc Kudisch are individually good, though they lack romantic sizzle. The subway scene remains a can't-miss joy.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Bloomer Girl
City Center

A year after the success of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (the pioneering musical that dealt profoundly with box lunch socials), musical theater collaborators Harold Arlen (composer), E.Y. Harburg (lyricist) and Sig Herzig and Fred Saidy (book writers) would opt for more social significance with their 1944 tuner, Bloomer Girl. Bloomer Girl did not achieve the immortality of "Oklahoma," but its quaint charms, enlivened by adapter David Ives, were recently revived for the popular Encores! Series at the City Center.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Boy Gets Girl
Manhattan Theater Club - Stage I

Boy Gets Girl, the latest from up-and-coming playwright Rebecca Gilman, represents a 2-for-2 in terms of promise unfulfilled for this new voice in the theater. Critics have been singing her praises ever since the debut of her racially-charged drama, Spinning into Butter, at Lincoln Center last year, citing her willingness to hit on hot-button issues and bring forth topics relevant to modern society but are rarely explored in theater. Few, however, seems to mind that she starts with potentially explosive premises that completely deflate before your very eyes.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Breaker: An Aerial Fairie Tale
Dixon Place

One of the most beautiful, moving theater happenings in NYC is Breaker: An Aerial Fairie Tale, performed by five women trapeze artists and a four-piece jazz group. A circus rises into the air from the sea, and we fly with them.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Closing Time
Arlene's Grocery

Short comic works by Irish playwright Flann O'Brien make for a thoroughly delightful piece of "Pub Theater," with live Irish music performed by one of the finest acting ensembles in town, directed vividly by Macdara Mac Uibh Aille. There is no better actor on stage anywhere than Sean Powell. 

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Bobbi Boland
ArcLight Theater

Poor Bobbi Boland. Left behind in the wake of the tumultuous sixties, she just doesn't get it. She's caught in a time warp, and she can't get out. She clings desperately to her past, symbolized by the rhinestone tiara resting on a shelf in her living room etagere. It represents the high point of her life -- when she was crowned Miss Florida 20 years ago. As the play opens, we find Bobbi giving lessons on social graces to a young girl who lives down the street.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2001
Connecticut Yankee, A
City Center

While much has been said and argued about on the merits of revising once and future musicals, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart did just that to their own 1927 hit, A Connecticut Yankee (adapted from "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain).

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
February 2001
High Dive
Manhattan Class Company

Leslie Ayvazian's autobio solo is thinly conceived but lively. The gimmick of having audience members cue her with dialogue (instead of using pre-recorded voices) keeps things percolating.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
February 2001
Beowulf
Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts

When Benjamin Bagby is on stage, he tells a story nearly everyone knows, in a language no one understands - and the audience is mesmerized. His performance of Beowulf, in Old English, is creative, disciplined, entertaining, inspiring... in short, theater of the first magnitude. Bagby exploits the entire range of vocal sound, form, and technique: he growls, yells, sings, whispers, chants, as required. Through a thorough education to the oral tradition and a meticulous analysis of the text, he animates each phrase with commitment to his specific aesthetic decision.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
January 2001
Art
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Patty & Jay Baker Theater Complex

When it comes to fashion, food trends or theater, Milwaukeeans have learned to be patient.  It can take months - even years - before the latest hit migrates to the Midwest.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
December 2000
Almost Asleep
45th Street Theater

Few topics immediately draw attention in the theater; one is the subject of rape. Similar to the Holocaust in terms of severity, it is an issue that requires sensitivity by the makers but is also one that a viewer seems almost forced to be compelled to. That said, I wish Almost Asleep, the latest play by Julie Hebert (whose Ruby's Bucket Of Blood has become a Showtime feature) gave us something more to be compelled by than its subject.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Alice in Modernland
Sledgehammer Theater

Alice In Modernland is a world premiere by jazz vocalist, saxophonist, writer, and composer, Kirsten Nash. She has combined her love of jazz, blues, and many variations of rock with a contemporary version of the classic tale of one woman's dream/nightmare. Kirsten Brandt, who gave us the award winning Sweet Charity in 1998, has directed an almost-ready-for-Broadway production. But is New York ready for singer Alice's travails into the world of the cross-dressing Queen of Hearts (Christopher Hall), the Duchess (Leigh Scarritt), the Y.D.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Betrayal
American Airlines Theater

I'm not the world's biggest Harold Pinter fan, which is something I should share straight off.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Class Act, A
Manhattan Theater Club - Stage II

I never would have predicted it, but it seems the American musical isn't in such a bad state after all.  After the recent triumph of the surprise charmer The Full Monty on Broadway, here we have the belle of them all, A Class Act, which is to mind, the most original and affecting musical since Hedwig And The Angry Inch. There's true magic in it, and I suspect it's because its creators threw away all the stupid notes on how a musical is supposed to manipulate its audience.  More than any show (musical or play) I can recall in recent memory, it has its fin

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Cobb
Lucille Lortel Theater

You don't have to be a baseball fan to cheer for Cobb, Lee Blessing's (A Walk In The Woods) riveting play about the controversial slugger, who became as famous for hitting the ball as he was for hitting anyone who crossed him. Despite Cobb's remark, "I was too real for myth," Blessing has taken into account various legends that have surfaced about this great but petulant, player, who also became baseball's first millionaire, and devised not one but three ways to present him.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Doll
P.S. 122

