American Son
Booth Theater

Christopher Demos-Brown's drama, American Son, unfolds in agonizing real time, drawing together four characters in a South Florida police station waiting room. It is 4 A.M. sometime "this coming June," which is the playwright's way of warning that the American Dream was, and still is in a racial war and we can expect continued bitterness between young African-American males and law enforcement.

The night is stormy and tension is palpable in the large waiting room throughout the play.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Bus Stop
Reuben Cordova Theater

The search for love lies at the heart of Bus Stop, William Inge’s 1955 play which has been revived at Theatre 40 with Nico Boles and Kaitlin Huwe taking on the lead roles first performed by Albert Salmi and Kim Stanley. (Don Murray and Marilyn Monroe starred in the 1956 movie).

The play may be 63 years old and a bit creaky around the edges, but it still came to vibrant life at Theater 40 thanks to the splendid acting of the 8-person cast and to Ann Hearn Tobolowsky’s able direction. Theater 40 also did not stint on production values, beginning with Jeff G.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Network
Belasco Theater

Very few actors can bring to the stage what Bryan Cranston contributes to this production of Network; the combination of brilliant talent, total commitment, and pure magnetism make this a performance that shouldn’t be missed by anyone who loves the theater. Add to this his sheer, unadulterated joy in performing, and the atmosphere becomes even more rarified; Frank Langella and Hugh Jackman come to mind.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Every Christmas Story Ever Told
free/Fall

What does a regional theater do to avoid offering again A Christmas Carol as its classic theater piece during end-of-year holidays? Probably it will offer some alternative based on a contemporary popular story, modern seasonal classic, well-known holiday song or movie, or even some dredged-up foreign Yuletide celebration. At freeFall Theatre, all of these prove useful.

Since the show begins on a set for A Christmas Carol, and someone playing someone like Charles Dickens starts narrating, there’s suspense over will it continue and, if so, how and when?

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Very Judy Christmas, A
Kalita Humphreys Theater

A star was born on the stage of the Kalita Humphreys Theater as Janelle Lutz commanded the stage for the entire production of A Very Judy Christmas. This original work by B.J. Cleveland pays homage to the 1960s TV holiday specials and is chockful of 22 feel-good Christmas and Broadway songs leading off with Judy's signature, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” followed by “Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend.” You can close your eyes for this one and imagine Carol Channing.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Merry Chris-Mess
Tenth Street Theater

There’s an old saying about laughter being the best medicine. Well, laughter can make a pretty good holiday gift, too. That point is made loud and clear by In Tandem Theatre, which has audiences practically rolling in the aisles with its “alternative” Christmas show, Merry Chris-Mess.

This year, In Tandem is putting aside some of its popular holiday specials from past years in order to offer a blend of old skits, silly songs, and some new material. It’s not exactly a “mess,” as advertised by the title, but audiences need to be prepared for almost anything.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Marvin Gaye: Prince of Soul
West Coast Black Theater Troup

A reworking of one of Westcoast Black Theater Troupe’s most popular shows, this new Marvin Gaye biographical musical is stronger on details of his life and career. As almost a revue, Marvin Gaye: Prince of Soul won permission from the subject’s estate to use all his hit songs, and WBTT’s Nate Jacobs now employs them as well as enhanced dancing to delight Gaye’s many fans.

Details of accomplished Sheldon Rhodes’ Marvin Gaye’s early years at home foreshadow his ultimate deadly treatment by his father (Leon Pitts II, sanctimoniously strict).

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Revolutionists, The
Strawdog Theater

You probably haven't thought about revolution—not the kind extolled by advertisers, but the capital "R" off-with-their-heads variety—since history class, but try now to recall what you were told about the toppling of monarchies that didn't focus exclusively on males butting heads and making speeches. The documented contribution of women to the quest for independent rule, however, has always been largely restricted to wives, mothers, daughters and sweethearts serving as figureheads or martyrs in support of their sires.

