Life of Pi
Gerald Schoenfeld Theater

Theater is the ultimate medium of the imagination, more so than film or TV. With the latter two, there is the potential to travel literally anywhere in the world (or the universe in fact), but the audience must work their minds to transform the four corners of the stage into the four corners of the earth. The stage provides more magical experiences than the ones offered before the large or small screens since you are a collaborator on making the trip and not just a viewer looking through the cinema camera lens.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Camelot
Lincoln Center - Vivian Beaumont Theater

Camelot, the musical adaptation of the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, has always been a “problem” show. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s lush, romantic score which includes such evergreen standards as “If Ever I Would Leave You,” “How to Handle a Woman,” and the optimistic title tribute to an idealized socially just society, has been overshadowed by Lerner’s confusing and diffuse book.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Peter Pan Goes Wrong
Ethel Barrymore Theater

For just plain endless belly laughs, give yourself a treat and take in Peter Pan Goes Wrong from a theater company just called Mischief at the Ethel Barrymore. This follow-up to Mischief’s The Play That Goes Wrong which had a long run on Broadway from 2017 to 2019 and is still playing Off-Broadway at New World Stages, follows the same basic template. An incompetent amateur troupe of British loonies mounts a familiar classic (in this case J.M. Barrie’s fantasy of the boy who wouldn’t grow up), and everything that can go wrong, does.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Thanksgiving Play, The
Helen Hayes Theater

Larissa FastHorse satirizes current confusing attitudes in modern theater in her riotous comedy, The Thanksgiving Play, now presented by Second Stage at the Hayes Theater after an Off-Broadway run at Playwrights Horizons in 2018. Fasthorse, the first Native American female playwright to be produced on Broadway, mercilessly mocks the well-meaning but condescending attempts of good-hearted liberals to include the voices of oppressed minorities in the arts.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Big Sexy
Donnelly Theater

Three things grace Westcoast Black Theater Troupe’s stage: the music of Fats Waller, a tribute to his embodiment but also performer Leon Pitts himself, and WBTT’s live band (previously playing from backstage). These constitute a triple treat for audiences who fill all seats in WBTT’s Creator and Director Nate Jacobs’s “dream come true” venue. They frequently applaud his Tribute to Waller but also his past and  present portrayer Leon S. Pitts.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Sunset Boulevard
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

One of Milwaukee’s newest theater companies, Bombshell, enters another phase with the company’s recent move to the intimate Studio Theatre at the Broadway Theatre Center. The small theater, home to Milwaukee Chamber Theatre and other local companies, is a big step up for Bombshell in terms of technical design and seating.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Visit Joe Whitefeather
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

Beaver Gap, 1970s, badly needed economic growth, so its Council decided to rename the town to attract more tourists and add to its residents. Consumeristic choice: adopt WWII Native American military hero’s name and put his body in a big memorial that can attract visitors. Good or bad move?  Visit Joe Whitefeather has the community development story being televised now, an interview with a prominent early participant in it.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Love's Labour's Lost
Ringling Bayshore Garden

Love’s Labour’s Lost, one of Shakespeare’s early comedies, is not as often produced as others, due probably to its many allusions to now obscure people of the times and its types of witty rhetoric and linguistics. For FSU/Asolo Conservatory presentation, director Jonathan Epstein has adapted the play into a modern, almost musical-comedy. In it, a mix of aristocratic and lower-tier characters sing, dance and cavort in a lush garden setting to bring to life a comic strip. 

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Bob Fosse's Dancin'
Music Box Theater

There’s no other way to put it. You’ve got to really love dancing to enjoy this show. Even so, after a while Dancin’ begins to feel disjointed, repetitive, tedious. All the Fosse trademarks are there: the famous “jazz hands,” straw hats, hip thrusts, cigarettes, and even the voiceover is Fosse. The best bits tend to be short, especially the number with extreme tumbling, with a little boxing thrown in.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Paralyzed
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne's Lab

Long postponed by the Pandemic, Paralyzed keeps its two characters’  meeting also delayed. Yet Lee and Leigh are importantly related from youth through middle age. Playwright Etan Frankel deals with their progress by having each act it out individually in tandem. Their mainly oral interpretative parts lead, under Meg Gilbert’s vigorous direction, to a very satisfying traditional dramatic climax. 

