Night Out, A
The Complex - The Flight

A group composed largely of former drama students at Los Angeles City College has gotten together again to put on a little-known play by Harold Pinter at the 2019 Hollywood Fringe Festival.  Directed by Sam Grey, A Night Out is a wicked portrait of a mama’s boy, Albert (Troy Rossi), with a hidden dark side.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Zombies on Broadway
Off the Wall Theater

Zombie lovers, rejoice! There’s a cleverly written production in Milwaukee that will more than meet your expectations for encountering the living dead. This world premiere musical, titled Zombies on Broadway, says it all. It’s a laughter-filled romp through the graveyard (er, Broadway) that will tickle anyone’s funny bone. Writer/director Dale Gutzman has wisely launched this show in the fun-filled summer season, and it more than holds its own with the rest of the city’s annual summertime treats such as Summerfest, Bastille Days and so forth.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
My Cry for Help
The Complex - Dorie Theater

Remember the name of Travis Acedia.  Creator and performer of the solo show My Cry for Help, now running at the 2019 Hollywood Fringe Festival, Acedia  is a powerful and  fiery actor who knows how to capture an audience’s attention and hold it tightly in his grasp.

In My Cry for Help Acedia tells a personal story about his lifelong battle with depression.  His honesty is conveyed in a monologue studded with manic bursts of energy and humor in which he pokes fun at himself and at the world around him.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
My Trans Wife
Flight Theater

Watching My Trans Wife at the 2019 Hollywood Fringe Festival made me think of a passage from the Song of Solomon: “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”

Mimi Kmet and Mara Wells are a testament to the truth of that adage. Kmet, who identifies as a straight ciswoman, was raised as a good Catholic girl. Mara, a transwoman, spent most of her life as a male.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Much Ado About Nothing
Delacorte Theater

Kenny Leon’s free Shakespeare in Central Park production of Much Ado About Nothing appears to be an unchallenging evening of delightful hijinks provided by a superlative all-African-American cast led by a blazingly witty and strong Danielle Brooks as the merry Beatrice and a virile yet comically vulnerable Grantham Coleman as Benedick, her adversary on the field of love and words. But Leon places the Bard’s lighthearted comedy within a serious framework.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Mysterious Circumstances
Geffen Playhouse

An aversion to Sherlock Holmes stories and to their occult-loving author Arthur Conan Doyle undoubtedly makes me the wrong critic to be reviewing Mysterious Circumstances, Michael Mitnick’s new play which just opened at the Geffen.  Mitnick, working on a Geffen/Edgerton Foundation commission, has turned Grann’s magazine article (see above) into an elaborate whodunit involving the death not only of Holmes but of his superfan, Richard Lancelyn Green (Alan Tudyk, doubling up).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
America v. 2.1
Barrington Stage

The avant-garde, play within a play, America v. 2.1. The Sad Demise and Eventual Extinction of the American Negro, by Stacey Rose has brilliant moments. A superb cast (Ansa Akyea (Donovan), Jordan Barrow (Grant), Kalyne Coleman (Leigh), Peterson Townsend (Jeffrey), Peggy Phar Wilson (The Voice)) has been crisply directed by Logan Vaugh, and choreographed by Kevin Boseman.

The broad reach of the one-act, ninety minute play is truly ambitious and immense. Set in the future the ensemble of four actors are seemingly indentured to a grueling and inhumane schedule.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Emma
Lifeline Theater

When your stage floor measures a mere 28 X 30 feet, you build UP, crafting scenic designs incorporating staircases, ladders, and sometimes even ski-slope-steep slides. When your play is a Regency romance by no less a luminary than Jane Austen, however, the skin-tight breeches and narrow ankle-length skirts of period fashions impair the athletic gymnastics necessary to navigate such terrain.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Secret Life of Bees, The
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

While Michael R. Jackson’s musical A Strange Loop is decidedly risky, The Secret Life of Bees at Atlantic Theater Company, based on Sue Monk Kidd’s best-selling novel, is an unsurprising musical where racial conflict is cast in absolute terms of black and white (forgive the pun) and ambiguity has no place.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Long Lost
City Center - Stage 1

Donald Margulies’s Long Lost, at Manhattan Theater Club, could have easily become a soap opera or Lifetime-TV-movie. Black-sheep, middle-aged Billy arrives unannounced at the swanky office of his successful, estranged brother David during the Christmas holidays claiming he is dying of cancer and has nowhere to go after having destroyed all of his relationships. The manipulative Billy sows disaster wherever he goes, undermining David’s happy marriage to the self-possessed Molly and damaging his bond with his teenaged son Jeremy, just back from college. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune
Broadhurst Theater