Lauren M. Gunderson disapproves this injustice.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Buttcracker, The
Reggie's Music Joint

When the Uptown Underground abruptly ceased operations earlier this year, Jaq Seifert's annual Yuletide revue, The Buttcracker, found itself searching for a place to pitch its tent—not just any church basement or banquet hall, either, but a campground capable of hosting pyrotechnics, floor acrobatics and exotic acts of nebulous infrastructure. Furthermore, the location of this vaudeville also needed to promise a comfortable environment for audiences entering into the spirit of its gender-fluid body-positive manifesto.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Meantime at HoJo's
Complex Theater

For the past sixteen years, Christian Levatino has been running the Gangbusters Theater Company which, as its moniker suggests, specializes in plays done in comic-book fashion. Levatino, who writes and directs the plays, has built a fairly sizable cult following. Although I don’t normally like comic-book plays (or movies), I did decide to go see two of the three plays culled from his “Black Bag Pentalogy,” King Dick and …Meantime at Hojo’s. They’ve been running, with a break, since October, in rep with Sunny Afternoon (which I was not able to cover).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
King Dick
Complex Theater

For the past sixteen years, Christian Levatino has been running the Gangbusters Theater Company which, as its moniker suggests, specializes in plays done in comic-book fashion. Levatino, who writes and directs the plays, has built a fairly sizable cult following. Although I don’t normally like comic-book plays (or movies), I did decide to go see two of the three plays culled from his “Black Bag Pentalogy,” King Dick and …Meantime at Hojo’s. They’ve been running, with a break, since October, in rep with Sunny Afternoon (which I was not able to cover).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
December 2018
Christmas in Babylon
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

If you spent Thanksgiving counting your blessings, here’s one more you haven’t thought of yet: that you aren’t a part of Long Island’s McShane family. Their trials and tribulations are at the core of Christmas in Babylon, a new play by Spring Green-based playwright James DeVita that is getting its world premiere on the Milwaukee Chamber Theater stage.

It must not have been a difficult choice for producing artistic director C. Michael Wright (who also directs here) to give the “green light” to this touching yet hilarious comedy.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Guitar Girls
Florida Studio Theater - Goldstein Cabaret

Florida Studio Theater’s second version of Guitar Girls contains some nice surprises. Only two of the cast of five play guitars. One of the cast is a man. Concentrating not on the women performing but on songs and developers’ fine script, the show sparkles in tribute to leading American female singer-songwriters and their creations. Their range includes Loretta Lynn, Dixie Chicks, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Come from Away
Ahmanson Theater

Come from Away, the feel-good musical, tells the story of Gander, Newfoundland in the days following 9/11 when some 7,000 air travelers were stuck there for a week when their planes were grounded for security reasons.

Gander was once a major airport, a refueling stop for international flights. It returned to the limelight when all those passengers and crew were dumped there by the airlines (on orders from the U.S. State Department).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
How The Grinch Stole Christmas
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! opened to mostly positive audience reaction in Milwaukee, only 12 years after the grumpy green fellow first appeared on Broadway. The Grinch has had a somewhat checkered career, coming out only at Christmas in various parts of the country. It opened on Broadway in 2006 at the Foxwoods Theater (now renamed the Lyric), where it made enough of an impression to make an appearance the following year at the St. James Theater.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Safe House, The
Edgewater Presbyterian Church

There's this house, you see—a modest mid-20th-century family-sized dwelling in Lansing, Michigan. The ambience is a study in Norman Rockwell warmth and tranquility, with a laundry room in the basement, a garden by the kitchen door and a grandmother who grows vegetables that she cooks into hearty stews (recipe in the playbill).

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Ghosts
Redtwist Theater

Over a century ago, Henrik Ibsen declared Victorian morality—to women, especially. Ever since, allegedly enlightened societies have continued to hide behind equivocation, speculation, and flat-out denial in their attempts to rein in the vehemence of his diatribe on the folly of blind obedience to rigidly inhumane convention.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Mother of the Maid
Public Theater

People on trial, especially women that end up being executed, make good theater and film, as well as subjects of art. The two reigning queens whose lives still continue to resonate long after their deaths are Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), the last Queen of France, who literally lost her head, and Jeanne d’Arc (1412-1431) who went up in flames nearly seven centuries ago. Done in by politics, both were captured, jailed, put on trial, dragged through the streets, and summarily executed, as a kind of entertainment before a boisterous crowd of unruly citizens.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Lifespan of a Fact, The
Studio 54

Does anyone care about getting the facts right anymore? After all, in an age when anyone who disagrees with you is declared to be spreading “fake news,” isn’t it easier to just shrug and say “Who know?”

