Duchess Of Malfi, The
Bailiwick Arts Center

Young artists might find it easy to visualize John Webster's lurid 17th-century thrillers in present-day settings, but the task is not as easy as it first appears. Though our universe is not without its share of sensationalistic horrors in lofty social circles, we have learned a few things since The Duchess Of Malfi and The White Devil exposed the hypocrisy and greed rampant in unsettled times. Three hundred-odd years of enlightenment have instituted measures designed to restrict the abuses of power that fuel Webster's bloody intrigues.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Durlovely, Durlightful, Durang
Rudyard Kipling

No playwright writes funnier lines than Christopher Durang at the top of his form. And that's one reason the Roundtable Theater's take on his one-act, For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, a devastatingly hilarious send-up of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, is such a riot. The other reason is the expert timing and daftness the four actors, under Dan Welch's skilled direction, exhibit as they plow through the absurdities of their characters and the plot.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
December 1999
Dutchman
Lynx Performance Theater

Amiri Baraka's 1964 Obie-winning play, Dutchman, is currently playing at Lynx Performance Theater under Al Germani's direction. It stars Michelle Procopio and Patrick Kelly with support from David B. Phillips and Bill Kehayias.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
November 2006
Dying Gaul, The
Intiman Theater

Stories of how Hollywood corrupts the artistic temperament with its toxic brew of power, money and glamour are hardly new. Playwright Craig Lucas is interested in something more substantial and more interesting than that hackneyed formulation. In The Dying Gaul, he uses a deceptively simple story of one writer's unhappy experience of L.A.-style compromise to examine essential questions of self. It is an exploration of how identity, persona, authenticity, social role-playing, ambition, desire and repression combine to shape and distort the individual.

Jerry Kraft
Date Reviewed:
July 2001
Eat Your Heart Out
Lamplighters Community Theater

There is a New York cliche that all the waitpersons are aspiring actors, which is probably 60 percent true. Nick Hall's Eat Your Hear Out follows Charlie (Christopher Buess) works in five different restaurants from Fall `78 through Spring '79. Charlie also narrates this simple story of desperation as he traipses from agent to agent and audition to audition. Also, though, it is the story of some of the folks he serves.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2005
EAT-TV
Oregon Cabaret Theater

It's perhaps inevitable that the recent uptick in TV cooking shows would result in a musical spoof. But would you expect to find such a show in a remote town in southern Oregon? Well, get your utensils ready and prepare to dig into Eat-TV: A Gourmet Musical. It's playing all summer in a converted church that serves as the resident home of Oregon Cabaret Theater. This homegrown musical is the recipe of Ashland playwright/choreographer Jim Giancarlo, who is also the company's artistic director.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2001
Echoes
6th at Penn Theater

Playwright N. Richard Nash, who brought us The Rainmaker in the 1950s, here creates a strange world inside a strange monochromatic room within an asylum -- the world of Echoes. Residents Tilda (Shannon Diana) and Sam (John De Carlo) are in their own special rooms of make-believe.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
March 2003
Eclipsed
MeX Theater

One of the most harrowing crimes against women waged by the Catholic Church in Ireland is the painful subject of Patricia Bourke Brogan's Eclipsed. The play is based upon the factual existence of the Magdalene Laundries operated for "penitents" well into the 1970s, according to director Rebecca Luttrell Briley's program note. Young women who bore children out of wedlock or were sometimes their orphaned offspring were kept under lock and key at a convent workhouse in Killmacha, Ireland, to wash, iron, and mend the clergy's clothing, bedding, and linens.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
March 2000
Edge
Coconut Grove - Encore Room

At one point in the one-woman, multi-charactered play called Edge, Sylvia Plath, then a college student with vague aspirations to be an artist, describes her drawings as "elegant" and "precise." It's a description easily applied to the performance of actress Angelica Torn as Plath, who gave up visual art for a life of poetry, then eventually gave up life as well. Combined with playwright Paul Alexander -- who also directed and designed the evocative lighting -- Torn delivers a portrait of Plath that is aching, funny and enraging.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Edmond
Source Theater

Is the moral to David Mamet's modern parable, Edmond, "Don't walk out on your wife or the bogeyman will get you?" Indeed, this is what happens to Edmond (Rick Foucheux in a strong, anguished performance that doesn't quite succeed in eliciting our sympathy for one of Mamet's most unsympathetic characters). Declaring bluntly to his wife (Lucy Newman-Williams) that he stopped loving or desiring her years ago, he threatens to leave, only to have her evict him. Cut loose from propriety, he is promptly swallowed up by his own demons.

