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
As Bees in Honey Drown
Legler Benbough Theater at Alliant International University

Karla Francesca, as con artist Alexa Vere de Vere, and Rob Conway, as first-time novelist Evan Wyler, are perfect together in playwright/screenwriter Douglas Carter Beane's As Bees In Honey Drown. The play satirizes the wannabees and the people who prey upon them. Beane gives Alexa a stylized speech pattern that has an artificial feeling - perfect for a con artist.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2008
Chronicle Of A Death Foretold
Repertorio Espanol

(see Criticopia listing(s) under "Cronica De Una Muerte Anunciada")

Rosemary Clooney
Regency Hotel

Rosie's back with a new beat, a Bossa Nova beat. It's not that the incomparable Rosemary Clooney was ever afraid of taking on a challenge during her amazing 55-year career as a professional "girl singer." Opening a two-week engagement at Feinstein's At The Regency to launch the release of "Brazil," her new Concord album, Clooney demonstrated on opening night that her heart, if not her soul, was on the beat that has proved daunting to many a popular American singer. Appearing with Clooney is the personable guitarist/singer John Pizzarelli, who also performs with Clooney on the album.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
June 2000
Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), The
Century Theater

Entertaining throughout, with an occasional big laugh, this revival of the Reduced Shakespeare Company's world-famous compressing of the Bard's canon into two farcical hours proves less frantic than the Off-Broadway original. That's a good thing, even though too much time is spent on the three actors setting the scenes and squabbling. Dropping some of this filler in favor of one more long-form piece (a la the Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet sketches) would really kick the evening into high comic gear.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
October 2001
Consenter
Japan Society

(see listing in Criticopia Off-Broadway under "Taniko / Der Jasager")

Crime and Punishment
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

What could be more daunting than a theatrical "deconstruction" of a famous Russian novel? That was the thought going through this reviewer's mind before the opening-night curtain rose on Crime and Punishment. The famous book is considered by many to be the first novel to probe the psychological underpinnings of its characters' actions.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2007
Celebration
Patio Playhouse

A "Celebration" it is not! Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt gave their audiences the longest-running production in New York, The Fantasticks. Celebration did not fare so well. One member of the audience at Patio Playhouse summed it up: This must have been during their dirty old men years.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
November 2002
Celebration of Silliness!, A
Shelton Theater

The usual (and ever-entertaining) array of juggling, card tricks and audience-participation magic, made worth the visit by the genial performer, Fred Anderson. On the night I attended, he held his own -- both in skill and verbal patter -- despite the presence of a voluble teenage tour group.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
August 2003
Cemetery Club, The
Bunbury Theater

If my complete delight and absorption in the lives and times of those three gutsy women and one man who light up Bunbury Theater's production of Ivan Menchell's The Cemetery Club mark me as a soft hearted old codger, so be it. No apologies! Director Juergen K. Tossmann, Bunbury's producing/artistic director, has assembled a dream cast for this touching and humorous look at three middle-aged Jewish widows from Forest Hills in Queens, New York, who once a month go to the graves of their husbands to talk to them and kibitz.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
October 2001
Central Avenue
Fountain Theater

Central Avenue was Los Angeles' Beale Street or Bourbon Street, the heartbeat of a black ghetto which thrived from the 20s to the 50s, replete with churches, vaudeville and movie houses, restaurants, nightclubs and after-hours joints.  Anchored by the famous Dunbar Hotel where the likes of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Paul Robeson and W E B DuBois stayed, Central Avenue was passed over by historians and writers until recent years.  Thanks to books by Bettye Cox, Stephen Isoardi, Johnny Otis and Buddy Collette, Central Avenue has finally been paid its due.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2001
Chairs, The
New World Stage

Ion Theater's new space, World Stage, on 9th, puts them almost back-to-back with 10th Avenue Theater. A new downtown theater district? World Stage is a very welcoming facility complete with a roomy lobby and a modest-sized theater space with tiered seating providing great sight lines. Their opening offerings are definitely for the serious theater patron. A Tuesday-through- Sunday performance schedule alternates between two Samuel Beckett plays and one Ionesco play. There are a variety of curtain times, varying from 2:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2006
Chaplin
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

If only The Producers had got their hands on this -- a sort of "Wintertime for Chaplin"! Conceived to be "A Memory as Entertainment," the show presents the developmental stages in Charlie's life (birth, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood) as they took place on theatrical stages (music hall, streets, vaudeville, movie sets). Scenes of his mother's artistic and mental deterioration, his father's drunken demise, his and brother Syd's consignment to workhouse change to ones of searching for love and (more successfully) artistic success and financial security.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2001
Charley's Aunt
Candlelight's Forum Theater

It is easy to imagine a troupe of collegiate players devouring this venerable antique with gusto, wringing maximum fun from the quaint language and manners, as well as the pivotal man-in-a-dress gag, until Brandon Thomas' vintage romantic comedy sparkled like new.  Unfortunately, the Forum cast are seasoned professionals, veterans of countless Plautian bedroom farces -- and it shows. 

