Life (X) Three
FSU - Cook Theater

 What a difference a production makes! In the original French presentation of Yasmina Reza's three versions of a disastrous mis-timed dinner party, the hosts and their counterpart guests were like the couples in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Their dramatic interplay barely caused a snicker, much less laughter, from the audience. But Banyan Theater Company draws laughs aplenty from the moment Henri and caustic wife Sonia spar over how to handle their six-year-old as he refuses to go to sleep in his room off the parlon.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2006
Life, Death and Resurrection of Pulcinella, The
FSU - Cook Theater

 In an academic setting, as a demonstration of facets of commedia dell'arte and use of its traditional masks, this "exclusive performance" might have been more appropriate. Presented for the public after much hype and without an accompanying lecture, it did neither the genre nor Antonio Fava credit. Fava has been working with students at Riverview High School and Florida State University's Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training who apparently learned enough about his work to better appreciate his take on Pulcinella.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Light in the Piazza, The
Sanford & Dolores Ziff Ballet Opera House at Carnival Center for the Performing Arts

 Miami's performing arts center opened unofficially in September with The Light in the Piazza, winner of six Tony Awards in 2005. Official gala events for the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts -- named for cruise operator Carnival Corp., which paid $20 million for the rights and is headquartered nearby -- didn't begin until Oct. 5, 2006. On the fourth stop of its first national tour, the Craig Lucas-Adam Guettel romantic musical was in fine form at the Ziff Ballet Opera House, the new venue that will mount touring Broadway shows.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
October 2006
Light Up The Sky
Patio Playhouse

 It's opening night, the first tryout in Boston before the long arduous trip to The Great White Way. Thus opens Moss Hart's 1948 Broadway success (it ran 27 weeks), Light up the Sky. This aging play survives quite well for it tells the story, admittedly way over the top, of the trials and tribulations of bringing a brand new play by a first-time playwright to the public.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2004
Light Up The Sky
Olney Theater Center For The Arts

 In playwright Moss Hart's loving tribute to the insanity of his profession, Producer Sidney Black (Tony Hoty) says he wants his latest investment to be a roman candle that will light up the sky like the Fourth of July. Although the fictitious allegory he's backing may not survive tryouts, this revival of Light Up the Sky,directed by John Going, a master of farce, is a hit for the Olney Theater Center.

Barbara Gross
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Lights, The
MeX Theater

 The Lights illuminates via sudden flashes or prolonged exposure the gritty lives of big city (New York?) denizens in their struggles with ordinary jobs, failed relationships, and corrupting influences. In 15 galvanizing scenes the extraordinary Necessary Theater cast makes the characters they portray disturbingly real. Howard Korder's play is a kind of theatrical collage in which scenes involving five major characters and some others are cut up and pasted together. Lilian (Mary Oliver Humke) and Rose (Susan Linville) work in dead-end department store jobs.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
March 2000
Limonade Tous Les Jours
Actors Theater of Louisville

 Charles L. Mee's seductive valentine to a sun-dappled Paris in the spring and the possibility of love between an enchanting young French woman and a somewhat boring older American man is as light as a souffle and as refreshing as an aperitif (or in this case a lemonade) sipped at a sidewalk cafe. The production values here, under Marc Masterson's fluid direction, are so strong, they almost camouflage the play's thinness.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Lindstrom And Motambi
National Black Theater Festival

 This ripening script pits a UN colonel against an African chieftain in a drama mirroring the long strife in Angola and the futility of well-intentioned mediation. John Amos, of "Good Times" fame, gets the opportunity to stretch beyond comedy and unleash the full power of his manly stage presence as General Motambi. But the spell is too often broken by Amos having to call upon an offstage prompter to read him his next line. And playwright Walter Owens gives him far too many lines to remember.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Lion In Winter, The
Legler Benbough Theater at USIU

 The Lion In Winter was one of the most powerful dramas to hit the stage and screen, as well as television, in the last half of the twentieth century. The film won three Oscars plus another 11 awards. A revival of the play opened this weekend at Scripps Ranch Theater. And what an opening it was!

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2006
Lion In Winter, The
Peninsula Players Theater In A Park

 Late in the second act of The Lion In Winter, Eleanor of Aquitaine brings "breakfast" to her three sons, all imprisoned in the castle's wine cellar. It is a very cold breakfast, one made of steel. She has brought them daggers. Eleanor hopes they will use them to escape. But the three quickly decide to kill King Henry when he arrives. It's a royal family that puts a big "D" into dysfunction, but it makes for an engaging and compelling night of theater. The Lion in Winter isn't a strict accounting of historical events.

