Comedy Of The Last Dinner, The
Niavaran Artistic Creations Foundation

Farhad Ayiish assembled a group of talented film and TV actors for his sparkling Comedy Of The Last Dinner, which had an extended run this past fall at the Niavaran cultural center, opposite Niavaran Park in northern Tehran.  Ayiish's long stay in the US probably accounted for the American-style direct contact the players established with the audience.  The action involved eight ingenuous eccentric guests at a fateful dinner party.  Each one was so caught up in his own super-high-priority concerns that the others were but a captive audience. 

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Core pazzo
Teatro Mercadante

Galleria Toledo artistic director Laura Angiulli has created a unique spectacle for popular singer Nino D'Angelo, uniting his songs with poetry recited by noted actor Tonino Taiuti to pay homage both to this street kid who made it big and to the city of Naples.  This show marks a natural evolution in the career of ever-popular D'Angelo, whose first major artistic recognition came from Miles Davis.  Since the texts of his songs and the poetry by him, Enzo Moscato and Rafaele Viviani are largely in Neapolitan dialect, this show is clearly intended for local consumption.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
December 1996
Coriolanus
Old Vic

After foisting on us last summer an abysmal Antony and Cleopatra, in which only one minor player could speak the verse acceptably, the Royal Shakespeare Company is back in top form with its current production of Coriolanus. Although it deals with the Rome of around 500 BCE, there are no togas here. In an acknowledged bow to filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, director David Farr has chosen to set the play in the world of Japanese samurai.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
July 2003
Coriolanus
Festival Theater Stage

Director Antoni Cimolino, newly appointed "General Director" of Stratford (he's been Executive Director since 1998), can get anything he wants for his own productions; and this Coriolanus is star studded, with superstar designers. Lighting is by Gil Wechsler, former head of lighting at Stratford and at the Metropolitan Opera House. Sets and costumes are by Theater Hall-of-Fame member Santo Loquasto, who has won Tony Awards in both categories, and Oscar nominations for some of his dozens of films.
 

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2006
Count of Monte Cristo, The
Stratford Festival - Avon Theatre

Wouldn't you know that right after the official opening night of a botched Shakespeare classic, a new version of an old hambone drama would get a Stratford production that looks like great theater? When I caught up with Marshall Borden's The Count of Monte Cristo, it was a hit show and a supremely polished performance.

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
August 2004
Crazy Heart

(see Criticopia International listing under "Core pazzo")
http://www.totaltheater.com/?q=node/1334

Creeper, The
Playhouse Theatre

A beautiful plant that creeps onto and strangles the tree it lives on in the garden of rich eccentric Edward Kimberly gives title to Pauline Macaulay's 1965 (but not dated) play, The Creeper, and symbolizes its action. Though an admitted "old Queen," Edward hires young men simply as companions. Extravagantly fed, clothed, entertained, housed, but not well paid, they become dependent on him while at his beck and call.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2006
Cuckoos
Barbican Pit

An absurdist comedy, Cuckoos was written in 1990 and assigned by its author (born in 1956) to a group of plays that he called "the Theater of Excess." This designation is certainly a fitting one. Manfridi's works have been widely performed (there is even a theater named for him in Finland); but if this play is typical, he is an appallingly bad dramatist.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
July 2003
Cut, The
Donmar Warehouse

The title, "The Cut," refers to a mysterious, painful killing under the auspices of The State, of an apparently colonial type that for generations has dispatched rebels and just plain natives. Ian McKellen plays the bureaucrat Paul who interviews candidates for, and, if appropriate, administers The Cut. He does so superbly. His Paul is tired -- of the secrecy surrounding his job, of its seeming futility, and most of all of the stress it has put on his life at home. He tries to dissuade his latest victim, portrayed stubbornly by Jimmy Akingbola, from accepting The Cut but fails.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2006
Cafe a Go Go
Cafe a Go Go

It's loud, it's fast, it gets the job done, and it's watchable all the way through - and it's also a show I could have left at any moment without feeling I missed much.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
October 2003
Cabaret
North Coast Repertory Theater

Dennis J. Scott, as Ernst Ludwig/Max, is a study in a slick character with a terrible goal -- the forming of the Third Reich. Linda Libby gives us a Fraulein Schneider we could love, feel sorry for, and enjoy her travails with her tenants. Jim Chovick as her love, Herr Schultz, gives a new meaning to naivety, as Schultz insists that the Nazi will think of him as a German, not a Jew. We watch their love grow and be destroyed. We shudder when young Michael Cullen, as the Youth, sings the haunting "Tomorrow Belongs To Me." Hitler's youth movement has begun to take hold in Germany.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2003
Cabaret
Patio Playhouse

