Sweeney Todd
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Although Sweeney Todd’s roots are in Renaissance revenge tragedy, 19th century English penny dreadful stories, and a 1973 dark melodrama, its concerns with class social differences, economic inequality, exploitation, and inhumane actions haven’t lost their relevance.  Nor have the power of literary suspense and triumphant romance. All receive emphasis through music at once classical and contemporary. At Asolo Rep, a relatively small cast acts with great aplomb.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
What the Constitution Means to Me
Helen Hayes Theater

Is the Constitution enough of a temptation to draw you to the Helen Hayes Theater for playwright Heidi Schreck's What the Constitution Means to Me? It should be. Part bio, part poli-sci, this is an original free-wheeling, emotional, and audaciously relevant play, at a time the country can benefit from its dose of provocative honesty.

Teenage Heidi Schreck, from Wenatchee, Washington, an “abortion-free zone,” was persuaded by her mother to enter her speech about the Constitution in the American Legion Oratory Contest.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Fiddler on the Roof
Stage 42

When the original 1964 production of Fiddler on the Roof premiered on Broadway, the character of Tevye, a struggling, big-hearted, Torah-quoting milkman from the Russian shtetl, Anatevka, moved into the lexicon of Broadway theater's standout characters. Of course, Tevya was already known to readers of Sholem Rabinovich, aka Sholem Aleichem, the “Jewish Mark Twain,” who wrote short stories about the vivid characters of the impoverished Yiddish-speaking villages of Russia.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Burn This
Hudson Theater

While the lead performers sizzle, the play fizzles. In the current revival of Lanford Wilson's Burn This, at the Hudson Theater, Keri Russell and Adam Driver, connect like sparkplugs while the play stumbles unevenly between the past and conflicts of the present.

Lanford Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize for The Fifth of July in 1980, but writing his upcoming play, Burn This, presented a struggle.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Crime and Punishment
Edgemar Center for the Arts

First produced in Chicago in 2003, this adaptation of Crime and Punishment was seen in L.A. ten years ago. Now it has returned in a new production directed by Peter Richards and starring three superb actors.  That’s right:  three actors, because this is a stripped-down, modern version of the 500- page novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Written by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus, the adaptations tells its story in an astoundingly brief ninety minutes.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Utility
Rivendell Theater

Literary scholars can speak of the narrative device labeled "a dark night of the soul" but the darkness surrounding our heroine on this sweltering East Texas evening in a house still recovering from flood damage is the result, in whole or in part, of her chronically irresponsible husband neglecting to pay the minimum due on their electric bill—an oversight disabling the air-conditioning and reducing their 8-year-old daughter's birthday party to a back-yard romp with balloons and a hastily repaired Walmart cake, instead of the promised movie.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Another British Invasion
Midtown Arts & Theater Center

It is hard to believe it is the better part of two decades since I first had the pleasure of hearing talented soprano, Kelli Estes, as she performed in New York City. How could I have guessed then that fate would soon find us both working in the Houston area where, happily, whenever I am in town, I continue to have pleasant opportunities to see her perform with the talented LoneStarLyric Company that she founded thirteen years ago back in 2006?

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
What the Constitution Means to Me
Helen Hayes Theater

While the current off-Broadway revival of The Cradle Will Rock is a relic of the past, Heidi Schreck’s unconventional stage piece, What the Constitution Means to Me, at the Helen Hayes on Broadway after two Off-Broadway runs earlier this season, is a living, breathing document, much like the constitution it addresses. Schreck’s unusual stage memoir recreates her journey as a 15-year-old making speeches on our sacred document cross-country to earn scholarship money. She also shares, as a grown woman in 2019, her view of the constitution.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Cradle Will Rock, The
Classic Stage Company

The Cradle Will Rock is John Doyle’s staging of the rarely-produced labor musical at Classic Stage Company. Marc Blitzstein’s legendary pro-union tuner is more famous for the circumstances of its premiere than the actual show. In 1937, the government-sponsored Federal Theater Project pulled funds for the production, directed by Orson Welles and produced by John Houseman. At the last minute, the company had to find another theater and the actors had to perform in the aisles since their union forbade their appearing on stage.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Lehman Trilogy, The
Park Avenue Armory