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 1995
Charlie Victor Romeo
MacGowan Little Theater

Man vs. Machine is the theme of NYC-based Collective Unconscious' powerful new play, Charlie Victor Romeo. The 10-person company based its text on black-box transcripts of six plane disasters.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2001
Chasing Monsters
Westport Country Playhouse

How did you spend your summer vacation?  Did you ever sit through a play and not understand or believe one thing that was happening on stage?  Well, I did.  This play, written by a young man whom I know as a very nice press agent with the Keith Sherman Agency in NYC, is a downright puzzlement.  How could experienced actors like Michael Learned, who is always a joy, and Ralph Waite, who has trod the boards in the best, and Jim McKenzie, longtime Executive Producer, choose a play as incoherent and repetitive as this?  It truly boggles the mind.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Chesapeake
Off-Broadway Theater

Washington, D.C.-based actress Holly Twyford makes her Milwaukee debut in Lee Blessing's Chesapeake, the fall season opener for Renaissance Theaterworks. Her performance is absolutely outstanding. Since she's the entire show in this one-actor production, it puts Chesapeake at the top of the "don't miss" category for the current season. Director Joe Banno also directed Twyford in the Washington production of this play, and he works his magic to excellent effect at the Off-Broadway Theater.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2001
Chicago
Civic Theater

"Chicago" the movie was based on Chicago, the Broadway musical created by Bob Fosse. Chicago the road show is a re-creation of the original musical, in which Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly separately dispose of problems in there lives, through murder. Billy Flynn, a glib lawyer, defends both. What goes on between murders and trials is the grist of Chicago, which has fun music though proves short on plot.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
December 2003
Chicago
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

Rare, beefy dance is served up with all the trimmings in a dinner-theater version of Chicago that's close to, but more intimate than, what audiences have long been enjoying in New York and London. Especially in the dance, the quality's there in electrifying performances by Charlene Clark and Jillian Godfrey as murderesses who aim to use their notoriety to become stage stars. Presented as a raunchy vaudeville with slinky, black-clad gangsta gals n' guys shaking, slithering and slanting in often-tilted Fosse fashion.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2004
Chicago
Oregon Shakespeare Festival

"Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads
and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders."
[from "Chicago," by Carl Sandburg]

Al Reiss
Date Reviewed:
March 1999
Chicago
Tennessee Performing Arts Center

Why did Chicago become a cultural phenomenon? It's highly entertaining and so timeless it's timely.  Don't believe me? Go to TPAC this week and see for yourself.

In this age of instant celebrity through TV shows like "The Apprentice" and "Survivor," nothing could be timelier than a song-and-dance satire of fame come and gone quickly, even if it's set in 1920s Chicago and first hit the Broadway stage in 1975.

Evans Donnell
Date Reviewed:
May 2005
Chicago
Music Hall at Fair Park

The touring company of Chicago that played the Music Hall at Fair Park in Dallas February 24-29, 2004 did not measure up to the 1999 touring production. It wasn't bad;  it just didn't have the sparkle or electricity of the previous mounting. With a book by Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse,  music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb, Chicago is a blockbuster musical with all the razz-ma-tazz of the flapper era -- at least it is when it delivers -- this show didn't.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
February 2004
Chicago
Cabot Theater - Broadway Theater Center

Wouldn'tcha know? Just as the first snowflakes settle on Milwaukee, along comes a blazing hot musical to warm things up.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2002
Chicago
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

Milwaukee theater audiences may recall a stunning local production of Chicago staged a couple of years ago. However, that hasn't prevented patrons from lining up to buy tickets to Chicago's national tour, starring Bianca Marroquin (Roxie Hart), Brenda Braxton (Velma Kelly) and Gregory Harrison (Billy Flynn). No doubt the successful film version has fueled a whole new fervor for this dark and cynical show.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2004
Chicago
Civic Theater

Hot, Hot, Hot -- and that's just the orchestra conductor, Leslie Stifelman. She and her 14 piece orchestra play center stage in a high-tiered structure leaving a bare six feet on either side for the cast to enter. The structure has several areas (one with an elevator) for cast to enter and exit. Grand entrances are usually from a center location adjacent to the conductor's podium. Ms. Stifelman is an integral part of this almost all-singing, al-–dancing show.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
September 2007
Children Of Eden
Derby Dinner Playhouse

Score another triumph for Derby Dinner Playhouse, the first dinner theater in the country given the rights to present Stephen Schwartz's grand-scale musical Children of Eden. What producer/director Bekki Jo  Schneider and her huge cast have wrought is sensationally good.  Schwartz's music and lyrics for his earlier Godspell (he keeps returning to Biblical and spiritual themes) are better known, but his mature Children of Eden score has greater depth and is far more dramatically satisfying.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Children Of Eden
Central Piedmont Community College Theater

