Criticopia

 A Discovery: I went to see Terese Genecco and her Little Big Band at Iridium on 51st and Broadway. Wow! She has a strong, wonderfully musical, lyrical chest voice, and a "Little Band"- sax, trumpet, trombone, double bass, two drummers (trap and conga/bongo) piano and a guitarist. She looks like a well-dressed 14 year old boy and opens up her chops and rocks the room. She's lively, charming, and filled with humor and charisma, and the whole show is a class act - top-level New York cabaret-- good music and fun. (The food at Iridium is delicious, too.)

 Nick Starr's The Awesome Dance is an intriguing, smartly-written New Age-ish play in several rather disjointed sections: the first is about three actresses waiting to see a powerful guru, and a distraught young man comes in. It ends in an orgy of violence. Part two is a non-sequitur with new characters and costumes, where a young man confronts a woman - something about his father dying, his sister, a traffic accident, a nurse. Part three has two lesbian women whose surrogate baby is being born in the other room, and a pot-smoking shamanic midwife.

 Thanks to remarkable acting (especially by Judith Ivey as Amanda) and directing, Tennessee Williams' 1945 family drama, The Glass Menagerie, finds new, reverberating life in this production at the Mark Taper Forum. Gordon Edelstein, who recently mounted the play at his Long Wharf Theater in New Haven (and then at the Roundabout in New York), has not only brought out the play's poignancy and despair but its oft-overlooked humor.

This play was commissioned and originally produced by the McCarter Theater Center, Emily Mann artistic director, and here repeats basically the same production with direction by Mann and design by the same design team but new casting.

 To paraphrase a line from the title song of Cabaret , "what good is sitting alone in your room …." when you can enjoy a fabulous evening in Berlin's Kit Kat Club? The Milwaukee Repertory Theater finally has opened the most-anticipated show of Milwaukee's fall theater season. The production represents a number of "firsts": first musical on the Quadracci Powerhouse stage, first production by new artistic director Mark Clements, largest cast ever to perform on this stage and first-time collaboration with one of the city's other performing arts organizations, the Milwaukee Ballet.

 InProximity Theater Company's Sight Unseen by Donald Margulies is that rare occurrence where it bats a thousand in all departments: play, acting, directing, design (James J. Fenton), lighting (Lisa Soverino) and costumes (Court Watson). Everything is beautifully done. The play is about Art, about artists, about the interacting of several social levels, about ambition, the consequences of success, the consequences of love. It's directed by a master composer of movement, action and emotion, Dorothy Lyman, with not a false note in the acting.

 Even those who have never heard Oliver Hardy utter his famous expression, "Well, that's another fine mess you've gotten us into [sic]," will find a lot of humor and affection in Tom McGrath's biography. Laurel and Hardy pays tribute to one of the great comedy duos of all time. The show has an ideal setting: Milwaukee Repertory Theater's most intimate performance space, the Stackner Cabaret. This allows audience members to get a life-size glimpse of these great comedians. Two actors, plus an exceptionally versatile pianist, comprise the show's cast.

 The Pitmen Painters by Lee Hall, based on William Feaver's book about a group of actual coal miners in Newcastle, England, who invited a teacher of art to come to their community in 1934 to teach them art appreciation. The early implication in this remarkable play is that there is talent in all of us, and it sure comes out in the five miners represented. They all paint wonderful pictures, finding visual perspective and express imaginative ideas on their canvasses. They exhibited in northern England and after the war in London.

 "Oh, the Women!" is not only sung joyously about the gals at Maxim's of Paris but also those at the Moravia Paris Embassy ball honoring the musical's titled widow. Appropriate, since it's the actresses who give life to the shortened story and cast of a classic lavish operetta turned mini-musical.

 The play begins and ends with the same simple words. A man, standing alone onstage, tells the audience that My Name Is Asher Lev. That may be the only simple thing about this highly complicated drama that pits identity against religious beliefs, father against son, and tradition against contemporary ideas.

 The young African-American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins lights a theatrical firecracker with Neighbors, now in its explosive West Coast premiere at the Matrix. Rude, funny, ballsy and pugnacious, the play dissects race and color in America in a highly original, un-politically correct way, slicing and dicing every taboo it encounters.

America's obsession with physical beauty is brutally examined in Neil LaBute's reasons to be pretty. (sic) With the same colorful language and scalpel-like precision one finds in the works of playwright David Mamet, LaBute tears into our preconceived notions of the price we pay in the name of beauty. In a powerfully acted production by Renaissance Theaterworks, four actors take the audience on a breathtaking ride through the triumphs and pitfalls of beauty, commitment and friendship.

 From the moment The Wanderers insist "Let's Go to the Hop," in the doo-wop tradition that sounds newly minted, it's an invitation hard to refuse. Like their black (jackets and pants) and blue (shirts and pocket handkerchiefs) outfits, they're a harmonious combo. Great, because representing 1950s and 1960s guy groups, harmony is what they're all about. Bop, bop, ding, dong, with lots of energy and clear enunciation, they easily shift from solo turns to backup and in-between progressions to quartet.

 Rich Orloff is a funny writer, and his Skin Deep, is a lark of a
romp full of sexual innuendo, mostly gay, at a "Clothing Optional" hotel
in Florida. Robby Sharp, whose goal is to be a Drag Queen Diva, is cute, funny, full of life and verve in and out of drag. Mary Theresa Archbold, with tools, is solid
and vigorous as the hotel's handyperson, and William Tatlock Green and Dee
Dee Friedman are just right as the square couple who inherit the hotel.
(Will they be influenced by the surrounding sexual freedom?)

 Combine the same ingredients that worked so brilliantly in The Producers, and you'll get similar results, right? Well, not exactly. Young Frankenstein, the musical based on the hit 1974 Mel Brooks film, doesn't pack the same emotional wallop as its predecessor, The Producers.

Credit Two Gentlemen of Verona as being Shakespeare's earliest comedy, and its debits (e.g., silliness, excessive punning, one unsympathetic hero) aren't dire. With so many literary sources and reliance on Elizabethan manners, morals, motifs, it's a wonder it's so neatly structured. The leads are the two young men of the title and the two women with whom they'll make two couples. There are two observant servants, two fathers who dictate to their sons, and two clowns.

 What an inspiration: telling the sordid story of the persecution and prosecuting of nine black young men falsely accused of raping two white prostitutes in Alabama in 1931 as a minstrel show performed by blacks, who play all characters, white and black, including the sheriff, and only one white, John Cullum, in the cast as The Interlocutor. It's a bizarre, but palatable way of telling this horrible story, including a humorous song about the electric chair.

Brief Encounter, based on Noel Coward's short play, Still Life, and David Lean's memorable 1945 film, leaves its black-and-white imprint and becomes a Crayola homage of music, laughter and flying sequences, in its current production at Studio 54.

 Yes, A Life in the Theater was written by David Mamet, but folks, this is not the David Mamet you know, that rapid-paced, caustic, socio-political wordsmith of controversial plays like Oleanna, Speed-The-Plow and Race. Over three decades ago, when Mamet wrote A Life in the Theater, he was a kinder, gentler Mamet, a struggling actor himself. This work reveals nostalgia toward that time in his life and empathy toward the passage of time and the grueling life upon the wicked stage.