All My Sons
American Airlines Theater

What irony there is having productions of Arthur Miller’s excellent emotions-extracting drama All My Sons emerge with apparent frequency and acclaim after it was decried as a Communist play and a blatant undermining of the American business ethos. It is back again courtesy of the Roundabout Theatre Company. It remains terrific.

There is no question that the accusations and allegations have proven to be woefully misguided both by the passage of time and the more open debate regarding the play’s social and political point of view.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Plough and the Stars, The
Irish Repertory Theater

It would be very easy to be under the delusion that I was not, in fact, at the Irish Repertory Theater in NYC but rather at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre so resonant is the forthright Irish-ness of their terrific production of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. What an audience can expect is that this grandly lyrical almost epic drama is vibrantly alive with characters mainly damaged by the disabling events of the times. The eminent dramatist had a patriotic zeal and a hearty political conscience that reflected his own passionate involvement.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Too Heavy for Your Pocket
George Street Playhouse

Although I previously saw this award-winning (2017 Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award) play a year ago in New York, it made a lasting impression on me, one that made me eager to see it again now that it is at the George Street Playhouse. Although Too Heavy for Your Pocket is well acted and remains worthwhile, the current production left me less than enthused. But more about that later.

As a graduate from the Yale School of Drama, playwright Jireh Breon Holder was inspired by his family history.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Othello
Factory Theater

It might have been the first production where Desdemona was strangled—twice—with a one-handed choke-hold, but that was because Brianna Buckley's right arm was encumbered with a sling mandated by an injury the week before. What was no accident, however, was the paradigm shift of Othello's misaccused wife struggling to escape the wrath of her angry husband.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Secret of the Biological Clock, The
Athenaeum

Don't be fooled by the title: This is not another grim grown-up gynecological jeremiad, nor a bumping-uglies spoof of classic ( and copyright-protected ) teen heroes Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. In fact, sexuality barely figures in a "coming-of-age" story for late-bloomers—i.e. over 30—based in metaphors as intricate as 3-D chess.

For some parts of the play, our locale is the aptly named town of Middlewood in 1965, where a group of enterprising adolescents exhibited a preternatural talent for domestic-level detection (lost wills, missing jewelry, etc.).

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
La Havana Madrid
Den Theater

This joint production of the Teatro Vista and Collaboraction theater companies premiered in March 2017 at Steppenwolf's 1700, where it sold out its run in one day. Three months later, the remount in the Goodman's Owen likewise set audiences to scrambling for tickets despite multiple extensions. The current incarnation, its third, looks to prove likewise successful.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Bronco Billy
Skylight Theater

Clint Eastwood’s 1980 film Bronco Billy has been revisited by screenwriter Dennis Hackin and turned into a full-blown musical which is doing L.A.’s intimate-theater scene proud. Packed with catchy songs (mostly by Chip Rosenbloom and John Torres), boasting of a large, enthusiastic and gifted cast, the show fills the 99-seat Skylight Theater with Broadway-like size and sizzle—so much so that it wouldn’t surprise me if the show’s next stop were The Great White Way. Bronco Billy tells the charming, heartwarming story about a self-styled cowboy hero (Eric B.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Soho Playhouse

What a terrific performance Burt Grinstead gives us as the eponymic characters - character - in Blanket Fort Entertainment’s production of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde! The show is a 70-minute-long adaptation of Robert Louis Stephenson’s famous 1886 book, “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” It’s played exclusively for laughs, and Mr. Grinstead is a marvel of a comic actor. As the good Dr Jekyll he pushes his hair back, cleans his glasses and lets his voice break. As the evil, cruel, malignant, hateful, reprehensible Mr.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Invisible Tango
Geffen Playhouse - Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater

Invisible Tango is, to put it simply, the best magic act I’ve ever seen.

Created and performed by Helder Guimaraes, a Portuguese-born magician now residing in L.A., Invisible Tango mixes fabulous card tricks with personal storytelling in a masterful and captivating way. When not gasping with amazement at his legerdemain, the audience sits entranced by his way with words.  A small, bespectacled chap with a lively, vibrant personality, Guimaraes knows how to talk to strangers, form a human connection with them, catch them up in his spell.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, The

(See review(s) under TWENTY-FIFTH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE, THE)

Twenty-Fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, The
Next Act Theater

As the 2019 school year comes to a close, what could be more topical than hosting an old-fashioned school spelling bee? It’s definitely on the course list for Next Act Theater, where All In Productions presents The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

This 2005 Broadway musical by William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin earns high marks for originality, casting, and creativity.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Too Heavy for Your Pocket
Baird Hall

Nowadays, protest demonstrations may be assembled within the boundaries of the law and the participants carry out their peaceful agendas uninterrupted.

