Big Bang, The
North Coast Repertory Theater

Entering the North Coast Repertory Theater, one is presented with a single yellow sheet of paper. On it is a list of songs such as "Free Food and Frontal Nudity, to be sung by Adam, Eve, God, and the Snake;"One Helluva Job" by Mary and Mrs. Gandhi; "The Dating Scene" by Pocahontas and Minnehaha, "Loving Him Is Where I Went Wrong" sung separately by both Eva Braun and Laura Bush, and "A Stain on My Character" vocalized by Monica Lewinsky.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2008
Beyond Therapy
Williamstown Theater - Nikos Stage

Nicholas Martin has taken over the helm of the Williamstown Theater Festival, and the first show of his first season is as good as can be.

My previous encounter with Beyond Therapy was the workshop production at the Manhattan Theater Club, starring Sigourney Weaver as Prudence, in 1981. It wasn't very good, weighed down by the playwright's apparent anger at its satiric targets, and a leaden comic touch by all involved.

David L. Steinhardt
Date Reviewed:
June 2008
Dial M For Murder
Poway Performing Arts Company

Alfred Hitchcock brought Frederick Knott's play, Dial M For Murder, to film, and it became an instant classic. The stage version, currently at Poway Performing Arts Center, under the direction Brent A. Stringfield, is even more fun. Designing the perfect murder has always been a mystery writer's greatest challenge, and developing the single fatal flaw his amusement. Tony Wendice (Christopher Armour), a retired tennis player, has developed the perfect plan to do away with his lovely and well-to-do wife. He enlists the aid of Captain Lesgate, a ne'er-do-well, to accomplish the task.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2002
Dial M For Murder
Geva Theater Mainstage

I suppose that Dial M For Murder is an appealing show to open Geva's season, but it's an old warhorse and maybe sends the wrong signal for a theater company that has been specializing in reviving meaningful classics and developing new works. I do like Geva's version, which trims and clarifies the original stage-script, adapting it to include some of the excellent filmscript for Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 international hit movie. It's dramatically effective without being quite so stagy.

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
September 2006
Diary Of Anne Frank, The
Patio Playhouse

Patio Playhouse's production of The Diary of Anne Frank, under Jay Mower's direction, is given an appropriately stark design by Judy Conlon. The plainly painted four rooms and hall are on several levels, with suggestions of some walls, allowing for a variety of playing areas. This, along with Kat Perhach and George Daye's lighting design, provide for the many intimate scenes. This is the prison for two years of the Franks, Mr. Frank's business partner's family, the Van Daams, and Mr. Dussel, a dentist and friend of the family.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2006
Diary Of Anne Frank, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

There are four versions of Anne Frank's diary. The last incorporates extra notes along with the original, one she edited herself for publication, and one her father Otto edited and made it his life's work to disseminate. His forms the basis for the Hacket couple's script. Writer Cynthia Ozick has been right to question the sentimentality, the toning down of what must have been grittier reality than what appears onstage here. All you see of the Dutch are two brave former employees who help sustain the Franks.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2004
Diary Of Anne Frank, The
People's Light & Theater Company

The 1997 re-write of The Diary Of Anne Frank is having its Philadelphia-area debut here in a controversial production. The results are arresting, justifying the gutsy choices. The new adaptation shows us an Anne Frank who is strong and outspoken and part of a family that is obviously Jewish, in contrast to the old version where the Anne was saintly, and the Jewishness was submerged in universal generalities. The story, as you will recall, covers two years from the time the Jews go into hiding until they are discovered by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
March 2000
Diary Of Black Men, The
National Black Theater Festival

If this brilliant piece hadn't already been staged Off-Broadway, I'd be saying it needed to be transported there posthaste. The script deals powerfully with a full range of top-shelf issues facing African American men. But first the species is defined -- six different ways by six different men, all of them telling us why he is what black women truly want.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Dickens in America
Cabot Theater - Broadway Theater Center

