Lyons, The
Cort Theater

Nicky Silver’s The Lyonsis an exceptionally enjoyable evening. The star, Linda Lavin, gives a stylized, very external but comfortably comedic performance as a wife in lifelong battle with her now-dying husband in a hospital room. She can really deliver a line, and there are plenty of zingers. She’s a comedic genius with impeccable timing that hits every note, and takes it beyond the writing with her gesture, face, comic sense. She’s a superb mugger, with a sense of being absolutely real.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Things That Go Ding
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

Things That Go Ding!, a highly theatrical musical revue, had modest beginnings. It first appeared as an after-hours cabaret act. However, it was such a hit that the creators conspired to produce this expanded, two-hour production.

An unseen announcer now opens the show by referring to Things That Go Ding! as “not good enough for the main stage, but too loud for the street.” Well, it may not be Shakespeare, or Mozart, but Ding! certainly surpasses such modest claims.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Leap of Faith
St. James Theater

Leap of Faith, book by Janus Cercone and Warren Leight, music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Glenn Slater, is a gospel musical about a con-man preacher and the small, drought-ridden town he plans to suck the last penny out of. Despite good songs and a lively singing, dancing cast, the show has problems. The first act, where characters, motivations and relationships are established, is filled with a mish-mash of production numbers by the fancifully costumed (by William Ivey Long) chorus.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Magic/Bird
Longacre Theater

Eric Simonson’s Magic/Bird is an exciting exploration of the relationship between two of basketball’s greatest: Magic Johnson and Larry Bird from 1979 to 1992. It’s an exhilarating, very theatrical trip — a sharp integration of actors and film of the actuals. The play has a lot of charm and humanity as we see comparisons of the parents and families of the two men from working-class beginnings and their gradual, slowly-growing friendship.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Clybourne Park
Walter Kerr Theater

Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris, well-directed and staged by Pam MacKinnon, is a very wordy play on an interesting subject – the racial transformation of neighborhoods. It’s performed by an excellent ensemble cast, with great lighting by Allen Lee Hughes on Daniel Ostling’s just-right set. However, the play doesn’t really start until more than twenty minutes into it, when the basic concept is first introduced.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Pianist of Willesden Lane, The
Geffen Playhouse

Concert pianist Mona Golabek makes her acting debut in a solo show adapted from her book about her Austrian mother, Lisa Jura, who at age fourteen was sent by her family to England aboard the kinderstransport. Jura might have escaped the clutches of the Nazis, but she had to face life on her own in a series of grim foster homes and institutions. What kept her strength and spirits up was her love of the piano, and her determination to play professionally, just as her mother had done before her.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
City Club, The
Minetta Lane Theater

I stood behind a lamppost, wearing my grey fedora, illuminated only by a dim streetlamp as I smoked a cigarette and watched the film noir musical, The City Club, with its high-steppin’, long-legged, gorgeous chorus girls. Narrated by a “Play it again, Sam” piano player/singer, Kenny Brawner, tickling the ivories, with a hot band behind him, this stylized musical, book by Glenn M.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Peter and the Starcatcher
Brooks Atkinson Theater

Peter and the Starcatcher by Rick Elice is a real oddball, with a separate style in each act. Act one has some brilliant physical staging by Steven Hoggett, with synchronized movements, abrupt stops and quick light changes in time with the movements, creating a stylized world. Act two sticks with the story of Peter’s evolution with none of that action style.