Breaking the metaphorical walls between disconnected people is the theme of Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune,, a tender romance between unlikely lovers. It’s one of the prolific McNally’s better known works, premiering Off-Broadway in 1987 at Manhattan Theater Club with Kathy Bates and F. Murray Abraham as middle-aged co-workers at a diner searching for romance before it’s too late. Abraham was replaced by Kenneth Walsh, and the play transferred to a hit Off-Broadway commercial run.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Strange Loop, A
Playwrights Horizons

Like Jackie Sibblies-Drury does in Fairview, Michael R. Jackson inverts audience expectations and conventions with his autobiographical musical A Strange Loop at Playwrights Horizons. While Sibblies-Drury mercilessly probes cultural and racial biases, Jackson turns the glaring spotlight on himself, an African-American, plus-sized gay man, a demographic usually relegated to comic relief supporting roles, particularly in tuners.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Fairview
Polonsky Shakespeare Center

The 2019-20 Off-Broadway theater season begins with a quartet of productions exploring African-American identities through a variety of lenses—out-of-the-box deconstruction, autobiographical satire, traditional musical, and Shakespeare. The most original and frightening is Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Fairview, now at Theater for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn following its run last summer at Soho Rep. This refreshingly different examination of how we perceive race begins conventionally enough, almost like a sitcom.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Butcher Holler Here We Come
Thymele Arts Center

Butcher Holler Here We Come is literally and figuratively underground theater at its best. Casey Wimpee’s play, now running at the 2019 Hollywood Fringe Festival, is set in a West Virginia coal mine, circa 1972 (when coal was still king.)  As directed by Leah Bonvisutto, the play unfolded in a bare room in the Thymele Arts Center which had no overhead stage lights.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Anne, A New Play
Museum of Tolerance - Peltz Theater

Anne, A New Play is, as the title suggests, a fresh take on the Anne Frank story. Adapted from the book by Anne Frank by two Dutch playwrights, Jessica Durlacher and Leon de Winter, the play premiered in Amsterdam in 2014.  Now it has found its way to the Museum of Tolerance in a stripped-down version which takes liberties with the original English-language version by Albert Hackett and Francis Goodrich (which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1955).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Ready Steady Yeti Go
The Electric Lodge

It’s kids vs. the adult world in Ready Steady Yeti Go, a look at a bunch of middle-schoolers who meet  in  a ramshackle shed in the woods somewhere in the USA to give vent to their feelings and thoughts.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Loot
Odyssey Theater

Director Bart DeLorenzo, working with a superb, mostly British cast, has given us a splendid production of Joe Orton’s Loot.  The black farce has just opened at the Odyssey, where a long run is predicted.

Orton, as most theatergoers know, was a disciple of Oscar Wilde, an epigrammatic comic playwright who gleefully punctured pomposity and propriety with wit as his stiletto.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Love, Loss, and What I Wore
The Players Center for the Performing Arts - Mainstage

The Players’ production differs from the usually seen oral interpretative Readers Theater one.  Director Carole Kleinberg uses a “star” guide and two mothers with four more actresses playing various characters to further dramatize life stories of women.  Each phase is characterized by memories of dress donned during the action or advice-taking, hence the title Love, Loss, and What I Wore.

Jeffrey Weber works with the director’s blocking to supply an attractive set of shifting backgrounds showing child-like drawings of women in different clothes.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Desire in a Tinier House
Pride Arts Broadway

It's love at first sight, eyes meeting—not across a crowded room, but through a car window. The irregularity of Carlos (the man inside) occupying the front seat with the ex-boyfriend of Trevin (the man outside) does nothing to obstruct the former's capitulation to the latter's lustful entreaty.

As time passes (to ascertain how much, or how quickly, you will have to read the script), Carlos and Trevin exchange personal information in addition to body fluids and flirtatious banter.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Come Together
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

Carole Bufford makes a triumphant return to Florida Studio Theater’s summertime Cabaret two years after her first hit. She has developed a whole new program but still celebrates songs from the years dear to the hearts (and ears) of typical older residents and tourists outside of “season” in Sarasota. The subtitle, “When the 60s Met the 70s,” tells the emphasis.

Bufford’s formula is to tell the story of each song, how it originated, became a hit, and often why it suited its singer and audiences.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Style and Grace
Black Ensemble Theater

Kylah Frye knows that Black Ensemble audiences come for the music, making the book for this musical bio-revue arguably the most no-frills directive in the theater's history. 