But it does matter, to the point of near mania, to Jim Fingal (Daniel Radcliffe), an intern assigned to fact check an essay by writer John D’Agata (Bobby Cannavale) by his high-powered editor Emily Penrose (Cherry Jones). He not only has to be accurate, he also has to be fast. Jim assures Emily that it’s in the bag.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
American Son
Booth Theater

I am pleased that American Son has found its way to the Booth Theater on Broadway following its premieres at the Barrington Stage and then last season at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, N.J. Sad and disturbing but also compelling, it remains on second viewing one of the more unnerving plays I’ve had to wrap my head around.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberly
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse

Love is in the air for Miss Mary Bennet this Christmas, in a holiday-themed sequel to Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” Austen neglected to give much attention to Mary, a middle sister in the Bennet family, as she wrote her masterpiece early in the 19th century. So this has made her character irresistible to modern playwright Lauren Gunderson, working in conjunction with Margot Melcon. They have created the delightful Miss Bennet , a show for the whole family to enjoy.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Music Man, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Classically, con man Harold Hill talks his swindling ways into tough-to-outsiders River City, Iowa folks. Asolo Rep now has him tenderizing the population by tap dancing in and getting everyone to thus move musically as he moves in on his goal: cashing in on their costs for a boys’ band. Hill still gets stopped in his tracks—out of town—by falling in love with librarian Marion. But who wouldn’t with Britney Coleman, of gorgeous soprano voice, finally acting out what she’s only read about?

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Finks
Electric Lodge

“We’re caught up in a whirl-wind,” says one of the left-wing artists who has been subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 about possible “subversive” activities in radio, TV, and theater. Finks, a drama by Joe Gilford now in a West Coast premiere at Rogue Machine, takes the audience right into the eye of the whirlwind which devastated so much of this country’s cultural landscape in the fifties.

The HUAC, led by the Hon.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Normal Heart, The
Lone Star College - Mainstage

For weeks Americans across this land have been virtually paralyzed with a sense of hopeless despair as they watch reports of the unprecedented California forest fires destroying entire towns while leaving thousands of our fellow citizens displaced and homeless with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The heart-wrenching scenes seem apocalyptic in scope.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Bitter Game, The
Wallis Center

It began with fun ‘n games and ended in blood and murder. That is the essence of The Bitter Game, Keith A.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Hughie & Krapp's Last Tape
Geffen Playhouse - Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater

These two short plays, Hughie and Krapp’s Last Tape, are studies in human isolation and desperation, which is undoubtedly why The Geffen has linked them in a home-grown production directed by the gifted Steven Robman.  Starring in both of these one-acters is Brian Dennehy, an actor who has appeared in numerous plays by the respective playwrights, Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett

In Hughie, Dennehy takes on the role of Erie Smith, a small-time gambler and hustler living in a seedy Manhattan hotel circa 1928.  Smith has just come off a four-day bender but he’

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Swansong
Studio Theater

Swansong is an 80-minute monologue by Conor McDermottroe presented by L. Wolf Productions as part of the United Solo Theater Festival. It’s a study of a criminal—a punk from the word gopresented with such insight that we leave the theater simultaneously appalled by the character and sympathetic to him. This is what it means to hold the mirror up to nature, non-judgmental and charitable.

Occi, as he is called, tells us about his life, starting with his habit of robbing the rich boys as a young hooligan.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Waiting for Godot
Gerald W. Lynch Theater

Waiting for Godot is flatly the most important play of the 20th century (the reader will remember that the comparable monuments of modern drama were written at the end of the 19th century). Samuel Beckett’s extended metaphor, often thought abstruse, has been more victimized by wayward criticism than any other modern drama. However, Edward Albee said to me when we discussed it: “If Waiting for Godot had been set in a living room, nobody would have had any trouble with it. It's this fucking blasted heath that got in everybody's way.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Cost of Living
Fountain Theater

Two of the play’s four actors are people with disabilities; the other two are their caretakers. But Cost of Living by Martyna Majok—whose gritty working-class play “Ironbound” was seen at the Geffen last year—is much more than just another disease-of-the-week tale of woe.  Its deeper concerns, the struggle to overcome loneliness, the need to connect to another human being, provide the real drama of this young playwright’s latest work.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Christmas Carol, A
Geffen Playhouse - Gil Cates Theater