Cabaret burst onto the Broadway scene in 1966, winning multiple Tonys. It defied musical theater traditions with heavy drama and few laughs. The piece illustrates how a society allows itself to be overtaken. It is currently on the boards at Patio Playhouse Community Theater in Escondido.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2007
Cabaret
Warner Theater

Outside the Warner Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue, ticket holders wilted in the August heat, waiting for the doors to open. But once inside the theater, where Cabaret has finally arrived after a two-week hold-over in Chicago, "everything (was) beautiful." Or the seedy equivalent. The meticulous road show production is decadent, naughty, and, oh, so much fun. Originally constructed in 1924, the sumptuously refurbished Warner Theater is the ideal setting for the pre-World War II German Kit Kat Klub, designed by Robert Brill.

Barbara Gross
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Cabaret
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

From the opening strains of the knockout opening number, which bids the audience "Wilkommen" in several languages, Cabaret is marvelously successful in transporting audiences to a different world. It is 1929, and the world is that of Weimar Germany, in the days when the Third Reich was coming to power. John Kander and Fred Ebb's magical score allows us to effortlessly slip into the past, when good times were as close as the neighborhood nightclub.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2001
Cabaret
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

The musical Cabaret has a superlative pedigree. It first opened on Broadway in 1966 and had a healthy run. Then was made into a hit film, starring Liza Minnelli. It has been revived a number of times, including a 1998 version (starring Alan Cumming as the Emcee) that won a Tony Award for Best Revival. With all these plaudits and resources to draw from, why does the Skylight Opera Theater version seem so muddled? One starts to wonder about the show even before the opening number.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2004
Caine Mutiny Court Martial, The
A Red Orchid Theater

When is the overthrow of authority justified, what is the responsibility of the individual to blow the whistle, and who profits -- always, who profits? Herman Wouk posed those questions in 1950 within the microcosm of a court-martial trial for a mutiny aboard an American warship. The 1954 movie version drowned any possible controversy in a flood of spectacle and sentimentality, but director Wilson Milam and an all-star ensemble or intensely committed actors delve into the ambiguities of the original material.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 1996
California Suite
Coronado Playhouse

Coronado Community Theater's current offering is California Suite, New Yorker Neil Simon's not-always-subtle slap at Californians' life style. This 1976 classic refuses to age; it is still a delightful mixture of humor and drama as five couples, in four short plays, occupy a suite in Beverly Hills.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
September 2001
Camino Real
Hartford Stage Company

Tennessee Williams is best known and loved for his plays steeped in realism, seething with sexual overtones like A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Rose Tattoo. The Hartford Stage is presenting on a multi-level set, a ferocious, feverish party, a swirling crimson-drenched Camino Real, which, although rooted in historical allusion, is far more phantasmagorical and abstract than any of Williams' other seventy plays. It was not well-received when it opened on Broadway in 1953.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Camino Real
NJSF - F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater

First produced in 1953, Tennessee Williams's Dali-like, surrealistic play was a daring choice for artistic director Bonnie J. Monte and company, as well as a challenge to the audience. However, for serious theatergoers, the play was fascinating—a wild, metaphor-filled world in an unnamed South-American country populated by fictional and historical personages such as Don Quixote, Casanova, Marguerite de la Camillias, Lord Byron and Esmeralda, all under the control of the ominous Gutman, who announced each block or segment of the Camino Real.

Donald Collester
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Camino Real
NJSF - F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater

Set designer Harry Feiner's haunting evocation of a decaying town is the first thing we see as we enter the Shakespeare Festival's new Kirby Theater.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Camping With Henry And Tom
Horse Cave Theater

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine sent fairy-tale characters "into the woods" in their stylish musical of that name. Playwright Mark St. Germain used real-life people from history to do the same in his Camping with Henry and Tom with results alternately humorous, poignant, and thought-provoking. Based on an actual Maryland camping trip taken by President Warren G. Harding, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison in 1921, St.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Camping With Henry And Tom
Charlotte Rep - Booth Playhouse