The Lehman Trilogy, in the vast space of the Park Avenue Armory for a limited run after engagements in Europe and London, conveys the story of 150 years of the titular financial clan.  Lehman, by Italian playwright Stefano Massini adapted to English by Ben Power, is a sweeping tale with three world-class actors (Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles, and Adam Godley) enacting all the roles in the saga of the family as they progress from immigrant storeowners in Alabama to kings of the trading floor on Wall Street to losing everything in the crash of 2008.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
King Lear
Cort Theater

Some actors are larger than life, but not life-like. We admire their craft rather than identify with the characters they are portraying and the emotions they are conveying. These actors usually win major awards, but they rarely truly move audiences other than causing them to stand for ovations. Glenda Jackson can be one of these stars at times. Perhaps that is why she left acting for politics, where there is less risk of really showing your inner self. Her brilliance has always been cold, and her technique so practiced and steely, she holds us at an arm’s length.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations
Imperial Theater

While Broadway’s Oklahoma! revival and Hadestown offer modern slants on traditional templates, Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations is an example of a relatively recent and already cliched genre: the jukebox musical. Like Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, The Cher Show, Motown, and Jersey Boys before it,  Proud recycles the songbook of its subject, the phenomenally successful R&B male group The Temptations to rake in nostalgic box office dollars. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Hadestown
Walter Kerr Theater

Another musical with a long production history also recently finally arrived on Broadway and employs familiar tropes to interpret modern society. Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown comes to the Main Stem after concept albums, workshops, a 2016 off-Broadway run at New York Theater Workshop, and a London engagement at the National Theatre. Mitchell’s delightfully funky folk opera weaves together the myths of Eurydice and Orpheus with that of Persephone and Hades to create an allegory of the conflicting strains of passion, art, and commerce.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Oklahoma!
Circle in the Square

Like our current political climate, Daniel Fish’s sex-drenched nightmare version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! has polarized the theatergoing public. You either hate it or love it. After engagements at Bard College in 2015 and St. Ann’s Warehouse Off-Broadway earlier this season, the radical revival has forced audiences to examine their assumptions about this supposedly wholesome staple of high school and community theater. Naysayers moan that the director has distorted and ruined a beloved classic of Broadway’s Golden Age.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
View from the Bridge, A
Players Center - MainStage

Enclosed in a dynamic narrative, Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge illustrates his theory of a Modern Tragedy extending that of ancient Greece.His tragic hero of mid-20th century is as modern a one today as is the plight of immigrants involved in his story.  So is the hero’s relationship with wife and neighbors.Even the chorus is both classic in inspiration and modern in its manner of delivery as directed by Elliott Raines for this Two Chairs staging.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Hillary and Clinton
John Golden Theater

Star turns can make or break a production.Two recent Broadway openings feature big-name leads, but their effects on their respective shows are startlingly different. In Burn This, a mismatched Adam Driver and Keri Russell drag down Lanford Wilson’s supposedly explosive romance to the ho-hum level. However, in Hillary and Clinton, Laurie Metcalf and John Lithgow make Lucas Hnath’s intriguing behind-the-scenes political premise into a gripping portrait of a complex marriage.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Non-Player Character
Athenaeum

In the 100th-anniversary year of Mary Shelley's “Frankenstein,” playwright Walt McGough invites us to consider the ease with which real-life toys can be repurposed to create monsters, much as an incendiary once associated only with holiday fireworks became the deadly substance we now call “gunpowder."

Our fable begins with Trent and Katja, former high-school comrades in rural New York state who bonded through their communal enthusiasm for online role-play games featuring horticultural battles against marauding vegetables and homicidal flowers.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Burn This
Hudson Theater

Star turns can make or break a production.Two recent Broadway openings feature big-name leads, but their effects on their respective shows are startlingly different. In Hillary and Clinton, Laurie Metcalf and John Lithgow make Lucas Hnath’s intriguing behind-the-scenes political premise into a gripping portrait of a complex marriage. However, Burn This, has a mismatched Adam Driver and Keri Russell drag down Lanford Wilson’s supposedly explosive romance to the ho-hum level.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Ragtime
Hobby Center

I recall back when I first became curious about the musical Ragtime that I was astonished upon locating a synopsis of the plot. It appeared, at first glance, to have such a complex structure, with its three main story lines, to be nearly impossible to stage successfully. Belying that, the extraordinary production currently being presented by Theater Under the Stars at Houston’s Hobby Center is about the best example I can imagine of genius on the stage translating the complex printed pages of a play to a living, breathing miracle right before our eyes.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Royale, The
Geva Theater - Nextstage

Virtually all of our leading contemporary repertory theaters now include non-traditional experimental techniques in staging not only original new work but also – even especially – to perform and reconsider revivals of historic classics. Canada's great Stratford Festival now regularly gives us Shakespeare revivals with actors playing characters of the opposite sex, six or seven actors performing plays written to have a cast of more than 30 characters, and realistic people and animals played by puppets. Understandably, their audiences are sharply divided in response.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Two Trains Running
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse

August Wilson wrote some of our era’s most extraordinary plays, namely his Pittsburgh Cycle, alternately known as the American Century Cycle — plays that dramatize the African American experience decade by decade, throughout the 20th century.