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
The Best We Could (A Family Tragedy)
City Center - Stage 1

Emily Feldman’s The Best We Could (a family tragedy), at Manhattan Theater Club’s Off-Broadway City Center Stage I, is performed on a bare stage and delivers an emotional wallop despite its spareness. Feldman’s telling of her story of a father-daughter road trip is influenced by Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, with a Stage Manager narrating the action, playing supporting parts, and acting as God-like figure controlling the characters.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
Seagull/Woodstock, NY, The
Pershing Square Signature Center

Most updated adaptations of classic theater works deliver few fresh ideas or interpretations and usually elicit the response, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Just present the original and have done with it.” But two current variations on oft-produced pieces prove the exception to this rule. Both Broadway’s & Juliet and The Seagull: Woodstock, NY, presented by the New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center, offer new insights for contemporary audiences without tearing down their source material.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
Doll's House, A
Hudson Theater

Before Jamie Lloyd’s minimalist and strangely powerful revival of A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen’s prophetic proto-feminist masterpiece, begins, audience members at the Hudson Theater are treated to the spectacle of Oscar-winning Jessica Chastain sitting in a simple chair on a revolving turntable. As Chastain is spun slowly around, she fixes the audience with a cold stare. Many whip out their camera-phones to take videos or pictures, as if she were an art exhibit. This pre-show photo op reinforces Ibsen’s theme of society treating women like dolls or objects.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
Noises Off
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

Readers who have seen and enjoyed the hilarious 2012 comedy, The Play That Goes Wrong can tip their hat to another play that opened about 40 years ago, Noises Off by Michael Frayn. In both works, done in the play-within-a-play format, actors must contend with missing props, falling set pieces, actors’ physical missteps, inaccurate line readings, and so forth.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
& Juliet
Stephen Sondheim Theater

Most updated adaptations of classic theater works deliver few fresh ideas or interpretations and usually elicit the response, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Just present the original and have done with it.” But & Juliet, on Broadway at the Stephen Sondheim Theater after a smash run in London, offers new insights for contemporary audiences without tearing down its source material.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
Pictures from Home
Studio 54

Pictures from Home currently running thru April 30 is the most delightful and thought-provoking play currently gracing the Broadway stages at this very moment.

Featuring the tried-and-true Danny Burstein, Nathan Lane, and Zoë Wanamaker - three stellar actors at their very best – the play is wowing audiences with loads of laughter, wisps of tears, and nostalgia to boot, for one hour and forty-five intermissionless minutes. As to be expected, with such accomplished illuminati, be prepared to add a 7-minute tsunami of uproariously well-deserved curtain bows.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

In what she deems a memory play, narrator Linda O’Shea tells the audience of four 1970s days when an Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish shook up her entire  Irish Catholic family.  Her narration gets frequently interrupted and briefly taken over by family members and visitors. All this activity occurs in two acts in the family’s common rooms to be like the era’s typical TV show episodes and with similar characterizations, jokes, and comic effects.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
We Will not be Silent
St. Christopher's Episcopal Church

Acacia Theater, Milwaukee’s Christian-based theater company, presents a powerful and intense drama, We Will Not Be Silent, in the intimate downstairs performing space at St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in River Hills.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
SpongeBob Musical, for Young Audiences, The
First Stage

Family-friendly First Stage, one of the country’s leading theaters for young audiences, continues its current season with a scaled-down production of the 2017 musical, SpongeBob SquarePants, the Broadway Musical .