The sparse action of this wilderness summit meeting has roots with deep import. Henry Ford, entrepreneur and bigot extraordinaire, has plotted to whisk President Warren Harding away from the surveillance of the Secret Service and the prying of the press. Ford hopes to buy an abandoned power plant from Congress at less than a penny on the dollar. Then, prefiguring Hitler's crazed final solution, Ford wants to buy the presidency and rid his nation of those fiendishly clever Jews who conspire to make life in America so miserable.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
April 1999
Can-Can
Chanhassen Dinner Theater

Although it is generally thought of as one of Cole Porter's weaker efforts, 1953's Can-Can show racked up almost 900 performances in its initial Broadway outing. And the bad rep is certainly not owing to Porter's score, which includes such standards as "C'est Magnifique," "Allez-Vous-En," "It's All Right with Me," and "I Love Paris." No, it is the Abe Burrows book that is the heavy in the case.

Michael Sander
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Cancell'd Destiny
Martin Experimental Theater at Kentucky Center for the Arts

Teacher/scholar Christine Burleson's shocking suicide in Johnson City, TN, took on the trappings of a real-life literary mystery for a transplanted husband and wife who learned about it when they moved into the house where she killed herself. No one in the town where the arthritic, wheelchair-bound 68-year-old woman was a well-known and much-admired teacher of Shakespeare at East Tennessee State University seemed to understand, crippling illness aside, why she put a plastic bag over her head and shot herself in November 1967.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
May 2004
Cannibal Cheerleaders On Crack
Torso Theater

Set in a future "sooner than you think," Bermingham's warning to an America on the brink of self-destruction leaves no taboo unviolated, punctuated by flying body fluids, copious "sim-sex", and up-to-the-minute topical commentary.  This zap-splat-boom brand of satire may be too much for the weak of heart (or stomach), but at a time when so many artists claiming to be "daring" and "outrageous" shrink from anything approaching extreme, Torso Theater at least has the courage to walk as it talks.  If you don't see this with your own eyes, you'll never believe it when you read about it in theate

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
1993
Captain's Tiger, The
Off Broadway Theater

The following statement may be taken as a criticism, although it's not meant that way. Athol Fugard's most recent play, The Captain's Tiger, is not an emotional blockbuster. It is a finely crafted piece of work that casts a hypnotic spell over the audience.  A cascade of words falls soothingly over the ears, much like the sounds of gently lapping waves. Captain's Tiger is a nautical tale that tells of the author's early days on a steamship. The author is only 20 and very unsure of himself.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2001
Carmen
La Jolla Playhouse - Mandell Weiss Forum

Bizet's 1875 opera Carmen, one of the most popular operas of all times, has had many iterations. Among them are the 1954 film, "Carmen Jones," starring Dorothy Dandridge; a 1983 flamenco-based version, the 2000 dance version, "Car Man: An Auto-Erotic Thriller," the 2001 "Carmen: A Hip Hopera," and many more. If you are a purist and prefer Bizet's music, read no more, but please remember that his opera was, in fact, an iteration of Prosper Merimee's 1845 novella. Director Franco Dragone's uniquely staged Carmen retains the storyline in a period setting.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2007
Carnival
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

"Love Makes the World Go 'Round" -- as the lead song of Carnival insists. Love -- by director, cast, and crew for this musical -- also comes through in a joyous, colorful production. Sarah Farnam not only looks perfect as the childlike young woman Lili who talks to puppets she believes real. Her sweet soprano hits both notes and emotional highs too. Brian Minyard's voice soars as well, while he tempers his characterization of the bitter, lame former dancer who manipulates the puppets who'll express the love he can't.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2007
Carnival
F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater

At the end of last season, The New Jersey Shakespeare Festival made a diverting digression from classic plays with The Fantasticks, the famously whimsical and long-running musical by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones. The oddly delicate 1960 show that opened inconspicuously Off-Broadway and without the benefit of great reviews, delighted audiences and became a hit that ran 40 years. It also proved a resounding hit with the Shakespeare Festival audiences. Perhaps that show's success inspired artistic director Bonnie J.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Carnival
F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater

Carnival, which opens the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival's  "Grand Magic" 40th anniversary season, is definitely fun for the children and pre-teen crowd, but as adult fare, this production is predictable and lacks imagination. Maybe it's post-September 11th cynicism that makes this show seem incredibly dated.