Barbara Gross
Date Reviewed:
October 1999
Cirque Dreams
Broadway Theater

Cirque Dreams: Jungle Fantasy at the Broadway Theater, created and directed by Neil Goldberg, is a beautifully staged, world-class, fully satisfying audience pleaser. Comparisons with Cirque du Soleil are inevitable, but neither one is better than the other. They're only different.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
June 2008
True Tale of Sleeping Beauty, The
Coronado Playhouse

The True Tale of Sleeping Beauty, set in 1465, achieves the difficult task of entertaining children and adults equally. Adriane Coros and Kate Barrett's delightful musical take-off on a children's classic is saturated with puns and language twists. Director Pamela Rotta and her family have been intimately involved in the show since its premiere in 2002.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2008
Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, The
Poway Performing Arts Company

 PowPAC's production of The Effects Of Gamma Rays On Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds should not be missed. In it, epileptic Ruth (Blair Hollingsworth) is bipolar, catty, both nasty and nice, and extremely convincing when she has a fit. She's a brat, a supportive sister and is emotionally close to her mother. She is duplicitous and manipulative, with emotions that change in nanoseconds. Old mute Nanny (Beth Mercurio, aging herself a good 40 years) is being taken care of (read: taken advantage of) by Beatrice.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Eight By Tenn
Hartford Stage Company

 To kick off the Hartford Stage's 40th anniversary season, artistic director Michael Wilson, who five years ago embarked on the project of presenting the entire Tennessee Williams canon, has chosen to stage eight relatively unfamiliar one-act plays divided into two quartets ("Rose" and "Blue"), presented in repertory. The plays cover a span from the late 1930s until a few weeks before the dramatist's death in 1983.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
October 2003
Einstein Comes Through
North Coast Repertory Theater

David Ellenstein is the very capable artistic director of North Coast Rep, and Marc Silver is an accomplished actor. The two are responsible, alas, for Einstein Comes Through.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
January 2005
Elephant Man, The
American Heritage Center for the Arts

 Richard Jay Simon seems to have a talent for mounting plays at his Mosaic Theater that demand a lot of actors and then of casting and directing actors and actresses that can do the job. He's done that again with The Elephant Man. Antonio Amadeo is exquisite as the title character, a man whose gross deformities, somehow affecting all of his body save his left arm and his mental and artistic acuity, made him a freak-show attraction and a medical curiosity - a higher class of freak show, some might conclude - in Victorian England.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
September 2005
Ella
Lyceum Theater

 This has certainly been the year of plays that were really revues or concerts. We've seen Always...Patsy Cline, My Way - Frank Sinatra, Our Story - Our Songs; The Shelly Hart Breneman & Shauna Hart Ostrom Story, and now, Ella, starring the fantabulous Tina Fabrique. Ella is staged as a concert; it is a concert. The patter between songs is Ella Fitzgerald's life story.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
September 2006
Empty Plate in the Cafe du Grand Boeuf, An
Studio Theater

 Like a memorable meal, the play An Empty Plate in the Cafe du Grand Boeuf makes one eager for more. Each course is such a delight that one scarcely knows where to begin. In the first place, it's astonishing that a company such as Bialystock and Bloom could be capable of creating this fragile souffle of a play.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2004
Enchanted April
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

 Scenery, costumes and special effects figure almost as importantly in this production as does the plot. Enchanted April builds on the Come-to-Italy-and-Your-Life-Will-Change premise, used so often in modern movies (note the British film version of von Arnim's book.) Asolo Theater Company wins applause for the real rain pouring down outside windows in the opening London scenes. Clapping also greets a first view of the castle, its trellises overflowing with vines and flowers, overlooking a sunlit shore at San Salvatore.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2005
End of Death, The
Swedenborg Hall

 The End of Death, by prolific playwright Janet S. Tiger, explores a long life – life as long as you want to live while still retaining your chosen age. Director Diane Shea has a difficult job with 11 actors and times shifts that go back to a cave family, in more or less current day, and a future world.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2007
Enrico IV
F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater

 Don't ask me why the plays of Luigi Pirandello, Italy's most revered 20th century playwright and one of the world's great dramatists, aren't given half the stage time of those of Chekhov, Ibsen and Shaw, those other deservedly-exalted titans of modern dramatic literature. Never mind, just grab this opportunity to go to The New Jersey Shakespeare Theater's production of Enrico IV, and see one of the Italian master's most challenging and complex plays.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 2002
Enrico IV
F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater

 Madness, masks, mirrors, and portraits symbolize the shifting and inter-penetrating theatricalities of Luigi Pirandello's Enrico IV -- the third production of the 2002 New Jersey Shakespeare Festival season. The play constitutes a long philosophical and poetic diatribe on the fact that to be human is to be mad. Pirandello's dark view was influenced by a variety of sources: his wife's insanity, his own paranoia, existentialism, theater of the grotesque, Einstein's theories of relativity, and, most importantly, the ideas of nineteenth-century philosopher Henri Bergson.