We owe these displays of what was once labeled "civil disobedience" largely to the activists championing an end to racial segregation in our country during the mid-20th century. Among these were the so-called "Freedom Riders"—multiethnic bands of crusaders who defied, often at great peril, the de facto apartheid operating in the Southern states.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Hamlet
Navy Pier

Long ago, before universities evolved into the trade-schools-for-rich-kids they represent today, their curriculum in preparation for civic leadership encompassed such subjects as logic, classical rhetoric, theology, grammar, and mathematics. This course of study reflected the belief that if a person was educated in how to think—that is, how to evaluate information through rational examination—all other knowledge would come easily.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Come from Away
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

At the same time Americans were reeling from the impact of 9/11, a very small town almost an ocean away came together and, through the generosity and ingenuity of its townsfolk, managed to care for thousands of people from around the world who arrived unannounced in their back yard.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Ten-Minute Play Festival (14th Annual)
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

[Editor’s Note: As noted in the review, the author of this critique was involved in the process of choosing works for this festival.]

For the first time I’ve attended Theater Odyssey’s short play festival, that originated with a single night’s performance of Ten Minute Plays by playwrights in Sarasota, Manatee, and Tampa Bay. This 14th year, the contest to choose plays was extended to entrants from all of Florida.  Included in a culminating performance of latest best short plays is one chosen from a Student Ten Minute Play Festival contest.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
Resurrection of Son House, The
Geva Theater - Nextstage

It seems that GeVa Theater Center's long devotion to creating a worthy theater piece devoted to the history of Son House has reached a temporarily completed form in this rich, complicated show that dazzled the opening night audience. Geva commissioned the work more than four years ago, and at this point it includes a number of impressive, prestigious contributing African-American artists, and stars the irresistible Cleavant Derricks.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
All My Sons
American Airlines Theater

It all feels true, Arthur Miller's articulate and touching themes of family and society, war and business, denial and self-deception. His 1947 American classic, All My Sons, an immaculately plotted exploration of an American family, is skillfully revisited at the American Airlines Theater by The Roundabout Theatre Company.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Sweeney Todd
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Although Sweeney Todd’s roots are in Renaissance revenge tragedy, 19th century English penny dreadful stories, and a 1973 dark melodrama, its concerns with class social differences, economic inequality, exploitation, and inhumane actions haven’t lost their relevance.  Nor have the power of literary suspense and triumphant romance. All receive emphasis through music at once classical and contemporary. At Asolo Rep, a relatively small cast acts with great aplomb.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2019
What the Constitution Means to Me
Helen Hayes Theater

Is the Constitution enough of a temptation to draw you to the Helen Hayes Theater for playwright Heidi Schreck's What the Constitution Means to Me? It should be. Part bio, part poli-sci, this is an original free-wheeling, emotional, and audaciously relevant play, at a time the country can benefit from its dose of provocative honesty.

Teenage Heidi Schreck, from Wenatchee, Washington, an “abortion-free zone,” was persuaded by her mother to enter her speech about the Constitution in the American Legion Oratory Contest.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Fiddler on the Roof
Stage 42

When the original 1964 production of Fiddler on the Roof premiered on Broadway, the character of Tevye, a struggling, big-hearted, Torah-quoting milkman from the Russian shtetl, Anatevka, moved into the lexicon of Broadway theater's standout characters. Of course, Tevya was already known to readers of Sholem Rabinovich, aka Sholem Aleichem, the “Jewish Mark Twain,” who wrote short stories about the vivid characters of the impoverished Yiddish-speaking villages of Russia.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Burn This
Hudson Theater

While the lead performers sizzle, the play fizzles. In the current revival of Lanford Wilson's Burn This, at the Hudson Theater, Keri Russell and Adam Driver, connect like sparkplugs while the play stumbles unevenly between the past and conflicts of the present.