Ed Huyck
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Lion King, The
Pantages Theater

 The Lion King is a mega-hit in L.A. and elsewhere, a show that attracts audiences of all ages and types, so criticizing it is like a lesson in frustration and irrelevance. But criticize it I must. Not that I find it all bad; on the contrary, it has miraculous things, such as Taymor's staging, costumes and puppetry. I also find much of the music (and arrangements) stirring, and there are first-rate performances galore, notably Danny Rutigliano's antic Timon, John Vickery's villainous Scar and Bob Bouchard's flatulent Pumbaa.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Lion King, The
Fox Cities Performing Arts Center

 When The Lion King first opened on Broadway ten years ago, even seasoned New York critics were stumped about what to say. Adjectives such as "stunning," "fantastic" and "incredible" didn't even come close to describing this unique show. The best statement, I think, came from The New York Times: "It's unlike anything you've ever seen." Thankfully, that's still the case. A touring version recently opened in Appleton, Wisconsin, bringing local theatergoers their first taste of this extraordinary musical.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2007
Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The
Todd Wehr Theater

 A dazzling production by Milwaukee's acclaimed First Stage Theater brings to life the children's classic, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Though a vastly simplified version of the Land of Narnia book series by C.S. Lewis, the show manages to pack a lot of wallop into 90 minutes. (This is the prescribed running time for all First Stage performances.) In retrospect, the show does perhaps stretch a bit too far. It introduces a number of characters (such as the White Stag), and situations that are not fully explained.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2004
Little Foxes, The
Cygnet Theater

 The house of Regina (Rosina Reynolds), Horace (Michael Harvey), and daughter Alexandra Giddens (Rachael VanWormer) is a beautiful example of southern elegance. Alas, the matriarch, Regina, is a driven woman. She is in constant power struggle with her brothers Ben (Tom Stephenson) and Oscar (Tim West) and with her husband, Horace (Michael Harvey). Yet, more than greed that drives her in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes. Add to this mix the lovely, but repressed Birdie (Glynn Bedington), wife of Oscar, who himself is repressed by his brother Ben.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
November 2005
Little Mary Sunshine
Legler Benbough Theater at USIU

 She might not look it, but Little Mary Sunshine is almost 48 years old. She still has a spring in her step, even if she has a passing resemblance to the 1954 film, "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers."

Here we have six young gentlemen of the United States Forest Rangers and General Oscar Fairfax and the young ladies of the Eastchester Finishing School along with Nancy Twinkle and Madame Ernestine Von Liebedich with the charming Little Mary Sunshine. Ah, that magic number seven again.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2006
Little Night Music, A
Mann Center for the Performing Arts

 It's a perfect fit -- a musical comedy about a midsummer romance "in the country" staged in the park on a midsummer's evening. In addition, this orchestra and this show are a good match. Sondheim's score is in three-quarter time and variations of it, and the Philadelphia Orchestra has a long association with waltz music. Unfortunately we have to put up with bad amphitheater acoustics, with reverberations that make it difficult to hear Sondheim's exquisitely-crafted word play. Despite this, the music triumphs.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
July 2001
Little Shop Of Horrors
Theater At The Center

 Based on Roger Corman's horror film of the 1950s, Little Shop of Horrors is a humorous and bright musical comedy send-up of the genre and the Fifties in general. The horror of this little skid row flower shop is a bloodthirsty, flesh-eating plant, for whom the Beverly Hills diet means Shelley Winters for breakfast and Raymond Burr for dinner. A wimpy plant shop employee, Seymour (Steve Dunne) is the unwitting keeper of the bloodthirsty plant, and a brassy, tacky, but warmhearted employee named Audrey, played by Heidi Kettenring, is the girl of Seymour's dreams.