Kathryn Wylie-Marques
Date Reviewed:
September 2002
Enter The Guardsman
New Jersey Shakespeare Festival - F.M. Kirby Theater

 There is no denying the excitement and anticipation in the air at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival for the opening of Enter The Guardsman. New York paparazzi and major Broadway producers could be readily spotted among the usual shower of stars and friends of stars.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Enter The Guardsman
Oregon Shakespeare Festival

 What's this, a musical on the stage of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Bowmer Theater? I mean, real songs, a libretto, people holding hands, looking at one another moon-eyed and singing to one another? Welllll, times and policies do change. And in this case, it's definitely a change that is right on. Enter the Guardsman enters full-voiced, in full costume, and with full humor as the ensemble cavorts outlandishly. Based on Ferenc Molnar's droll and witty play, Guardsman is finely tweaked by writer Scott Wentworth, who has made it ripe for today's audiences.

Steve & Herb Heiman
Date Reviewed:
August 2001
Enter The Guardsman
Oregon Shakespeare Festival

 Oregon Shakespeare Festival's staging of classics draws most visitors to the quaint town of Ashland. However, most audience members prefer a bit of variety in their theatrical diet, and the OSF obliges with Enter the Guardsman, a light, witty confection of a musical comedy based on a Ferenc Molnar's 1910 boulevard comedy The Guardsman. The musical explores the nature of romance, as seen in the relationship between a pair of leading players. Married in real life, they fret when their affection begins to fade.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2001
Escanaba in da Moonlight
Cygnet Theater

Theater in the United States is a study in regionalism. Take Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the south, or Neil Simon, the New York Jew. There are many lesser-known scripts, such as How to Talk Minnesotan - The Musical from Plymouth Playhouse outside of Minneapolis and Jeff Daniels's film and play, Escanaba in da Moonlight, Las Meninas, Bed and Sofa, and Fully Committed. This season, they've scheduled Pageant, Lanford Wilson's Burn This, the aforementioned Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and David and Amy Sedaris's The Book of Liz.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
October 2004
Ethel Waters
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

 What a journey Ethel Waters took in life! From a bastard black childhood in Philadelphia's Whores' Alley to stardom as a singer and actress of stage and screen, and finally to crusading with Billy Graham as a partner in faith, the trek exacted a toll. As if mirroring how hard Ethel Waters had it physically as well as emotionally, to embody her Jannie Jones alternates with another singer-actress. Judging from her unflagging energy here - and remembering how well she recreated Alberta Hunter all by her lonesome on this same stage - I'd say she deserves a letup but probably doesn't need it.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2005
Europe
Mary-Arrchie at Angel Island

 Since anybody can style himself an expert on any war, David Greig's proposing to tell us about Eastern Europe is probably no more invalid than the generic characters who populate the Irish playwright's flagrantly emotional look at another country's troubles: we have the blustering stationmaster, clinging to the illusion of order his occupation provides. The wise old teacher, patiently waiting for Decency and Good Sense to prevail.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Evening of Christopher Durang II, An
Park Vaudeville

Christopher Durang consistently provides us with an oblique look at life and relationships. Through his eyes we see and hear a different reality. North Park Vaudeville offers up six examples of Durang's strange look at life.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2005
Evening Of Tennessee Williams, An
Rudyard Kipling

 Of the four one-act plays of Tennessee Williams that Coffee Cup Theater Company is presenting at the Rudyard Kipling, only The Dark Room has enough substance to be compelling. Natalie Reece is Mrs. Pocciotti, a care-laden Italian woman who, under persistent questioning by a social worker (Tracy Jones), gradually reveals the shocking truth about her teen-age daughter's six-month seclusion in a darkened room. Reece's accent and delivery go straight to the heart of her character.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
September 2000
Everybody Loves Opal
Venice Golden Apple Dinner Theater

