Criticopia

Geva Theatre Center is ending its 40th season in Rochester, NY with an elaborate, very pleasing production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.Co-directors Mark Cuddy, Geva’s artistic director, and Skip Greer, artist in residence and director of education, keep the focus clear on the three worlds of the Court: the nobles in the Palace, the Fairy Kingdom in the forest, and the “rude mechanicals” from the town, who rehearse their play in the forest, then perform it for the nobles in the Palace.

The evening of delicious dish is called I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers, but the centerpiece is really the Divine Miss M. She plays the late Hollywood super-agent Mengers who dishes about her “twinkies.” If it weren’t for the audience’s love affair with Midler, John Logan’s (Red)one-act memoir at the Booth Theater would fade under its own scantiness and irrelevancy.

August Wilson's 1986 play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, part of his Century Cycle, has been triumphantly revived at the Taper, thanks to the splendid work of its cast and director. Credit the Center Theater Group, as well, for providing strong production values -- especially John Iacovelli's lavish boardinghouse set and Karen Perry's evocative period costumes.

I like Colm Toibin’s play The Testament of Mary,which has a contemporary Mary reminiscing about the death of her son, Jesus, two thousand years ago. But the evening starts by assaulting us with a disorientating, irritating soundscape that drones on for fifteen minutes as we walk up onto the stage and look at props, a live bird, and the actress Fiona Shaw in a glass booth preparing. As directed by Deborah Warner, Ms Shaw gives us a very strong, active, but quite masculine performance of a woman I had thought of as warm, feminine, maternal.

The current revival of Horton Foote’s wonderful play, The Trip to Bountiful, is a beautiful rendering of the work in all departments. The story of an irrepressible old woman (Cicely Tyson in a powerful, nuanced performance) who wants to see her ancestral home one more time, contrary to the wishes of her staid son (Cuba Gooding Jr) and his shrewish wife (Vanessa Williams), is sensitively directed by Michael Wilson, who allows Foote’s words to flow with a natural grace.

Bette Midler’s portrayal of agent Sue Mengers in John Logan’s I’ll Eat You Last, directed by Joe Mantello, is a vivid portrait of a larger-than-life Hollywood character, performed with a verve and energy that capture us from start to finish. Midler is a great actress, with a sense of timing and nuance stirred into a very large characterization that can remain subtle and broad at the same time.

Uptown Players, Dallas' premier gay-themed theater company, presents writer Jamie Morris' re-imagined parody of the popular 1986-93 TV sitcom, “Designing Women.” The original starred the late Dixie Carter as haughty, sensible, Julia Sugarbaker who, with her ex-beauty-queen sister, Suzanne (Delta Burke), operated an interior design firm, Sugarbakers, from their living room in Atlanta.

The only way to enjoy Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep is to completely surrender to its insane charm. If this play can’t be called “the kitchen sink,” then no theatrical endeavor could claim it. Irma Vepcontains almost everything imaginable: from aristocrats to servants, mummies, vampires, werewolves, scientists, Egyptian guides and all sorts of wives, both living and dead. Added to this lunacy, the play’s pacing is so fast that the audience’s multiple waves of laughter threaten to drown out some of the funnier bits of dialogue.

Lyle Kessler’s Orphansis a surreal nightmare about two brothers — orphans. One (Tom Sturridge) is a severely retarded man whose manner of speaking presents an IQ of about 58, and the physicality of a chimpanzee who bounds around the set, jumping from railing to window ledge to couch. The other brother, Ben Foster, a criminal, brings home a drunk, Alec Baldwin, another orphan, planning to rob him. Unfortunately, Foster speaks so rapidly that much of what he says is lost or obfuscated. My companion and I (neither of us with much hearing loss) kept wondering what was going on.

Congratulations to Jessie Eisenberg: the kid is workin’. Somehow he got Vanessa Redgrave to co-star with him in his play, The Revisionist,about a young man who visits his old Polish cousin, a holocaust survivor. Redgrave gives a strong, moving, many-layered performance. In giving us a rapid-fire nervous portrayal of a writer under pressure, Eisenberg’s snappy delivery obscures some of his words. Daniel Oreskes is fine as a handy handyman.

The rendition of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderellanow running on Broadway is a great show with fun tangents to the original story by book writer Douglas Cater Beane and spectacular, imaginative, active sets by Anna Louizos. It’s beautifully lighted by Kenneth Posner and offers wild splashes of costume by William Ivey Long.

Nothing says “spring in Milwaukee” more than the “Jeeves” series by playwright Margaret Raether, based on the writings of PG Wodehouse. The latest effort, Jeeves in Bloom, follows on the heels of a successful 2010 run of Jeeves Intervenes.Both productions are by Milwaukee Chamber Theater.

It’s the question heard over and over again whenever modern Broadway musicals are discussed: What do the critics have against Frank Wildhorn? Does their aversion stem from his leaping out of pop/country music directly onto Broadway, instead of toiling away at some musical-theater workshop or drama school? Is it because he has endured a string of flops yet has little trouble bringing projects to New York, whereas, for the past two decades, some of Broadway’s most legendary talents had to settle for revivals because their new material couldn’t scare up enough investors?

Based on a true story of “Siamese” twins who achieved show biz and then film fame in the ‘1930s, “Side Show” questions whether such “freaks” can ever be, as they sing, “Like Everyone Else.” Or is their destiny to be objects to see but not emotionally touch, as their cohorts urge the audience, to “Come Look at the Freaks”?

“You can’t have it all,” mourns a new mother in Lisa Loomer’s thought-provoking comedy, Living Out. The show, which premiered in 2003 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, recently made its Wisconsin debut at Milwaukee’s Boulevard Theater. In essence, Living Outis an exploration of modern women who are confronted by the conflicting demands of careers and motherhood.

There’s a lot of dazzle and little in the way of character development in Catch Me If You Can, which recently toured in Milwaukee. Based on the 2002 Dreamworks film and the true story that inspired it, Catch Mechronicles the rise and fall of con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr. Remarkably, Abagnale was able to pass himself off as a pilot, doctor and lawyer before being caught by the FBI. All this happened before Abagnale was 21. By then, he had cashed nearly $2 million in counterfeit checks.

Young men in torment over their sexual persuasion is the theme of Slipping, the contemporary drama by Daniel Talbott now in its L.A. premiere at the Lillian Theater. Talbott is a New York-based playwright who serves as literary manager of the Rattlestick Theater, the producing body behind Slipping, a play that has been mounted previously in Chicago and New York.

It’s magical, it’s musical, it’s Matilda, a precocious-plus little girl, disdained by her parents and tortured by her headmistress. Dennis Kelly’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s (“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”) popular 1988 novel for children captivates Broadway audiences in a Royal Shakespeare Company production just as it has thrilled London theater-goers. The 2012-2013 musical theater season is finally percolating.

When the great California Gold Rush was announced in 1849, and single Chinese men began crossing the Pacific to The Golden Mountain—which was their generic name for the gold fields — an immigration pattern was established. In hopes of making a pile and returning to China as rich men, they endured all kinds of hardships and frequent insults from the hated white devils who let them do their laundry.