The seventh play in that cycle, Two Trains Running, from 1992, can be seen in a remarkable production at Milwaukee Repertory Theater. For the record, the Rep has produced seven out of the 10 August Wilson plays in recent seasons. Two Trains Running is its only August Wilson offering this season.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Native Son
Kirk Douglas Theater

Richard Wright is having his revenge. The great Black writer was persecuted by this country in the 1950s, vilified by the right-wingers and Hoover’s FBI because of his politics and militancy.  Wright fled the USA for Paris, where he died in 1960, a bitter and disillusioned man.  But his work lived on after him; his best-known novel, Native Son, was twice turned into a motion-picture, with a third one about to be screened by HBO.  In 1942, the book was also adapted for the stage by Paul Green and Wright himself. Now, four decades later, yet another dramatist, Nambi E.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Diary of Anne Frank, The
Crighton Theater

The wonderful Stage Right Players, resident company of the exquisite Crighton Theater in Conroe, Texas, is well known for its many delightful productions of musicals and comedies. But the group is not afraid to take on more serious offerings from time to time, as was the case with last season’s production of The Elephant Man. Continuing in that vein, Directors, Bonnie Hewitt & Meredith Ann Gaines, now bring us a poignant revival of The Diary of Anne Frank, the 1956 play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Niceties, The
Geffen Playhouse - Gil Cates Theater

Black militant student challenges white liberal teacher in The Niceties, Eleanor Burgess’s provocative two-character play now running at The Geffen after successful runs on both coasts (including the Manhattan Theatre Club).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Call Me Ishmael: A Hallucination on Moby Dick
Off the Wall Theater

One of Milwaukee’s smallest theater companies, Off the Wall Theater, takes on one of American literature’s greatest challenges, the monumental epic, Moby Dick. And here’s the good news: thanks to a talented cast and cleverly produced special effects, the whale has landed.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Ben Butler
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

Humor and history—that’s the formula to success within Richard Strand’s engaging Ben Butler. As the play opens, a Civil War general has one of his worst days yet in his new office. He’s a lawyer who has been recruited as a Union general and he’s barely had a month with Fort Monroe, Virginia under his command. Even some of his crates haven’t been unpacked.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Duet for One
Beverly Hills Playhouse

Duet for One, Tom Kempinski’s two-character play about a therapist fighting to save the life of an anguished, suicidal patient, takes flight at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, thanks to the sensitive, skilled work of its cast and director.  What could have been a static talkfest becomes an engrossing drama in their hands.

The entire play takes place in the office of Dr. Feldmann (Howard Leder), a tall, lean, sharp-featured shrink with a light German accent.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Lottery Day
Goodman Theater

You could stage all seven of the plays comprising Ike Holter's Rightlynd cycle over one day (with a dinner break). Theaters looking to make history should start planning to do that very thing, now that the concluding chapter in the saga of a Chicago neighborhood-in-transition has premiered.

And a handsome premiere it is, too.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
As You Like It
Florida State University - Selby Garden

Without any trace of a designed set, As You Like It in Sarasota’s Selby Gardens always seems like the Forest of Arden, never Duke Frederick Senior’s court.  This works better than the much-doubling and changed casting, amount of editing of the original text, and a rather strange directorial vision of the play’s being about all sorts of magic rather than predominately satire and love.

Shakespeare universalized much of what life in Elizabethan England was concerned with.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
FRANK: The Man. The Music.
Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion

They say that “seeing is believing,” but there are magical times when that old saying seems dramatically challenged. Such was the case last Saturday night when a unique concert titled “FRANK. The Man. The Music” was presented at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in The Woodlands, Texas.