You know what it’s about -- How did Peter become Pan? It starts with the cast showing a lot of cuteness, and they are quite conscious of it.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Reel Music
Florida Studio Theater - Goldstein Cabaret

How well does the cast of Reel Musicwork together? My husband thought they were an established group, a quartet! Director Bill Castellino has the four who don’t look or act alike or project the same personalities wonderfully melding or going solo or forming duets in song and dance from famous movies.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Miser, The
Venice Theater - Pinkerton

Though Venice Theater promised a Moliere play, the playbill for The Misermore accurately than not listed it as by adapter Timothy Mooney. The main characters and slightly rearranged and whittled plot may be traced to Moliere; but how startling to find Mooney has changed Moliere’s proseplay to a verse play! It’s of predominantly couplets in iambic pentameter, but in contemporary idiom.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Burnt at the Steak
Richmond Shepard Theater

I saw Carolann Valentino’s show, Burnt at the Steak, the heart of which is showing us the life of a restaurant manager and all the people in her life, including her Italian mother in Texas, the customers and the wait staff. She’s a very beautiful, remarkably energetic singer/dancer comedian with super jokes and amazing clear, clean characterizations. She’s a dancin’ twirlin’ fool with great personal charm whose delineation of recognizable distinct characters is hilarious, each notched up just a tad into very funny caricatures.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Nice Work if You Can Get It
249 West 45th Street

I saw the show on Saturday night; it opened last night [Tuesday, April 24], and I’ve been thinking about it -- because it’s such a monster operation – in between. This is the kind of super-entertainment that is cobbled together from great songs and old shows (the chief one here was Oh, Kay!, a Gershwin musical that opened in this same theater, the Imperial, in 1926). I remember following the versions of what became My One and Only, Tommy Tune’s 1983 huge hit Broadway musical hodge-podge of Gershwin tunes and rewrites of at least two earlier shows.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Blackbird
Westcoast Black Theater Troupe

Blackbirdportrays Josephine Baker from 1919 as Josie McDonald, a teenaged ghetto street dancer in St. Louis, to 1925 as her career as a voluptuous brown exotic dancer in France soared. Though the book takes her through two husbands and a male lover, she relates to her mother and other women more for her successes. In selective biographical mode, her bisexualism and early New York successes are underplayed.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Bus Stop
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

The characters in William Inge’s classic, Bus Stop, , are forced to face some hard truths about themselves in the hours they spend holed up in a small-town diner during a blizzard. Although it may not be Inge’s best play, Bus Stopcontains the distinctive touches he infuses into all of his work. He reveals the frustration and disappointment in ordinary people’s lives, especially those people who live in America’s Midwest.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
West Side Story
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

Considered by many to be one of the best American musicals ever written, a new version of West Side Storyplayed in Milwaukee as part of the Time Warner Cable Broadway at the Marcus Center series. This is the national tour based on the 2009 revival, which played more performances on Broadway than the original or any other revivals that followed it.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
End of the Rainbow
Belasco Theater

I’m going to say some negative things about End of the Rainbow, Peter Quilter’s play about Judy Garland’s last years. But bear this in mind-- Tracie Bennett who plays Garland, is a great singer, actress, dancer and athlete, and, when she is singing (which takes a while to get to), she rocks the house with both her voice and her performance, which captures nuances of Garland and gives us a geschrei from deep inside her agonized soul. In Act 2 her athleticism approaches Cirque dimensions.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Morini Strad, The
59E59 Theaters

Willy Holtzman’s The Morini Stradis an odd evening. The audience the night I saw it was full of white-haired music lovers, who, because of the subject matter, filled the theater. We all expected that there would be lots of good music played. Alas, the magical violin-playing of Hanah Stuart, isn’t 10 percent of the play, which studies a very old former violin prodigy (a totally convincing Mary Beth Peil whose depth of feeling fills the theater) who owns a Stradivarius violin that needs repair so she can sell it.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
In Paris
The Broad Stage

Russian theater is not only alive and well, it is doing some remarkable things. A case in point is In Paris,a play adapted from the Ivan Bunin short story by Dmitry Krymov, who currently teaches at the Russian Academy of Theater Arts in Moscow.