We've got these four singers, you see. The duo played by Aeriel Williams and Chantee Joy represent Lena Horne at two divergent stages of her career, while the other pair, played by Jayla Craig and Rhonda Preston, are introduced as the younger and (ahem) older Nancy Wilson.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Indecent
Ahmanson Theater

  Indecent, Paula Vogel’s touching play about the history of God of Vengeance, has now come to the Ahmanson after a successful run on Broadway.  It is not to be missed.

Written by Sholem Asch, the first Yiddish writer to be nominated (in 1943) for the Nobel Prize, God of Vengeance told the melodramatic yet daring story of a Jewish-owned brothel in Warsaw, where a lesbian love affair takes place between one of the prostitutes and the owner’s daughter (Elizabeth A.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Frankenstein
Water Works

In the season marking the 200th anniversary of Mary Godwin Shelley's groundbreaking horror classic, no less than four theaters have attempted to convey Frankenstein’s warning to audiences not yet grown in wisdom sufficient to ensure invulnerability to the danger foreshadowed by its adolescent author.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Moby Dick: Rehearsed
Theatricum Botanicum

The trifecta of Herman Melville, Orson Welles, and Theatricum Botanicum can’t help but be a winner.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Around the World in 80 Days
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Imagination blends with physical creativity to produce a highly inventive jaunt Around the World in 80 Days. It’s billed as family fun but shouldn’t disappoint anyone who loves Jules Verne’s novel or the film and plays based on it or even most theater-goers who enjoy comedy from slapstick to satire.  A British production, based on a French novel, presented by an Italian-named Florida rep company, it swiftly (and that’s the operative word) makes its home in a circus town.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Exit the King
City Garage

City Garage continues its ongoing exploration of the avant-garde theater with its latest production, Exit the King, by Eugene Ionesco. The 1962 play has been freshened up by Frederique Michel and Charles Duncombe, the mom and pop behind City Garage. Their new translation (and adaptation) is crisp and colloquial, easy on the ear. And they have mounted the play in equally vibrant fashion. Exit the King deals with mortality. A  king called Berenger (Ionesco’s version of Everyman; he turns up in other plays of his) is dying.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Dana H.
Kirk Douglas Theater

Watching Dana H. is like taking a trip to hell and back.

The play, written by Lucas Hnath, tells the harrowing story of his mother’s life. She is impersonated by the actress Deirdre O’Connell, who, clad in red and black, sits on stage being interviewed by an unseen Steven Cossen. O’Connell lip-synchs rather than speaks Dana’s lines, timing perfectly every move of her mouth and body.  It is a seamless, remarkable display of acting talent.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Long Day's Journey into Night
American Stage

Using the latest critical edition of Eugene O’Neill’s major play, American Stage presents a production true to his words and their dramatic impact. Never do Director Brendon Fox and his cast ever flag in their dedication to the spirit of the work. Despite its length, Long Day’s Journey into Night is not tiring, always engaging.

The play  begins with sturdy James Keegan as commanding James Tyrone almost swaggering toward wife Mary (Janis Stevens, fragile but trying to hide it). It’s after breakfast and they’ve established their space on the parlor table rug.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2019
Marvelous Wonderettes, The
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

Bubbly and nostalgic, The Marvelous Wonderettes demonstrates particular summertime appeal to Sarasota’s and nearby senior residents and tourists.  But director Jason Cannon injects enough gentle ribbing into the characterizations performed to raise smiles from relative youngsters as well.

A 1958 typical Springfield, USA Senior Prom tinfoil-curtain-backed stage shows off four fresh young beauties behind microphones decked out in hearts, as the women are in pastel gowns with billowing chiffon below-the-knees skirts and matching pumps. They open with “Mr.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Paris Love Story, A
Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

The one-man-band Hershey Felder is back at The Wallis with a new show, A Paris Love Story.  Actor/pianist/writer Felder has won world-wide fame and fortune for his previous shows about such famous composers as Gershwin, Bernstein, Beethoven, and Liszt.  Now he has trained his sights on Claude Debussy, one of his childhood heroes, and brought his life to the stage in a warm, loving way.