Lanford Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize for The Fifth of July in 1980, but writing his upcoming play, Burn This, presented a struggle.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Crime and Punishment
Edgemar Center for the Arts

First produced in Chicago in 2003, this adaptation of Crime and Punishment was seen in L.A. ten years ago. Now it has returned in a new production directed by Peter Richards and starring three superb actors.  That’s right:  three actors, because this is a stripped-down, modern version of the 500- page novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Written by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus, the adaptations tells its story in an astoundingly brief ninety minutes.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Utility
Rivendell Theater

Literary scholars can speak of the narrative device labeled "a dark night of the soul" but the darkness surrounding our heroine on this sweltering East Texas evening in a house still recovering from flood damage is the result, in whole or in part, of her chronically irresponsible husband neglecting to pay the minimum due on their electric bill—an oversight disabling the air-conditioning and reducing their 8-year-old daughter's birthday party to a back-yard romp with balloons and a hastily repaired Walmart cake, instead of the promised movie.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Another British Invasion
Midtown Arts & Theater Center

It is hard to believe it is the better part of two decades since I first had the pleasure of hearing talented soprano, Kelli Estes, as she performed in New York City. How could I have guessed then that fate would soon find us both working in the Houston area where, happily, whenever I am in town, I continue to have pleasant opportunities to see her perform with the talented LoneStarLyric Company that she founded thirteen years ago back in 2006?

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
What the Constitution Means to Me
Helen Hayes Theater

While the current off-Broadway revival of The Cradle Will Rock is a relic of the past, Heidi Schreck’s unconventional stage piece, What the Constitution Means to Me, at the Helen Hayes on Broadway after two Off-Broadway runs earlier this season, is a living, breathing document, much like the constitution it addresses. Schreck’s unusual stage memoir recreates her journey as a 15-year-old making speeches on our sacred document cross-country to earn scholarship money. She also shares, as a grown woman in 2019, her view of the constitution.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Cradle Will Rock, The
Classic Stage Company

The Cradle Will Rock is John Doyle’s staging of the rarely-produced labor musical at Classic Stage Company. Marc Blitzstein’s legendary pro-union tuner is more famous for the circumstances of its premiere than the actual show. In 1937, the government-sponsored Federal Theater Project pulled funds for the production, directed by Orson Welles and produced by John Houseman. At the last minute, the company had to find another theater and the actors had to perform in the aisles since their union forbade their appearing on stage.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Lehman Trilogy, The
Park Avenue Armory

The Lehman Trilogy, in the vast space of the Park Avenue Armory for a limited run after engagements in Europe and London, conveys the story of 150 years of the titular financial clan.  Lehman, by Italian playwright Stefano Massini adapted to English by Ben Power, is a sweeping tale with three world-class actors (Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles, and Adam Godley) enacting all the roles in the saga of the family as they progress from immigrant storeowners in Alabama to kings of the trading floor on Wall Street to losing everything in the crash of 2008.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
King Lear
Cort Theater

Some actors are larger than life, but not life-like. We admire their craft rather than identify with the characters they are portraying and the emotions they are conveying. These actors usually win major awards, but they rarely truly move audiences other than causing them to stand for ovations. Glenda Jackson can be one of these stars at times. Perhaps that is why she left acting for politics, where there is less risk of really showing your inner self. Her brilliance has always been cold, and her technique so practiced and steely, she holds us at an arm’s length.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations
Imperial Theater

While Broadway’s Oklahoma! revival and Hadestown offer modern slants on traditional templates, Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations is an example of a relatively recent and already cliched genre: the jukebox musical. Like Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, The Cher Show, Motown, and Jersey Boys before it,  Proud recycles the songbook of its subject, the phenomenally successful R&B male group The Temptations to rake in nostalgic box office dollars. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Hadestown
Walter Kerr Theater

Another musical with a long production history also recently finally arrived on Broadway and employs familiar tropes to interpret modern society. Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown comes to the Main Stem after concept albums, workshops, a 2016 off-Broadway run at New York Theater Workshop, and a London engagement at the National Theatre. Mitchell’s delightfully funky folk opera weaves together the myths of Eurydice and Orpheus with that of Persephone and Hades to create an allegory of the conflicting strains of passion, art, and commerce.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Oklahoma!
Circle in the Square

Like our current political climate, Daniel Fish’s sex-drenched nightmare version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! has polarized the theatergoing public. You either hate it or love it. After engagements at Bard College in 2015 and St. Ann’s Warehouse Off-Broadway earlier this season, the radical revival has forced audiences to examine their assumptions about this supposedly wholesome staple of high school and community theater. Naysayers moan that the director has distorted and ruined a beloved classic of Broadway’s Golden Age.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
View from the Bridge, A
Players Center - MainStage