Krymov, who is also a painter, has teamed up with Mikhail Baryshnikov, the most celebrated dancer of his time, who not only agreed to act in the play but to help Krymov develop it at his own arts center in NYC. The result of their collaboration is simply astounding.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Othello
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse Theater

Some consider Othello to be Shakespeare’s greatest play It certainly is one of his most action-packed, filled with enough betrayal, intrigue, lust and suspense to captivate the most blasé audiences.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
one time
Next Act Theater

Next Act Theater concludes its 2011-12 season with the world premiere of Richard Lyon Conlon’s one time, a story billed as “a man, a woman, a park bench, and a need to share secrets from the past.” It is all that, and so much more. This romantic comedy for older adults is a “must-see” of the spring theater season.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Superior Donuts
Geva Theater - Mainstage

I read this play and liked it before I heard about and later saw Tracy Letts’ multiple-prize-winning August: Osage County. Now, a couple of years later, I’ve finally seen Superior Doughnuts performed. It has none of the bitterness and angst of Letts’ earlier plays; and though it lacks the ambitions and scope of Osage, it also never feels as interminable.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Ha!
WorkShop Theater

Rich Orloff is a very funny writer, and his HA! [sic], now at the Jewel Box Theater on West 36th Street, gives us a very entertaining evening: three stylistically different comedic ventures. The first, Oedi,is a straight-out farce mocking the Oedipus legend, full of laughs, with an absurdist flair, including a hilarious Gerianne Raphael as Oedipus’ Jewish mother/wife. Oedipus-schmedipus -- as long as he loves his mother!

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Carrie
Lucille Lortel Theater

Carrie, based on a novel by Stephen King, with book by Lawrence D. Cohen and memorable music by Michael Gore and lyrics by Dean Pitchford, is a Broadway-level show in all departments including acting, singing (led by the amazing Marin Mazzie as the religious nut mother and a scintillatingly sensitive Molly Ranson as Carrie). The entire cast are all first-rate singers in this gripping, fascinating musical (even though, due to the movie, we know how it will end).

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Death of a Salesman
Ethel Barrymore Theater

Attention must be paid to Mike Nichols’ stunning production of Death of a Salesman,the insightful American tragedy of Willie Loman, at the Barrymore Theater. Past and present weave smoothly through Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner, again reaffirming its place as possibly the most perceptive drama of the American stage.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
April 2012
Red
Historic Asolo Theater

After the budding young artist Ken enters the warehouse-like studio of Mark Rothko -- only to be told he’s there only as an employee and not to be parentally, spiritually, psychologically guided or taught -- we get ready for a Visiting Mr. Green (or Butley or even Educating Rita) type of play. Yes, in a way, over almost two years of Rothko’s fathering, guiding, teaching, we get a familiar drama.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2012
Winter
New Theater

South Florida’s New Theater presents its second consecutive world premiere of the season in Winter,in which the adult he-and-she twins of Elinor Winter do battle at mom’s London home after her sudden death. There’s only the relatively young, live-in aide to explain the circumstances – until, that is, the discovery of a not-quite complete journal. But Robert Caisley’s play isn’t a mystery so much as a comedy with serious undertones. Under artistic director Ricky J.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
February 2012
Hamlet, Prince of Cuba
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

The performances of fiery Frankie J. Alvarez as Hamlet and Douglas Jones as both a pompous Polonius and definitively comic Gravedigger would alone make Hamlet, Prince of Cuba worth watching and hearing. Not that this version of Hamletis a gimmick. It’s a much-edited adaptation of Shakespeare’s play to a different time (late1890s) and place (Cuba) with accommodations to cultural differences.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2012
Lady from Dubuque, The
Pershing Square Signature Center - End Stage Theater

I am one of the few who saw the original Broadway production of this play in 1980 (it ran for 12 performances.) I thought it a brilliant work, though neither pleasant nor reassuring in its treatment of our inability to prevent a horrible death, in this case from cancer, or to alleviate its pain. The pain here is central and omnipresent: not only the victim’s physical pain but also the awful pain of loss.