Boy, the Almighty sure knows how to make an entrance!  Before our eyes, he creates the world and paradise, breathes life into his children, sets the rules, metes out the punishments.  Through the first generations, concluding with Noah's sons, we watch God withdrawing from his creation.  John Caird's audacious book, playful and penetrating, presumes to tell why the withdrawal occurs.  Through his interaction with mankind, God comes to terms with the fact that his children will disobey and displease him -- and develop their own concepts of right and wrong.  Bluntly put, God learns parenting

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Children's Hour, The
Poway Performing Arts Company

Life is not always fair. The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman, is placed in the mid-30s. Her taboo subject is lesbianism, in the days when it was an unholy scandal. The Children's Hour exposes exactly how easily a rumor destroys.

At stake is an all-girls school two women have put their lives' money into. One, also, has a forthcoming marriage at stake. The play, 70 years old, is as topical as today's news.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
March 2003
Soldier's Play, A
Historic Asolo Theater

At Ft. Neal, Louisiana, 1944, Tech Sgt. Vernon C. Waters, in charge of a Negro unit in the still-segregated U.S. Army, is murdered. Is this fierce black disciplinarian, so racially self-conscious and particularly contemptuous of his easier-going southern charges, the dramatic subject? Or does the play belong to Capt. Richard Davenport, a Negro lawyer, sent to find and prosecute the murderer, much to the consternation of base Capt. Charles Taylor?

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2008
Shayna Maidel, A
North Coast Repertory Theater

Two sisters, a mere six years apart in age, are literally worlds apart in life experiences. Rose Weiss (Christy Hall) left Poland for New York with her father, Mordechai Weiss (Ralph Elias), at age four. Her mother (D. Candis Paule) and older sister, Luisa (Jessica John), were left in Poland, suffering under both the Russian and German invasions and occupations.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2008
Frozen
Geva Theater - Nextstage

Geva Theater Center, Rochester' leading professional theater, in a generous gesture, is presenting 14 regional theater companies in a 2007-2008 theaterfest program, each visiting company offering one work from its current season in Geva's intimate Nextstage, which is usually reserved for development of new plays. Currently in the Nextstage, Shipping Dock Theater, a daring, small company which has introduced challenging plays to Rochester for about 40 years, is performing Bryony Lavery's Frozen.

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
February 2008
Catholic School Girls
Boulevard Ensemble Studio Theater

Boulevard Theater's production of Catholic School Girls is a must-see for anyone who "survived" a Catholic education. And for the rest of us, this hilarious show is the perfect antidote for a dreary, endless winter. The show treads familiar territory, but playwright Casey Kurtti has a way of making familiar things seem fresh and vibrant.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2008
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ark Theater

We are met by an attendant garbed in white. He reminds us we must be quiet and that electronic devices are not allowed, and then he slams the barred gate behind us.
We enter the day room. Off to our right is a door to the dormitory, the locked nurse's station with the drugs and records, and the lavatory. In front of us is a small table and some folding chairs. We are locked into a mental hospital in Dale Wasserman's adaptation of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2008
Hedda Gabler
Patio Playhouse Community Theater

Is Hedda Gabler Ibsen's female Hamlet? An idealistic heroine fighting society? A victim of circumstances? A prototypical feminist? A manipulative villain? See her in action and decide for yourself. Director Richard Gant has given us a fine opportunity to draw our own conclusions.

Hedda Gabler was premiered in Germany to less than enthusiastic reviews. Twelve years later it became a Broadway sensation. It subsequently became a classic of nineteenth-century realism. It is short on action and long on dialogue.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
March 2008
Duchess of Malfi, The
FSU Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Exposition comes fast and furious as this Duchess opens, so if ever a production needed to get it out clean and clear, this is the occasion. Instead, the director claims "to bring a fresh and very exciting eye to the play." Indeed, the contemporary of The Duchess of Malfi setting is so startling to look at, it distracts us from the dialogue revealing who's who and what's what. The whole gang of mainly jeans-clad actors fills a long, lemon-walled rectangle with its lime carpet, one rear and one side door.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2008
November
Ethel Barrymore Theater

That David Mamet wrote November is a surprise. That Nathan Lane is hilarious in it is not.

It's sitcom joke after joke after joke about a bad president ending his term, and it's great to have a master comedian with super timing in the role of the ridiculous ninny. Who would have thought Mamet could write like a team of network talk-show monologue creators? He does it very well.

Mixed in is a glimpse of some of the basic flaws of our country, a lot of it from the lesbian speechwriter (a marvelous Laurie Metcalf).

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2008

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