Enclosed in a dynamic narrative, Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge illustrates his theory of a Modern Tragedy extending that of ancient Greece.His tragic hero of mid-20th century is as modern a one today as is the plight of immigrants involved in his story.  So is the hero’s relationship with wife and neighbors.Even the chorus is both classic in inspiration and modern in its manner of delivery as directed by Elliott Raines for this Two Chairs staging.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Hillary and Clinton
John Golden Theater

Star turns can make or break a production.Two recent Broadway openings feature big-name leads, but their effects on their respective shows are startlingly different. In Burn This, a mismatched Adam Driver and Keri Russell drag down Lanford Wilson’s supposedly explosive romance to the ho-hum level. However, in Hillary and Clinton, Laurie Metcalf and John Lithgow make Lucas Hnath’s intriguing behind-the-scenes political premise into a gripping portrait of a complex marriage.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Non-Player Character
Athenaeum

In the 100th-anniversary year of Mary Shelley's “Frankenstein,” playwright Walt McGough invites us to consider the ease with which real-life toys can be repurposed to create monsters, much as an incendiary once associated only with holiday fireworks became the deadly substance we now call “gunpowder."

Our fable begins with Trent and Katja, former high-school comrades in rural New York state who bonded through their communal enthusiasm for online role-play games featuring horticultural battles against marauding vegetables and homicidal flowers.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Burn This
Hudson Theater

Star turns can make or break a production.Two recent Broadway openings feature big-name leads, but their effects on their respective shows are startlingly different. In Hillary and Clinton, Laurie Metcalf and John Lithgow make Lucas Hnath’s intriguing behind-the-scenes political premise into a gripping portrait of a complex marriage. However, Burn This, has a mismatched Adam Driver and Keri Russell drag down Lanford Wilson’s supposedly explosive romance to the ho-hum level.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Ragtime
Hobby Center

I recall back when I first became curious about the musical Ragtime that I was astonished upon locating a synopsis of the plot. It appeared, at first glance, to have such a complex structure, with its three main story lines, to be nearly impossible to stage successfully. Belying that, the extraordinary production currently being presented by Theater Under the Stars at Houston’s Hobby Center is about the best example I can imagine of genius on the stage translating the complex printed pages of a play to a living, breathing miracle right before our eyes.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Royale, The
Geva Theater - Nextstage

Virtually all of our leading contemporary repertory theaters now include non-traditional experimental techniques in staging not only original new work but also – even especially – to perform and reconsider revivals of historic classics. Canada's great Stratford Festival now regularly gives us Shakespeare revivals with actors playing characters of the opposite sex, six or seven actors performing plays written to have a cast of more than 30 characters, and realistic people and animals played by puppets. Understandably, their audiences are sharply divided in response.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Two Trains Running
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse

August Wilson wrote some of our era’s most extraordinary plays, namely his Pittsburgh Cycle, alternately known as the American Century Cycle — plays that dramatize the African American experience decade by decade, throughout the 20th century.

The seventh play in that cycle, Two Trains Running, from 1992, can be seen in a remarkable production at Milwaukee Repertory Theater. For the record, the Rep has produced seven out of the 10 August Wilson plays in recent seasons. Two Trains Running is its only August Wilson offering this season.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Native Son
Kirk Douglas Theater

Richard Wright is having his revenge. The great Black writer was persecuted by this country in the 1950s, vilified by the right-wingers and Hoover’s FBI because of his politics and militancy.  Wright fled the USA for Paris, where he died in 1960, a bitter and disillusioned man.  But his work lived on after him; his best-known novel, Native Son, was twice turned into a motion-picture, with a third one about to be screened by HBO.  In 1942, the book was also adapted for the stage by Paul Green and Wright himself. Now, four decades later, yet another dramatist, Nambi E.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2019
Diary of Anne Frank, The
Crighton Theater

The wonderful Stage Right Players, resident company of the exquisite Crighton Theater in Conroe, Texas, is well known for its many delightful productions of musicals and comedies. But the group is not afraid to take on more serious offerings from time to time, as was the case with last season’s production of The Elephant Man. Continuing in that vein, Directors, Bonnie Hewitt & Meredith Ann Gaines, now bring us a poignant revival of The Diary of Anne Frank, the 1956 play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
April 2019

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