It's a wonder that nobody has thought of it before. What would make more sense than writing a one-man show about Charles Dickens that could be performed during the holidays? Well, Wisconsin playwright and actor James DeVita has accomplished just that with Dickens in America. Although DeVita is listed as the sole playwright, he graciously acknowledges the considerable contributions of two other local figures, (director) C. Michael Wright and (actor) James Ridge.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2006
Dining Room, The
Patio Playhouse

Director Jay Mower's minimalist set features one elegant dinning table with eight chairs and a lighted landscape painting as the only decoration -- all in a black box. It's a perfect setting to platform A. R. Gurney's The Dining Room. Nothing distracts the audience from the talents of the six players performing 57 different characters.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2003
Dining Room, The
Broadway Theater

Saturday I traveled to Vista for two shows: a matinee at the Avo and an evening performance at the Broadway, to which I am new. The theaters' stage entrances are within a few feet of each other on the alley between Main and Broadway. The Broadway Theater, owned and operated by Randall Hickman and Douglas Davis, is charming. The entry is off a small, quiet courtyard. The lobby, as is the auditorium, is filled with Broadway memorabilia. The square auditorium offers flexibility in staging. A. R.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2006
Dinner Party, The
Mark Taper Forum

Neil Simon's new play is a dud, one that resembles a bad translation of an equally bad French drawing-room comedy by Marivaux or Feydeau. The setup we are asked to believe is that three divorced couples have been invited to partake of a mystery dinner in the private dining room of a swank Parisian restaurant. The six men and women arrive separately and are shocked to come face to face with their respective ex-spouses.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
December 1999
Dinner Party, The
Paper Mill Playhouse

Why is Neil Simon's The Dinner Party so improved and more likeable at the Paper Mill Playhouse than it was on Broadway? The answer is the cast. Although the ensemble for the Broadway production included such high-profile performers as Henry Winkler and John Ritter, they were not only poorly cast as Parisians but displayed a reckless disregard for anything that could be considered a competent characterization. With the help of a more carefully conscripted cast, Simon's play can be looked at with new eyes.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
January 2002
Dinner With Friends
Poway Performing Arts Company

Divorces affect many more people than the couple untying the knot. Dinner With Friends, playwright Donald Margulies' testament to breakups, is an extremely strong look at dissolution. Director Jay Mower, who also designed the set, brings to the stage, Cheryl and Sam Warner as Karen and Gabe -- the "perfect" couple, and Rob Tyler and Susan Lawson as the "imperfect" couple.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Dinner With Friends
Florida Studio Theater Mainstage

Talk about midlife crises! Now that they're happening to early baby boomers, what are they like, and are they typical?

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2001
Dinner With Friends
Cabot Theater - Broadway Theater Center

Chamber Theater concludes its current season with an excellent production of Donald Margulies' Pulitzer Prize-winning Dinner with Friends.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2003
Dirty Blonde
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

Two stories intertwine: one a biography of Mae West, the other of two major, faithful fans who meet at her tomb and fall in love. Behind a rear proscenium arch, as if on a movie screen, Mae West's projected eyes beckon. Fronting the stage, old fashioned footlights suggest the period bioplay to be performed: Jo, a struggling actress who's patterned her professional self after her idol, and Charlie, a dweeby public library film archivist who when a youngster met Mae, act out their impressions of and facts about the star.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2003
Dirty Blonde
George Street Playhouse

Who could imagine that two misfit singles, who meet at Mae West's mausoleum in Queens, might build a future together? Claudia Shear, the actor-author of the hit one-woman autobiographical play Blown Sideways Through Life and co-author James Lapine did imagine just that and came up with a lovely play that many considered (including myself) the best new play to hit town in 2000. It uses an unlikely yearly pilgrimage on Mae West's birthday as the catalyst for an endearing romance, with a little biography of West woven through it.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
November 2002
Dirty Blonde
Theater Three

Theater Three has a solid hit in Dirty Blonde, Claudia Shear's comedic musical salute to Mae West, the bawdy 1920s musical comedy performer with an attitude. Julie Johnson does Mae justice in an all-out recreation, with all the peccadilloes firmly intact.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
April 2004
Dirty Blonde
Cabot Theater - Broadway Theater Center