Richard Allen Eisenhardt
Date Reviewed:
June 1999
Little Shop Of Horrors
Actors Theater of Louisville

 Who has customers when you run a flower shop on Skid Row? the owner, Mr. Mushnik (Fred Major), laments to his two lame-brain employees, Seymour (Steve Routman) and Audrey (Audrey Klinger), as the day ends without a single person coming by. But when Seymour suddenly produces from the back room and places in the front window a weird-looking plant he has been nurturing, the shop begins drawing customers galore along with swarms of interviewers who make Seymour famous in every media outlet.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
February 2001
Little Shop Of Horrors
Cabot Theater - Broadway Theater Center

 Few shows rate the term "perfection." However, cult musical fans will want to rush to the box office to buy what few tickets remain for the Skylight Opera Theater's sparkling production of Little Shop of Horrors. Interestingly, the Milwaukee production arrives on the eve of its Broadway revival, scheduled to open October 2. For those unwilling to hop a plane to New York, however, there's plenty to enjoy right here at home.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2003
Little Shop Of Horrors
Marcus Center For The Performing Arts

 The Marcus Center for the Performing Arts closes its 2004-05 Broadway season with the peppy Little Shop of Horrors. This is the touring version of the Broadway show, directed by the talented Jerry Zaks. The show benefits from its newfound Broadway polish, with a cast that showcases top voices and excellent performances. Kathleen Marshall's choreography is another new treat. Much of it is lavished on the top-notch trio of Skid Row chorines. They have been given more prominence in this version; indeed, they appear in almost every scene.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2005
Little Women
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

 Just as the novel, "Little Women," is more than a Victorian tale about four sisters, so is the new opera, Little Women, more than a story set to verse. It is just as much a musical as it is an opera -- except the dialogue is briefer and the songs are longer.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2005
Little Women
Marcus Center For The Performing Arts

 It is doubtful that Little Women: The Musical will become a theatergoer's all-time favorite show, in the way some feel about South Pacific or even the macabre Sweeney Todd. There is much to like about Little Women, but unfortunately, the deficits outweigh the show's few but undeniable benefits.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2006
Lively Lad, The
Actors Theater of Louisville

The Lively Lad, the fourth of the six full-length plays in this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville, is sheer unadulterated bliss. Imagine Oscar Wilde teamed up with Joe Orton to create an outrageously droll plot for which Gilbert and Sullivan supply epigrammatic bursts of song. With The Lively Lad, the mission has been accomplished with dash, vigor, style and flair, and it's all been done (except for the music by Michael Silversher) by one man: the amazing Quincy Long.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
March 2003
Living With Klaus
Bunbury Theater

 Juergen K. Tossmann, Bunbury Theater's producing/artistic director, has become quite the accomplished playwright in recent years with his string of blue-collar-milieu comedy/dramas that include Salvage Yard, Garage Sale, Salvage Yard Revisited and Uncle Smiley's Comin' Home. With his latest effort, another world-premiere comedy, the cleverly written and delightfully performed Living With Klaus, he has taken a giant step forward in subject matter and character development.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
September 2003
Glass of Wine, A
Brick Theater

 Daniel Fortano is an enchanting, charming clown with great physical flexibility and perfected circus skills. In A Glass of Wine, his struggles to drink a glass of wine cause him to juggle, do hat tricks, balance on a ladder, and more, all with gymnastic plasticity and great charm.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
September 2008
Nosdrahcir Sisters, The
Brick Theater

 The Nosdrahcir Sisters are Kimberly and Sara Richardson, who give us terrific, innovative, totally engaging comedic sketches with a bevy of fully-realized characters. Both of these women have great physical elasticity, and their various characters are very clearly defined. Lots of fun.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
September 2008
Big Bang, The
Brick Theater

 The Big Bang, a performance-art piece with colored lights and text, has two outstanding Mimes, Mitchel Evans and Jeff Robinson, the delightful clown Tara Strand, and a beautiful, sexy classic woman, Aryiel Hartman, in a mixture of literal and abstract. Written and directed by Evans, who is one of the best classic Mimes and a good soft shoe dancer, countered by Robinson, whose humor shines through, and abetted by the two women, it's a winning combo giving us an exciting encounter with talent, skills and innovation.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
September 2008
Tale of Two Cities, A
Al Hirschfeld Theater

 A Tale of Two Cities, with book, lyrics and music by Jill Santoriello, 'tis a far, far better show than I expected.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
Three Movements
Studio Theater

 Martin Zimmerman is a young playwright whose reflection on George Balanchine and his wives has a good outline, interesting performers (Mike Timoney as an overbearing pain-in-the-ass choreographer, the lovely Erin Fogarty, who is quite a good ballet dancer in the clear choreography of Avichai Scher, as the ingénue; and Maria Portman Kelly as the polio-ridden wife who also gets to dance in flashbacks) and needs a a blue pencil.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
All My Sons
Gerald Schoenfeld Theater

 Arthur Miller's great play, All My Sons, now on Broadway, is given a great disservice in a destructive, misconceived production directed by Simon McBurney. He seems to have no faith in the play and none in the fine actors who portray the members of the Keller family in this post-World War II drama about the devastating consequences of greed.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
I Am My Own Wife
Lyceum Theater