Jefferson Mays has given Los Angeles an ideal Christmas gift: a one-man, thrilling performance of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which he adapted along with Susan Lyons and director Michael Arden.>I Am My Own Wife” and “Yes, Prime Minister,” returns with a much-abridged but moving version of the Dickens classic tale.  In it he impersonates some fifty characters, giving each of them a distinctive voice and manner.  Mostly, though, he addresses the audience in the voice of Ebenezer Scrooge, the old ski

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Valley of the Heart
Mark Taper Forum

The intertwined history of two minority groups in California, Latino and Japanese, is the basis for Valley of the Heart, the latest work by Luis Valdez, founder of El Teatro Campesino and author of Broadway’s first Chicano play, Zoot Suit. Valdez, the child of Mexican migrant workers, grew up in the Central Valley, where his father toiled for a Japanese-American family until the attack on Pearl Harbor. After FDR signed the shameful Executive Order 9066, the Japanese-American family was forcibly relocated to an internment camp.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Lady in Denmark
Goodman Theater

Historical fiction typically recounts its chronicles from the vantage of a humble witness whose proximity coincidentally enables them to observe—perhaps even participate in—the significant events under scrutiny.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, A
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

When your mother’s died leaving poor you surprised that you’re ninth in line to become rich, what do you do? What Monty Navarro does is set out to get rid of all other heirs from the family who snubbed his mom for marrying beneath them. He concocts A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, enhanced by music, while also romancing a mistress and a future wife. With immoral delights, he invites you to enjoy his quest and its ends.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Sight Unseen
The Players' Backstage

Sight Unseen proves to be about the importance of past to the present with changes brought about by family influences and time on personal relationships, art, historical viewpoints, jealousy, commercialism. The play time-travels among rural England and a London gallery in 1992 and about 17 and 15 years earlier in an art school studio and digs in New York City.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Steambath
Odyssey Theater

Watching the Odyssey’s revival of Bruce Jay Friedman’s 1970s Steambath was a painful experience, largely because the play seemed dated and unfunny. Then I realized that maybe the play would have worked better had there been a larger audience. But it was a Thursday night, and the handful of people in attendance never once laughed out loud. With no giveback from the audience, the actors were left to work in a vacuum, fighting desperately to pump life into the text.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
King Kong
Broadway Theater

It has been nearly a century since a 1933 film made “King Kong” one of the greatest monster movies of all time. Sadly, the King Kong which opened recently at Broadway’s Broadway Theater was not, to borrow from another critic’s comments, “as fun as a barrel of monkeys.” Although the giant, animatronic beast was by far the best element of this $35 million musical, the rest of the cast come off like chumps (or chimps, as the case may be).

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Scientific Method
Rivendell Theater

Sexism, Racism, cronyism, backbiting, misappropriation of funds, intellectual property theft and general ass-covering in the academic world is no news these days, but when the arena is a research lab and the hostage is a cure for cancer, the stakes are considerably higher.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Back to the 80's
Music Box Theater

Regular customers of The Music Box Theater (and there are plenty of them filling the house at each performance), are very familiar with the way each month-long production has a creative new theme. The current offering, Back to the 80s, may sound familiar to those who attended their similar production titled, “The 80's Mix Tape Diaries” just two years ago. At that time, the plot thread was built around a fictional tale of characters involved in the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Waverly Gallery, The
Golden Theater

It is a heartbreaking study in human decline, watching the indomitable Elaine May play 86-year-old, hard-of-hearing Gladys Green, fiercely grappling with dementia as she clutches her dignity, fights for lost words and finally cannot even recognize those closest to her. Written by Kenneth Lonergan (Lobby Hero), The Waverly Gallery is a touching memory play based on his grandmother. It offers no happy ending, a trail of losses, anger, frustration, a picture of decline and dependency, eloquently honest and crushingly sad.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
November 2018
Marriage Zone, The
Santa Monica Playhouse

In the words of the legendary S.J. Perelman, comedy is a tough dollar. Perelman’s remark came to mind while I was watching The Marriage Zone, Jeff Gould’s comedy which has been revived at the Santa Monica Playhouse after a successful run at Secret Rose Theater in 2017, where it won a Valley Theatre Award. Although I went to the play hoping for some badly needed laughs, I was sadly disappointed. Very little that happened on stage tickled my funny bone.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2018

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