Houston area fans of “Old Blue Eyes” were out in force, and although the beautiful venue was not at full capacity on that pleasantly warm spring evening, those fortunate enough to be in the audience would see and hear an event that few would soon forget.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
King and I, The
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

The King and I is no stranger to the Broadway stage. The original 1951 version and revivals in 1996 and 2015 all won Tony Awards and earned enviable box office receipts. Now, the national tour of the 2015 version comes to Milwaukee’s Marcus Center for the Performing Arts. One wishes that the Broadway actors had come with it.

As most everyone knows, this is the tale of an English widow, Anna Leonowens, who comes to Siam with her your son Louis to tutor the many wives and children of the progressive King.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Rep Lab
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stiemke Studio

Each year, the Milwaukee Rep’s Emerging Professional Resident ensemble creates a show to highlight the talents of its artists. However, for the 9th annual Rep Lab, as it is called, the 2018/19 EPRs chose something entirely different. Instead of offering a half dozen or so new short plays, the group chose to stage an entirely original production.

The change took the young artists into the worlds of dance, video art and individual performance.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
How to Write a New Book for the Bible
Next Act Theater

Bill Cain’s finely tuned How to Write a New Book for the Bible makes a strong statement about the power of family. The play probes some of the families mentioned in the Bible, during his own autobiographical quest to see his mother through the last six months of her life.

When the play opens on Rick Graham’s minimalist set, Bill Cain (the character, not the playwright) is realizing that his mother – who lives in another state – is no longer going to be able to care for herself.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Things We Do, The
Odyssey Theater

”What man’s head would do is always defeated by his scrotum.” Edward Dahlberg’s aphorism came back to me as I watched The Things We Do at the Odyssey Theater. Written by Grant Woods, who was Arizona’s attorney general in the 1990s, the play deals with the impact of an adulterous  love affair on two middle-aged Los Angeles couples.  Restaurateur Bill (Blake Boyd) has been married for a long time to Alice (Liesel Kopp). They are reasonably happy despite “having grown apart” over the years, owing mostly to her New Age interest in yoga and vegetarianism.  But they hang in

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations
Imperial Theater

There are few examples of jukebox musicals—a denigrating term if ever there was one—that have blown me away. In fact, without overtaxing my brain, Jersey Boys, which dramatizes the formation, success, and eventual break-up of the 1960s rock ‘n’roll group The Four Seasons, is the only jukebox musical of import that immediately comes to mind.

Directed by Des McAnuff and choreographed by Sergio Trujillo, Jersey Boys opened on Broadway to rave reviews, a Best Musical Tony, and a 4,642 performance run, followed by continued success off Broadway.

Ed Rubin
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Birdland Blue
Los Angeles Theater Center - Theater 4

Birdland Blue, the latest production of The Robey Theater Company, which is now in its silver anniversary season, must be counted as a major disappointment. On paper, the play sounded intriguing:  a portrait of jazz in its 1959 heyday, with Miles Davis (Marcus Clark Oliver) playing his horn at Birdland, the NYC nightclub named after the famed Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker. With a live band listed in the credits, the chance to hear some good music—and see a rare jazz play—was enticing.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Wednesday's Child
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz Theater

Wednesday’s Child centers on a couple who want a child but can’t conceive one. They hire a healthy university student to be a surrogate mother. Each of the couple nourish her, either with food or promises of a better path to life fulfillment.  But then the gal’s murdered, so a lawyer and police come into the picture to determine who’s responsible and why.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Herland
Redtwist Theater

"When people ask us if we want to do something, it will be a real question! We can say 'no' or 'yes,' and they'll listen to us when we answer!" Following a wave of playwrights wringing their hands over adult children struggling with the question of what to do about grandma, Grace McLeod thinks it's high time to bring the grandmas themselves into the discussion.

What do McLeod's empty nesters want?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Admissions
Theater Wit

Historically, the children of rich parents attended college, while those of poor parents were sent to trade schools. The mid-20th-century introduction of government-funded facilities offering a variety of curricula, however, has led to confusion over the differing purposes of these institutions, culminating in the popular myth of certification by the "right" school guaranteeing the recipient thereof a future blessed by both social and financial success.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Cake, The
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

The Cake is a problem play because of its central issue involving gay marriage and religious opposition. But one of Bekah Brunstetter's two major couples involved—especially the lead-role wife and baker—is humorous enough to heighten the comic. The play's basically what used to be called a matinee comedy and what today could be considered an onstage (rather than TV) serio-comic sitcom.

The titled pastry is ordered from Della, a proud baker with her own shop, by Jen, a lifelong friend and somewhat of a daughter substitute.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2019

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