Now it’s time for The SpongeBob Musical for Young Audiences, which opened at Milwaukee’s First Stage theater on March 3. Both the Broadway show and its younger version are affiliated with the Nickelodeon TV network, which produces the popular cartoon version.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
Cornelia Street
Atlantic Theater - Studio

Two new Off-Broadway productions on the smaller stages of two major theater companies have large ambitions but offer only tired tropes we’ve seen too many times before: the Roundabout’s The Wanderers and Simon Stephens and Mark Eitzel’s musical Cornelia Street, about a struggling Greenwich Village eatery. The latter piece, at Atlantic Theater Company’s basement studio space, wants to be hip and compassionate but winds up serving us a warmed-over, unsatisfying meal.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Wanderers, The
Roundabout - Laura Pels Theater

Two new Off-Broadway productions on the smaller stages of two major theater companies have large ambitions but offer only tired tropes we’ve seen too many times before: the musical Cornelia Street and Anna Ziegler’s The Wanderers at Roundabout Theater Company’s Laura Pels stage. The latter does have a modicum of genuine emotion and insight, but too much of the plot, acting, and direction are stagey and stilted.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Dreamgirls
West Coast Black Theater Troupe - Donnelly Theater

A simple story set to music with much dancing and other movement becomes an extravaganza in Dreamgirls at Westcoast Black Theater Troupe. It has gone all out technically to present this show, even by employing renowned Asolo Rep Scenic Studios to construct the colorful scenery.  Along with WBTT’s usual sumptuous costuming, designed by Darci Collins, the musical drama couldn’t look any better nor could its cast. And all the sound matches the sight.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Last Match, The
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne's Lab

The Last Match is about more than a semifinal in a career-determining contest. It’s also personally important for its opposing male tennis players. Playwright Anna Ziegler also ensures that the women in their lives completely share in their achievements. Kate Alexander, an eminent director of women but well versed in motivating male actors too, astutely shows how intimate ties to women can work when the men are prominent sports figures.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Inspector Calls, An
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

A night of a successful businessman’s family and a prospective son-in-law celebrating becomes a nightmare of revelations when an Inspector comes with news and questions about a woman’s ghastly suicide. Could the English aristocrats have been involved? If so, how? FSU/Asolo Conservatory’s revival of J. B. Priestley’s early 20th century classic supplies answers within an Edwardian atmosphere. It presents Priestly’s humane socialist philosophy vs. the characters’ greed, self-indulgence, and moralistic vacancy.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Some Like it Hot
Shubert Theater

The new musical version of Some Like It Hot, based on Billy Wilder’s 1959 comic film classic about two musicians disguised in drag, is a delightfully daffy romp, so silly and fun-making that its sometimes heavy-handed political messaging doesn’t get in the way of a Broadway good time. Set in during the depths of the Depression in 1933, this Hot follows the basic outline of Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s original screenplay but makes more than a few significant detours into “woke” territory.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Reel Music
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

Music and movies go together as four singer-dancers summon up memories of favorite viewings and accompanying tunes from silent to recent film classics. By starting with “Hurray for Hollywood” and “That’s Entertainment”, the group previews the script’s organization of songs from earliest films through each decade until the present. So there’s at least some tune for every body of every age in the audience to recall and love, as it will an era’s chief events.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Chicken & Biscuits
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Divided family members interact at a funeral in Chicken & Biscuits. The corpse, a family leader and pastor of a Black Church, will be given “a celebration of life”—but not before his relatives cure what’s been deadly in their relationships. Douglas Lyons says, unlike most other Black playwrights, he’s had a “right to be silly” in this “universal” work. Silly is indeed what this play is. Also, universally stereotypical.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Endgame
Irish Repertory Theater

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame does not show a typical family, but he does write about family dynamics in addition to the larger issue of how man copes with mortality as civilization crumbles. Currently revived Off-Broadway by the Irish Repertory Theater, Beckett’s 1957 one-act depicts a quartet of survivors of an unnamed apocalypse quarreling and coping through one day. Climate change, pandemics, and increasing nuclear tensions make the play more relevant than ever.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Pictures from Home
Studio 54

The drama of the everyday and the ordinary are given vivid, rich life in Pictures from Home, Sharr White’s stage adaptation of Larry Sultan’s 1992 photo memoir, staged with precision by Bartlett Sher and acted with compassion and depth by three of the strongest actors from Broadway and the West End, Danny Burstein, Nathan Lane, and Zoe Wanamaker. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Collaboration, The
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

I’ve lived in New York City’s East Village for many decades, the very neighborhood where much of the action in Anthony McCarten’s currently running Broadway play, The Collaboration, takes place, and where art-world legends Andy Warhol (1928-1987) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) — here channeled by actors Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope — could frequently be seen roaming the streets. Just reading for weeks on end about McCarten’s drama working its way from London’s Old Vic to Broadway’s Samuel J.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Network
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