 I Am My Own Wife, by Doug Wright, is an amazing show. Based on 1992-93 interviews with a German transvestite who built, kept and guarded a collection of phonographs, clocks, and furniture through the Nazi and the Communist regimes, the piece is gripping, fascinating, vastly entertaining, and reaches down into the human spirit more that anything I have seen recently.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
December 2003
I Am My Own Wife
Lyceum Theater

 If I Am My Own Wife were merely a fascinating story, compellingly told, it would be worth attending and strongly applauding. But this tale of a man, living as a woman and curating a veritable museum of Weimar era-history, not only during the Nazi period but throughout the Communist years in East Berlin, has a second-act twist that keeps us guessing long after the show's over. Think of it as the equivalent of Golda's Balcony, only here we're not sure if Golda might really be Yasser Arafat.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
December 2003
If You Ever Leave Me, I'm Going With You
Cort Theater

Critics have tried time and again to kill old-fashioned, punchline-laden boulevard comedy, but audiences end up having the last laugh—literally. Even the most familiar jokes and situations, if handled snappily, can make for a pleasing night of relaxed entertainment.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
July 2001
I'm Not Rappaport
Booth Theater

Pundits have sniped at the number of 1980s re-runs taking up prime Broadway real estate lately—Into the Woods, Morning's at Seven, Noises Off—but the truth is that all these revivals have proved worthy and highly entertaining. The hot streak continues with I'm not Rappaport, Herb Gardner's 1985 Tony winner about two old men fending off muggers, senescence and obsolescence in Central Park.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
August 2002
I'm Not Rappaport
Booth Theater

 Herb Gardner's I'm Not Rappaport, now revived on Broadway, is a joyful experience. Two alter kockers, one of them an old Red, sit on a park bench in New York and cope with the contemporary world and the frustrations of being old. Performed by the sensational Judd Hirsch in a turn that can only be accomplished by many years of understanding the character (he won a Tony for the same role years ago) and with fine support by Ben Vereen and a very good Anthony Arkin, the delights multiply as the brilliantly written play unfolds.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
August 2002
Imaginary Friends
Ethel Barrymore Theater

 As snappy, smart and entertaining as much of Imaginary Friends is, Nora Ephron's ficto-biography of feuding literary lionesses Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy can't overcome a basic stasis in its premise: both writers are dead from the outset and quarreling in retrospect. Director Jack O'Brien can trick this up with video and vaudeville turns (with generally ephemeral, period-style songs by Craig Carnelia and Marvin Hamlisch), but that just makes the piece feel like a Dirty Blonde wannabe.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
January 2003
Imaginary Friends
Ethel Barrymore Theater

 Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron is an odd, experimental play -- two famous writers, Lillian Hellman (Swoosie Kurtz) and Mary McCarthy (Cherry Jones), in a fantasy that works theatrically. The women are great foils for each other as they literarily and theatrically jab enmity back and forth. There is great style in the play's inventiveness, although the verbal encounters are a tad over-written.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
January 2003
Imaginary Friends
Ethel Barrymore Theater

When Lillian Hellman reached the pinnacle of her second career, switching from the stage to personal memoirs, the esteemed novelist/essayist/critic Mary McCarthy had the temerity to attack the grand dame. "Every word she writes is a lie," she smiled, guesting on The Dick Cavett Show, "including 'and' and "the.'" Hellman, catching the nationwide telecast, responded swiftly, slapping McCarthy with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit calculated to financially crush her detractor.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
January 2003
In My Life
Music Box Theater

 Let's hear it for Tourettes Syndrome and for sweet sentimentality. Joe Brooks' new musical, In My Life (he wrote the book, the music, the lyrics and directed it) is about the romance of a guitarist/singer who suffers from the malady. It's like a circus of non sequiturs, but its cast of marvelous singers make it very entertaining nonsense. Lovely song after lovely song, mostly ballads, almost held together by an almost plot.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2005
Into the Woods
Broadhurst Theater

 Any Sondheim musical with as much to offer as Into the Woods must be approached with a certain degree of gratitude and reverence, even when the full experience falls short of our high expectations. In Woods, Sondheim and librettist James Lapine are working on a level, musically and intellectually, higher than most of us can grasp, and when they hit the mark - either thematically with the piece's meditations on loss and the bonds between two people, or musically with such songs as "No One is Alone" and the delightful "Agony" -- the results are transporting.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 2002

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