I made myself platinum, but I was born a dirty blonde.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2002
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
Music Hall - Fair Park

The experience of attending theater doesn't begin when you enter the theater; it begins when you leave the house, and it comprises more than just what happens on stage. The current State Fair Musical, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, rates a 10 on the Disaster Scale from 1 to 10.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
October 2006
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

Milwaukee's Broadway Theater Series closes its season with a rousing national tour of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. If the name sounds familiar, you may recall that a film with the same title (and plot) was released in 1988. The simple story focuses on two con men who connive to cheat wealthy, unsuspecting women out of their fortunes. One of the con artists, Lawrence Jameson, is the older and more suave of the two. He has built not only a reputation but also an enormous mansion, filled with servants and accomplices who do his bidding.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2007
Distant Fires
Stamford Theater Works

Distant Fires deals with black and white issues derived from sharply drawn characters, not polemic. Danger and hopelessness hang over the construction crew -- five men at work atop a ten-story building in Ocean City, Maryland, in the heat of the summer. On a marvel of a set, the actors speak their lines, quite eloquently, while actually pouring and spreading cement, actually recreating the duties of laborers. Three of the workers are black. Ray Aranha plays the oldest, affable, smiling Raymond, whose language is almost completely made up of expletive and sexual references.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
February 1996
Diva on the Verge
Odyssey

You don't have to be an opera-lover to love Julia Migenes' affectionate send-up of the world of opera. It's a world she knows well, having trained as a soprano and sung at such major venues as the Metropolitan, Covent Garden and Vienna Volksoper, where she specialized in the music of Donizetti, Berg, Strauss and Puccini. Migenes (who is married to the film director Peter Medak) would be enjoying an even more successful operatic career if not for her irreverence and rebelliousness.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
December 2000
Some Kind of Bliss
59E59 Theaters

"Brits Off Broadway" at 59E59 offers Some Kind of Bliss, a one woman play by Samuel Adamson performed by the British actress Lucy Briers.
An energetic, fast-talking contemporary woman describes an ill-fated walk through London to Greenwich, at times playing several characters, each with a new voice and attitude. She experiences a toke of spliff, a bit of sex with a kid, a mugging.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
June 2008
Dance, The

 (see Criticopia listing under "El Baile")

Dark Habits

 (see Criticopia Off-Broadway review of "Habitos Oscuros")

In the Heights
Richard Rodgers Theater

This jubilant celebration of life in the barrio has been hailed as groundbreaking in the same way Rent was so honored a decade ago. Winning a handful of 2008 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, the show is a tribute to the work of newcomer Lin-Manuel Miranda. Not only did Miranda come up with the concept and write the music and lyrics, he also stars as the show's central character, Usnavi (pronounced oos-NAAHV-ee).

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2008
Thirty Nine Steps, The
Cort Theater

Rarely (perhaps never before) has a "straight" film been so miraculously transformed into an absolutely hilarious comedy. But that's what theatergoers will find upon arriving at The 39 Steps, based on the 1935 Alfred Hitchcock film.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2008
Do I Hear A Waltz?
George Street Playhouse

Richard Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents' musical, Do I Hear a Waltz?, is rarely produced -- and for good reason, as the revival at the George Street Playhouse demonstrates. Laurents' book, based on his The Time of the Cuckoo, is characterized by trite situations and some unappealing characters. Leona Samish (Penny Fuller) an unmarried American school teacher, travels alone to Venice with dreams of romance.

Donald Collester
Date Reviewed:
October 1999
Doll's House, A
Theater Charlotte

A longtime expatriate, Ibsen knew that you had to travel far and suffer much to find true happiness. In Theater Charlotte's production of A Doll's House, we slowly discern that Nora Helmer has suffered much from her husband -- almost always unknowingly. Diligently seeking Torvald's favor, with admirable discretion and coquettish craft, she has never stopped to ask whether he was worth it. In the classic turning point, Ibsen skillfully reveals the contempt behind Torvald's condescension.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
April 1999
Doll's House, A
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse Theater