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
March 2012
Waiting for Godot
Mark Taper Forum

Center Theater Group has mounted a landmark production of Waiting for Godot, one which will not be topped in this, or perhaps any other, age. The production, now on tap at Mark Taper Forum, was directed by Michael Arabian and is acted by two specialists in Beckett, Alan Mandell and Barry McGovern (with strong supporting work by James Cromwell, Hugo Armstrong and LJ Benet).

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2012
Coronado
The Holding Company

Dennis Lehane, known primarily for his novels (“Gone Baby Gone,” “Mystic River,” “Shutter Island”), recently turned one of his short stories, “Until Gwen,” into a play, his first. Coronadowas originally produced by the Invisible City Theater in NYC; now a gutsy new theatre company in L.A., Player King Productions, has mounted the West Coast premiere of the play.

Director Drew Shirley has done Lehane proud, putting together an 11-person cast that deftly and flawlessly brings Coronado to life -- no mean feat, considering the challenges posed by the play.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2012
Shalom Dammit! An Evening with Rabbi Sol Solomon
Richmond Shepard Theater

Full Disclosure: Elizabeth Ahlfors has been a theater critic for TotalTheater.com since 2010. David Lefkowitz publishes TotalTheater.com and therefore edits Ms. Ahlfors' reviews for publication.

How does one describe Shalom Dammit! An Evening with Rabbi Sol Solomon? A comedy, a passionate sermon, a witty diatribe, a musical? Actually it’s all of the above in full-volume yelling.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
March 2012
Diary of a Madman
Circle Theater

Nikolai Gogol's Diary of a Madmanwas first written in 1833 as a short story; soon after that the author converted his work into a stage piece, a monologue. It takes place in a mental institution where Poprishkin, a minor government official (played masterfully by Ilya Volok), talks feverishly, compulsively, about his shattered hopes and dreams.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2012
Imagining Madoff
Jewish Community Center

Let me confess that after a trying day I dozed occasionally during the early moments of this uninterrupted hour and forty-five minute play -- not to excuse my missing something but to possibly modify my impression that this drama never really discusses what Bernard Madoff’s crime actually was: a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme. Instead, it presents us with the playwright’s imagining what Madoff may have been thinking.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
March 2012
American Idiot
Ahmanson Theater

Rash, brash and gutsy, American Idiot is a punk-rock musical with attitude -- lots and lots of attitude.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2012
Steady Rain, A
GableStage at Biltmore Hotel

All elements combine at GableStage in South Florida to make the two-character cop drama, A Steady Rain, come off as significantly more than the sum of its storyline parts.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
March 2012
In the Next Room
Milwaukee Repertory Theater

You don’t easily forget a play with the word “vibrator” in the title, do you? That must have been the intent of author Sarah Ruhl. The noted playwright could easily have played up this title with a series of cheap laughs. However, she rewards us with a play that is as much about electricity, history and relationships as it is about sex.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2012
Cages
Adler Theater

Drawing on his long experience as a psychotherapist in the California state prison system, Leonard Manzella has written a bold and shocking drama about the challenges he faced in his dealings with deeply disturbed inmates, those who used to be called the criminally insane.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2012
American Night
Kirk Douglas Theater

Originally produced by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, American Night: The Ballad of Juan Joseis that rare, blessed thing -- an hilarious farce which also has a social bite to it, a bite that draws blood.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2012
Daddy Long Legs
Skylight Music Theater

The newly renamed Skylight Music Theater (formerly Skylight Opera Theater) continues to bring exciting new work to the Milwaukee area. Years ago, Skylight audiences were treated to Midwest premieres of Floyd Collins and The Spitfire Grill. Last season brought the startling, brilliantly staged production of The Adding Machine. With Daddy Long Legs,Skylight proves its artistic direction is right on the money.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2012
Celebration of Harold Pinter, A
Odyssey Theater

Harold Pinter is best known as a dramatist and screenwriter, but thanks to Julian Sands and John Malkovich, we must now recognize him as a poet as well, one of the finest of the 20th century.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2012

Pages