 John Patrick is a Pulitzer-prize winner, though not for this play about a frugal junk-lady whom everybody loves. Nevertheless, Everybody Loves Opal has been popular community and dinner theater fare. I doubt that will be the case with Venice Apple's production, which, much like the three crooks' plot to insure and then kill Opal, needs to have a fire lit under it. When a gag works, like Opal making tea from recycled bags hanging on a line, it gets repeated ad nauseum.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Everybody Loves Opal
Coronado Playhouse

 The Coronado Playhouse is currently running John Patrick's Everybody Loves Opal under the direction of Keith A. Anderson. Opal Kronkie lives on the edge of a dump in a Midwestern city. She is a third-generation owner and a third-generation collector of miscellaneous refuse of others. Set designer Rosemary King utilizes Coronado Playhouse's large deep stage to the maximum. The set includes stairs and ramp to an upstairs and a hidden exit to the basement, as well as the house entrance.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Evita
Civic Theater

 Che Guevara never could give up his revolutionary ways and, at 39, was executed in Bolivia, after a career fomenting guerrilla warfare in Cuba and throughout South America. An Argentinian by birth and education, he took part in riots against Juan Peron. In Webber-Rice's Evita he is the commentator/storyteller. We see Eva Duarte rise from an illegitimate birth, to struggling actress, to the most powerful woman in Argentina as Eva Peron. She was 33 when she died.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2005
Evita
Welk Resort Theater

 Eva Duarte was born into a dirt-poor family. By age 26, at the side of Juan Peron, she had become the most powerful woman in Argentina. By 33 she was dead from cancer. The Weber-Rice musical, Evita, opens with her death on July 26, 1952. We then follow her manipulative rise to fame and power.

Peron evokes extremely strong feelings. She was beloved by the lower class, despised by the upper class. Juan Peron reigned through the use of excessive violence against any he thought were against him. Argentina's economy, which was very strong, became a disastrous morass of debt.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
January 2006
Evita
Historic Orpheum Theater

 Remember when one of the joys of being an actor was the opportunity to play characters of all kinds of social and ethnic backgrounds? In these politically-correct times, thanks in part to the brouhaha over Jonathan Pryce and Miss Saigon, that sort of opportunity is temporarily in abeyance. Thus we have this Class A staging of Evita, perhaps the most powerful and most likely to last of the Lloyd Webber musicals, in which the three principal characters are played by Latino actors.

Michael Sander
Date Reviewed:
June 1999
Evita
Theater Charlotte

If you've followed Billy Ensley for the past three years, you'll notice that Charlotte's preeminent triple threat has expanded his horizons as a singer and an actor. To effect his startling transformations -- most memorably as Fagin in Oliver! and as the lead rocker in Hedwig and the Angry Inch -- Ensley has radically changed his look.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
September 2003
Exonerated, The
Lynx Performance Theater

 It seems inevitable that sometime during our childhood we are unjustly accused of an infraction of the rules. The result was probably a bit traumatic, but we survived. Take a mega leap in complexity: think of being accused of a capital crime punishable by death. You are innocent but can't convince anybody, and you end up on death row. The Exonerated is the true story of five men and one woman of just such a case.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
January 2006
Exonerated, The
Gompertz Theater - Stage III

 From interviews with over 40 people who'd been exonerated from death row, the authors interweave the words of a presumably representative six. In a front row of chairs, those words in their hands, sit five who'll tell and act the stories. One representative of the accused, intellectual Delbert, effects transitions moving from a stool on one side of the row to another on the other side. (LeRoy Mitchell, Jr.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2005
Expecting Isabel
Mark Taper Forum

 There's good news and bad news about Expecting Isabel. The good news is that Lisa Loomer, an ex-standup comic and sitcom writer, is a funny writer, someone who can find much humor in the trials and tribulations of a 40-something couple trying desperately for its first child. The bad news is she will stoop at nothing to get laughs: cartoon characters, cliche ethnic types, dubious one- liners. Loomer also stretches out her thin story to such inordinate length that it ends up wearing out its welcome.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Expecting Isabel
FSU Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

 How hard can it be to have a baby? If the couple Expecting Isabel is any example, it's very difficult, expensive, aggravating, and l-o-n-g. Witness commercial writer Miranda and fine artist Nick, on the cusp of middle age in a world uncertain except about ways to go to pot. His spur-of-the-moment desire for a child to come out of their love turns into a years-long quest to beget one, naturally, then artificially. It merges into simply GETing a child and ends, only with maturity, in wanting to raise one.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2007

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