Felder walks in Debussy’s footsteps here, addressing the audience in two alternating voices:  his own and that of the French master himself.  It makes for an engrossing and clever nar

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
All My Sons
American Airlines Theater

While Broadway’s import Ink charts the descent of British public discourse into the gutter, All My Sons rips off the apple-pie surface of complacent post-war America to reveal a cesspool of corruption. As the play opens in the Roundabout Theater Company’s revival, it’s a picture-perfect weekend morning in designer Douglas W. Schmidt’s idyllic suburban backyard. Successful businessman Joe Keller is reading the Sunday paper as neighbors cheerfully pop in and out, chatting about their lawns and picnics.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Ink
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

When profit becomes the prime motive of conduct, bad things happen. James Graham’s Ink, now at the Samuel J. Friedman in a production for Manhattan Theater Club after a hit run in London, focuses on the degradation of British journalism in the late 1960s. Graham follows the rise of publisher Rupert Murdoch and editor Larry Lamb as they turn second-rate tabloid, The Sun, into a newsstand sensation by peddling scandal, fear, and resentment to a volatile British public.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Curse of the Starving Class
Pershing Square Signature Center

In All My Sons, now revived on Broadway, Arthur Miller’s America is a sunny place slowly shown to conceal a metaphorical swamp. Sam Shepard’s The Curse of the Starving Class, which premiered in London in 1977 and off-Broadway in 1978, offers an even bleaker view of the US, with a nuclear family coming apart on an already blighted landscape.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus
Booth Theater

Taylor Mac’s Gary is an irreverent satiric sequel to one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known but bloodiest gore tests, Titus Andronicus. Mac has made a name in the avant-garde world of Off and Off-Off-Broadway as a performer and playwright, bending gender and theatrical rules in such works as Hir, The Lily’s Revenge, and his performance piece A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. Gary is his Broadway debut and makes a bold departure from the the usual Main Stem fare.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Beetlejuice
Winter Garden Theater

While Broadway’s Tootsie makes a new and invigorating stage to screen transfer, Beetlejuice sticks fairly close to the Tim Burton-directed 1988 cult film comedy about an explosively frenetic demon, a lonely Goth girl, and a milk-toast couple of newbie ghosts. But director Alex Timbers’s haunted-house concept makes this show more than just another movie-into-musical.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Tootsie
Marquis Theater

Musicals based on hit movies have become a staple on Broadway. The creative teams of most of these shows such as Pretty Woman, School of Rock, and Kinky Boots, take the established screenplay and insert some songs, and call it a day. But Tootsie, derived from the 1982 comedy starring Dustin Hoffman as struggling actor Michael Dorsey who disguises himself as a woman to land a role, actually updates and improves the material. Robert Horn’s book is a sharp and funny update on Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal’s original script. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Songs from the Silver Screen
Music Box Theater

It's that time again. Time to get out and enjoy the nightlife in Houston. The cheerful delights continue as the familiar troupe at the Music Box Theater takes on their latest subject: “Songs from the Silver Screen.” To steal a line from the movie “Casablanca,: the cast has been able to round up “the usual suspects,” minus one, as cast regular Kristina Sullivan was granted a much-deserved vacation during this production. But all the regulars remain, including Brad Scarborough and Rebecca Dahl, the company's founders, along with Luke Wrobel and Cay Taylor adding to the fun.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Kiss Me, Kate
Studio 54

Another opening, another revival of Kiss Me, Kate or perhaps re- titled “Kick Me, Kate,” as this is what will come to mind as you watch Kate (Kelli O’Hara) give Petruchio’s (Will Chase) derriere what for and more in this rowdy and rousing and also slightly finessed version courtesy of the Roundabout Theater Company. The original play-within-a-play book by Bella and Sam Spewack was ingeniously fused with Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew but may have a slightly creaky resonance during these Me-Too days of late.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Juno and the Paycock
Irish Repertory Theater

What Sean O’Casey’s political tragicomedy Juno and the Paycock lacks in plot, it makes up for in characterization. Under Neil Pepe’s splendid direction for the Irish Repertory Theater, characterization gets its due. Pepe, who is currently the Artistic Director of the Atlantic Theater Company, has made the O’Casey play resound with a riveting ferocity. O’Casey wrote the terrifically subversive play in 1924 eight years after the Easter Uprising of 1916, and only two years after the terrible Civil War.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
King Lear
Cort Theater

It is to be expected that a seasoned critic would have seen William Shakespeare’s King Lear more than once, perhaps in my case quite a few times. That Glenda Jackson is playing the (monumental) role makes it unique for many reasons that should be obvious. But before we go too deeply into the production and the performances that will inevitably invite pros and cons, I want to share a program quote from Bonnie J.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
May 2019

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