Kathryn Wylie-Marques
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Carol
Actor's Asylum

Carol, A Christmas Story has been created out of the fertile minds of Gayle Feldman and Todd Blakesley, who are also principals in this newly-formed theater and production company along with Lee Lampard. Parodying Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," Scrooge has had a gender change.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
December 2001
Cast Me, Tony!
Patio Playhouse

Last night I went to the Peri Playhouse Community Theater for the auditions for Tony and Ann Peri's new musical. They had posters hung everywhere. It was amusing to see that Ben Damon was cast in all their shows. Hm! The 12 hopefuls were milling around outside, in the lobby, and in the theater. Even John Doe, the resident set guy, was auditioning. The undercurrent was tense. Cattle calls (an affectionate term for auditions) are a combination of intense competition, meeting old friends, and trying desperately to do your very best.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2004
Cast On A Hot Tin Roof
Ivanhoe Theater

The Free Associates celebrated their fourth anniversary of Cast On A Hot Tin Roof; four years of improvising plays in the manner of Tennessee Williams from on the spot audience suggestions. They do this exceptionally well, which is probably why they still have an audience for their tailor-made plays "not by Tennessee Williams" (as they state in the program notes).  So closely in his spirit do they follow, you could almost swear you're seeing a new, posthumously unearthed tidbit Williams wrote and tucked into a drawer. 

Effie Mihopoulos
Date Reviewed:
August 1995
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof
Cygnet Theater

Is the term "perfect" presumptuous? Not for Cygnet's production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Every element is exactly right. Sean Murray's casting and direction absolutely nailed Tennessee Williams' bitter, rarely sweet, tale. The designers complement every aspect of the production. Finally, the actors define each of their roles exactingly.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2005
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts

Alone on stage for what seems like an eternity, talking and undressed, Susan Riley Stevens is such a strident Maggie, no wonder Brick fails to succumb to her charms.  Her sexiness doesn't last as long as the haranguing that diminishes her anguish.  Jay Stratton's Brick is pretty one-note too.  We get no sense of his longing for a relationship that represented purity, although we do finally see his disgust at how it's been torn at or lacking by everyone in his family, Maggie above all.  But neither Stevens or Stratton make us care. 

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Cats
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

The Apple's on a roll this season with truly golden dancing and delicious ensemble acting. In an intimate setting we get caught up in "Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats," the Names, the prospect of the Ball, "Moments of Happiness" and sometimes discord from the likes of "Macavity" and "Mistoffelees," and finally, which of the cats will get a once-a-year chance at a new life. I've always thought the clever costumes and make-up along with spectacular (and unusual, at its debut time) set accounted for most of the appeal that made Cats such a popular show. It couldn't have been plot!

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Cats
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

Calling itself "the only production in North America" (!), the musical Cats lives up to its motto of "now and forever" with yet another appearance in Milwaukee. Like Grizabella, the Glamour Cat, this production has seen better days. Sets and costumes have been so scaled back from earlier tours that they merely suggest the majesty of what Cats once was. The acting troupe, too, has changed for the worse. Performers have gotten younger (if that's possible). Many members of the ensemble list cruise-ship credits and roles in regional theater productions, not Broadway ones.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2004
Catskills On Broadway
Wilshire Theater

Freddie Roman, the comedian/entrepreneur who put together the original Catskills on Broadway revue a decade ago, returns with an updated version of the show.  Three of the original cast members, Roman, Mal Z. Lawrence and Dick Capri, are featured, along with impressionist Scott Record.  Each of the four does a stand-up routine, backed up a six-piece band.  Jewish humor abounds in this paean to the Borscht Belt, though the subject matter also deals with topical events: George W.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2001
Caught In The Net
Poway Performing Arts Company

Suddenly London playwright and farce master Ray Cooney is rediscovered and playing at both Patio and PowPAC. Patio's It Runs in the Family was reviewed two weeks ago, and now we have the equally humorous Caught in the Net, which is the sequel to his Run For Your Wife. Be prepared for two hours of almost constant laughter. This is farce at its very best as the cast delivers Mr. Cooney's lines with almost perfect timing.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2007
Caught In The Net
Derby Dinner Playhouse

When last we encountered John Smith (Cary Wiger), the fast-talking, fast-moving London-area cabdriver happily married to women in two suburbs, it was in Ray Cooney's riotous farce called Run For Your Wife. That was one year ago in Derby Dinner Playhouse's gloriously entertaining presentation. Now the enterprising playhouse is revisiting with equally hilarious results Smith's bigamous little world, as it offers the regional premiere of Caught in the Net, Cooney's whiz-bang sequel. But it's 18 years later, and Smith has a son by one wife and a daughter by the other.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
July 2003

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