This gripping production of Ibsen's classic, A Doll's House, is sure to keep Milwaukee Repertory Theater audiences enthralled during its month-long run. Stunningly staged by famed Hungarian director Laszlo Marton, this staging keeps most of the play's familiar elements intact. It rarely deviates from Ibsen's original lines, its Victorian timeframe or its famous characters. (One of the play's minor characters, a nanny, is scaled down in this adaptation.) In clever and subtle ways, Marton allows the play to resonate with contemporary flavor.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2004
Don Quixote
Lyceum Theater

Mix 16th-Century music with rap, add in some juggling, liberal doses of puns, combat with various folks including giants claiming to be windmills, and you have a strange mix of entertainment at the Lyceum Stage by San Diego Repertory Theater. Paul Magid's Don Quixote is all of this and much more. It's at times silly, at times serious, with a delightful mix of music.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
January 2007
Don't Dress For Dinner
Venice Golden Apple Dinner Theater

This British version of a French boulevard farce takes place in a barn converted into handsome but un-Frenchified country-house. It's a few hours' train ride from Paris, where everyone talks with English accents. Owner Bernard (Michael Harrington, looking every inch a marital cheat), thinking his wife Jacqueline (attractive Beth Duda) will be off for a weekend with her mother, books a cook to make a dinner for his mistress to celebrate her birthday. When Jacqueline intercepts the booking confirmation call, the madness begins.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2000
Don't Dress For Dinner
Stage Right Theater

A lot can be lost in the translation when you have an American cast playing a British adaptation of a French farce. The complications in Don't Dress For Dinner are premised on a husband and wife who have both arranged at-home trysts with their respective paramours on the same evening, a mistress whose name is very similar to that of the cateress hired for the occasion, and a set having five doors -- three of them leading to bedrooms -- more discussed than slammed.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Don't Dress For Dinner
Stage Right Theater

For the final show of its 98-99 season, Stage Right Dinner Theater presents Don't Dress for Dinner, a British farce written by Marc Camoletti and adapted by Robin Hawdon. Set in the elegant living room of a French country house, the play introduces us to Bernard and Jacqueline, a very proper, upper-crust couple who happen to be carrying on separate clandestine affairs. When both his "other woman" Suzanne and her "other man" Robert drop in for the weekend, the farce follows form with mistaken identities and the arrival of an unexpected character to complicate matters.

Dan Vosburgh and Gayle Kirshenbaum
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Dracula
Coronado Playhouse

John Mattera's adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula is a drama, right? If I could only stop laughing or was still in knickers, it would appear to be a drama. Or maybe I've just seen too many horror flicks and stage productions. Either way, director James Gary Byrd has created a delightful, highly interactive production.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
January 2007
Dracula
Manatee Players' Riverfront Theater

The theater is webbed. Lights flicker from ledged candles or stab through shades of veiled dark or flash ruby and scarlet. Sounds clop, pound, shriek, clank, peal – not excluding eerie real music. Three be-Witching women in filmy white whirl. As if from an eddy they create comes a tall figure in a black velvet tunic, his head hooded in black sequins. Before we can acknowledge Dracula and his brides, they're putting the bite on Renfield to help them all get down and Transyvania-dirty in England. Soon, Dr.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2000
Drawer Boy, The
Cabot Theater - Broadway Theater Center

When a playwright can't explain the source of his work's popularity -- that's a mystery. And The Drawer Boy, written by Michael Healey in 1999, is certainly popular. In fact, it's one of the most-produced plays in American regional theaters. It is also being translated into several languages, including Japanese. Milwaukee audiences were fortunate to welcome Canadian playwright Michael Healey during the show's opening-night performance.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2003
Dream Of Doors, The
Players of Sarasota

The titled portals of The Dream Of Doors are metaphorical. They represent entrances to jobs, restaurants, neighborhoods in which to live, schools, even means of transportation, doors that were closed, mainly to African Americans, before and during their struggle for Civil Rights. Representative black people advance arguments for breaking the doors down violently vs. accepting limited entry or access vs. demanding forcefully but nonviolently that the doors open. The dream refers to community elder Ms.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2001

Pages