Audience members for Lee Hall’s adaptation of Network at Florida Studio Theater see and participate in a mix of the 1970’s TV industry with today’s multi-media usage. The play shows how both have and do affect individual lives. Yesterday’s filmed proclamation that “the media is the message” has grown to become “the message is the media”.  In addition, business and finance combine as message-giver.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

Playwright Edward Albee’s scorching indictment of middle-class marriage, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? comes to life on the Milwaukee stage this winter. Milwaukee Chamber Theatre has dedicated its intimate, “black box” space to one of best American plays of the 20th Century.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Dino: An Evening with Dean Martin
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

The program cover for Dino – An Evening with Dean Martin shows the body of a man, wearing a tuxedo, who is holding his drink in a double old-fashioned glass.

Now, if you have no idea what size of glass this is, you can stop reading right now. It may mean you are from a younger generation that is more apt to order a lemon drop martini from the bar than whiskey on the rocks.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Silent Sky
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Silent Sky is the story of Henrietta Levitt who, hearing musical rhythms in stars and their lights, attained and explained visual and scientific insights about our heavens and beyond. Author Lauren Gunderson also tells of a typical 1900-1920 family and fellow scientific professionals who influenced Henrietta Levitt’s life and work. Most positive were other women, since they shared a difficult struggle to get—as men had—not only opportunity, encouragement, and means to succeed but also recognition if they did.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Babel
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne's Lab

Babel comes to Florida Studio Theater as the last stop in the National New Play Network’s latest Rolling World Premiere program. FST aided the first stages of development through readings. Then the play moved on to allow author Jacqueline Goldfinger to keep or make changes, based on work of four additional creative theater teams. Her probable final script is the one FST is presenting as a dark comedy. But it’s not essentially comedic. It’s like the Biblical place of its title, where those who rule attempt to claim God’s power over it.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Three Musketeers, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

You may have seen “The Three Musketeers” before on stage or screen but most likely not as the scenic extravaganza Asolo Rep is offering. Yet it begins simply with D’Artagnan, son of a famous Musketeer, ready to leave their country home to join Musketeers and serve King Louis XIII in squelching Cardinal Richelieu’s attempts to rule France. In Ken Ludwig’s dramatic version of Alexander Dumas’s famous novel, D’Artagnan himself gets joined by a sister, Sabine.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Flyin' West
Westcoast Black Theater Troupe - Donnelly Theater

As a  black American historical drama, Flyin’ West became a major hit as both a piece of dramatic literature and a true exposition of 1890s black experience, especially in the U.S. West and involving women.  A few decades of developments in black theater and uncovering of much more of black experience in the U.S have made Pearl Cleage’s play no longer novel. It does, though, maintain some power, even in WBTT’s production where it’s like a staged TV movie.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Stick Fly
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theatre

Perhaps the most arresting thing about Stick-Fly is its title. It refers to a stick or the like with sticky stuff on it that entomologists use to catch flying insects so they may be studied.  A main character in the play is such a scientist, but neither she nor others deals with insects in it. 

Dramatist Lydia Diamond “sticks” attention on members—and possibly future ones—of a well-to-do black family during a crucial weekend at a long-owned beach home in upscale Martha’s Vineyard.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2023
Downstate
Playwrights Horizons

Bruce Norris has already won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for Clybourne Park, his clever contemporary twist on race derived from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. He is in line for more accolades for his latest searing and insightful play, Downstate, now at Playwrights Horizons after runs at London’s National Theater and Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company. The subject matter is off-putting and challenging to say the least. But this skilled dramatist finds displays incredible compassion for his deeply troubled characters. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2022
Leopoldstadt
Longacre Theater

The character list to Tom Stoppard’s latest work, Leopoldstadt, is certainly intimidating. Multiple generations of a Jewish Viennese family, played by a small army of actors, sprawl across two pages. “How will I ever keep all these characters straight,?” I mused as scanned the program. Yes, the relationships and plotlines are incredibly intricate and difficult to follow, but that doesn’t matter.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2022

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