Writer Erik Jackson and director Joshua Rosenzweig were onto something with this one (the program indicates it was "freely adapted from Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House). For anyone who had to read Ibsen's play in high school or college or whatever, it is evident that this work begs for someone to camp it up. It has everything: the put-upon, suffering housewife waiting for feminism to be invented, and her ungrateful husband who mentally takes advantage of her, all wrapped up in a highly dramatic vacuum of high drama.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Game Show
45 Bleecker

Back in my wilder days, I remember going to a now-defunct Greenwich Village bar that featured a live game show once a week, every week. For the cost of a few cocktails, you could see half-drunk people answer trivia questions about old TV personalities, sing karaoke-style ditties and perform scavenger hunts, all in an attempt to win prizes such as stuffed cows, magnets, videos and the all-important grand prize: a $50 bar tab. It was loose and fun, and nobody ever seemed to care that the prizes could be bought at any 99 cent store half the time.

November 2000
Beginning of August, The
Atlantic Theater

The Atlantic Theater Company's new season opens (miraculously) without a play by David Mamet; quite the opposite actually, it happens to be the new work by Tom Donaghy (Minutes From The Blue Route, Northeast Local). There are still ties (director Neil Pepe helmed the Atlantic's successful revival of American Buffalo last spring), so while it's nice to see new work being produced with craftsmanship, one wishes this new play had some of the kick Buffalo still has.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
October 2000
Arsenic and Old Lace
Derby Dinner Playhouse

One of the funniest and most beloved American comedies of all time,Arsenic And Old Lace is getting a splendid production at Derby Dinner Playhouse.  In lesser hands the 1941 play -- about two dear old ladies who with the best of intentions murder elderly single men -- could come off as creaky, dated, and somewhat offensive.  But Derby's fabulous cast breezes through the evening with a sure-fire knack for mining comic gold.  Sisters Abby (Rita Thomas) and Martha Brewster (Debra Babich) reside in a big old Brooklyn house where their grandfather once concocted patent med

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
October 2000
Polly Bergen: Sing One, Act Two
Feintein's at the Regency

I know what you're thinking. You thought I was dead, says Polly Bergen, the 70-year-old, still-quite-beautiful-and-svelte singer who greeted the audience that was packed in like sardines at Feinstein's at the Regency. Bergen, who, for whatever reason, chose to leave the professional stage thirty five years ago at the peak of her popularity, has retained the smoky sensual and strong voice that made her the undisputed queen of smoke-filled (the good-old days) cabarets.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2000
Barbara Cook: Stephen Sondheim and his Favorite Songwriters
Feintein's at the Regency

Musical theater legend Barbara Cook is taking her cue from a recent New York Times Magazine article written by Frank Rich about Stephen Sondheim, in which the composer talked about songs he wished he had written. She has made his list the theme of her month-long engagement at Feinstein's at the Regency.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2000
Four Guys Named Jose - And Una Mujer Named Maria
Blue Angel Theater

There was a time around the mid-20th century when one could truthfully say that the entertainer most visibly personifying the Latino temperament and artistry was Carmen Miranda, a.k.a. the Brazilian bombshell. Of course, the image of the short, fiery, motor-mouthed senorita with the tall, banana-topped headdress as the representative of so many diverse cultures was as limiting, and misleading, as it was grievously short-sighted.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2000
Game Show
45 Bleecker

So you haven't had your fill of TV game shows and often wished you could either attend one or be a player. Well the opportunity is at hand, maybe not to win a million bucks, but some nifty prizes (airline tickets, digital camera, a DVD Player, or a TV) that is, if you are one of the four lucky members of the audience that gets called on stage to be a contestant. Otherwise, the chances are good, if you have an aisle seat in the 300 seat theater, that you will walk out with either a T-shirt or an autographed photo of the show's revved up host Troy Richard (Michael McGrath).

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2000
Gloria
Theater For The New City

Glory be to "Gloria" (Carrie Brewer), a beautiful sword-wielding princess who, thanks to her now deceased father, is well schooled in the art of dueling and sundry martial arts. It's lucky for Gloria that she has maintained her form and technique in daily workouts with Carmella (Judi Lewis), her close friend since childhood and soon to become a nun. Also keeping close watch over Gloria is her trusted nurse (Barbara J. Spence), who promised the dying king that she would keep the secret of Gloria's birth and the true identity of her mother.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2000
Gorey Details, The
Century Theater

The fantastical illustrator and writer Edward Gorey's love of the macabre is so satisfyingly conceptualized and immortalized in print, it doesn't surprise me that most of the drolly dramatized skits compiled from the Gorey canon that make up the show The Gorey Details, left me cold rather than chilled. Peppered with songs by Peter Matz that curdle more than they creep, the "musicale," as it is billed, will, nevertheless be enjoyed by those who appreciate whimsy at its most capricious.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2000
And Neither Have I Wings to Fly
Victory Gardens Theater

The 1995 premiere production of And Neither Have I Wings To Fly by the then-debuting Seanachai Theater Company was the sort of serendipitous treasure one happens on unawares. But Ann Noble's poignant tale of two Irish sisters in 1950 seeking their individual freedom and happiness after the loss of their mother is now just another script, relying for its fulfillment on the expertise of its interpreters.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2000

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