Ugly Lies the Bone
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne's Lab

Jess almost seems to find coming home to Space Station territory as difficult as grappling with burned disfigurement, weak limbs, and little of once-glowing hair from combat in Afghanistan. Nothing and no-one are the same as they used to be. Especially Jess, who’s bitterly embarking on a novel virtual-reality therapy to rid herself of pain and problems at home, both past and present in Ugly Lies the Bone.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2024
Inherit the Wind
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Asolo

A play based on the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial”, centered on whether Evolution is a fact to be taught or held as anti-religion untruth, Inherit the Wind has not lost its dramatic currency.  As Asolo Rep’s season opener directed by lover-of-musicals Peter Rothstein, it also takes place in an atmosphere of sacred music, not unconfined to questioning what is or is not profane.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2024
Night of the Iguana, The
Pershing Square Signature Center

The revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana from La Femme Productions at the Pershing Square Signature Center sounded so promising (Note: this is not a Signature Theater production).

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
January 2024
All the Devils are Here
DR2 Theater

During the holiday theater lull, I caught up with Patrick Page’s brilliant solo show All The Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Created the Villain at the tiny DR2 Theater. In a dazzling 70 minutes, this dark-voiced thespian explores the Bard’s development of his sinister characters, making them multidimensional.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
January 2024
Prayer for the French Republic
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

In the two years since it premiered at Manhattan Theater Club’s City Center stage Off-Broadway in 2022, Joshua Harmon’s moving, funny and challenging play Prayer for the French Republic has become even more relevant and immediate. Now on Broadway at MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Harmon’s multigenerational tale of a French Jewish family confronting endless anti-Semitism is a harsh and difficult reminder of the perilous times we live in.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
January 2024
Last Five Years, The
Greendale High School Auditorim

The leafy Milwaukee suburb of Greendale contains one of the area’s most intriguing community theaters, in terms of the productions it stages. For its winter season, Greendale Community Theatre is reviving Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, which it first produced in 2006 under the moniker, All-In Productions.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2024
Becoming Chavela
Theater for the New City

Becoming Chavela, written by Stephanie Trudeau and directed by Joyce Callo, is a true story of a Costa Rican lesbian singer by way of Mexico, as told by a Puerto Rican woman. It’s bout Chavela Vargas, a renowned singer of Mexican ranchera songs, and was performed worldwide as a cabaret show to enthusiastic responses.

Scotty Bennett
Date Reviewed:
December 2023
Manahatta
Public Theater - Anspacher Theater

Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Manahatta at the Public Theater somewhat jarringly juxtaposes a contemporary story against an historic one. The flimsy plot draws parallels between the 2007-08 subprime mortgage crisis and the Dutch colonists’ takeover of what becomes Manhattan Island in the early 17th century. In the modern story, ambitious Jane Snake becomes the first Native American to work on Wall Street, selling derivative mortgages.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2023
Gardens of Anuncia, The
Lincoln Center Theater

Michael-John LaChiusa’s musical The Gardens of Anuncia at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater, is a gentle, fragmented memory piece inspired by the childhood and early adult years of choreographer-director Graciela Daniele. The 90-minute piece is a sweetly nostalgic ramble with no clear plot or driving storyline.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2023
Appropriate
Helen Hayes Theater

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate premiered at the Actors Theater of Louisville in 2013 and subsequently opened Off-Broadway at the Signature Theater Center in 2014, winning an Obie Award. Now this explosive play is making its Broadway debut in a searing, dangerous, and hysterically funny production by director Lila Neugebauer from Second Stage Theater at the Helen Hayes. In the years since its regional and Off-Broadway runs, it’s become even more relevant and hot.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2023
Hell's Kitchen
Public Theater - Newman Theater

While Stephen Sondheim and David Ives’s musical Here We Are aims at the lofty goal of questioning the nature of human existence,  Hell’s Kitchen at the Public Theater has a lower target of telling a familiar story of teen self-discovery — but it hits a bull’s eye. Pop songwriter-singer Alicia Keys has taken several of her hits songs, written some new ones, and along with book-writer Krisoffer Diaz, has woven pieces of her own past growing up in the titular Manhattan neighborhood into an entertaining, colorful, but not-too-unusual tapestry.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2023
Here We Are
The Shed - Griffin Theater

It should come as no surprise that Here We Are, the final effort by Stephen Sondheim, is unlike any other work from the late master of the American musical theater. Never content to examine the same subject matter or to repeat his style, each of the masterpieces and near-misses in Sondheim’s canon are unique, save for the brilliance and daring they all share. Sweeney Todd is nothing like Company. Follies does not resemble  Assassins. Pacific Overtures is not a mate to Sunday in the Park with George.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2023
I Can Get it for You Wholesale
Classic Stage Company

I Can Get It for You Wholesale is not based on real events, but the Classic Stage Company revival of the 1962 rarely-seen curio does explore jarring issues of anti-semitism while providing a taste of mid-20th century entertainment, Broadway style.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2023
Buena Vista Social Club
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

Buena Vista Social Club was the subject of Wim Wenders’s 1999 Oscar-nominated documentary which spotlights the making of the titular album and a legendary Carnegie Hall concert celebrating the musicians of pre-revolutionary Cuba. Like the current musical How to Dance in Ohio, which is also based on a documentary, the new stage musical version of Social Club emphasizes soap-opera-ish aspects of the story.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2023
How to Dance in Ohio
Belasco Theater

In the 2015 HBO documentary “How to Dance in Ohio,” filmmaker Alexandra Shiva focuses on three young autistic women and their struggles with social skills and entering the adult world independent of their families. In Rebekah Greer Melock’s book for the musical version, now on Broadway at the Belasco Theater, the scope is expanded to seven protagonists. The engine of the plot remains preparation for a prom-like event. That is the most moving element of the show as the participants learn to cope with their anxieties and the challenges of interacting with others.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2023
Pictures from Home
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

Presenting memories of a family dramatically through photos and and narrative, Pictures from Home basically stages both as created and remembered by Larry Sultan. HIs father Irving and mother Jean are the stars, along with the son. Scenes show them interacting in Larry’s decade of visits from the late 1980s. It was to the San Francisco Valley home where he grew up but where memories of earlier family places and conditions remained vivid.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2023
Joyful! Joyful!
Westcoast Black Theater Troupe - Donnelly Theater

Joyful! Joyful!, this year’s holiday offering by Westcoast Black Theater Troupe, lives up to its name in every way. Nate Jacobs, WBTT founder, producing artistic director, and show director, has delivered a high-energy musical revue, showcasing superb performances by the company’s troupe, whose talent the company develops and nurtures. All cast members are WBTT veterans except one, who brings his own strong credentials. Although the actors are listed in the program as “Ensemble,” each could be a featured performer.

Jo Morello
Date Reviewed:
December 2023
Stereophonic
Playwrights Horizons

If the Vineyard Theater’s current Scene Partners is the fever dream of a movie fan desperate for acceptance and fulfillment, Stereophonic, at Playwrights Horizons, is a brutal reality check and harsh reminder of the cost of fame.

Scene Partners
Vineyard Theatr

As he did in his previous work Wet Brain, which ran at Playwrights last summer, John Caswell mixes a believable situation with the fantasies of his characters to create a weird, dream-like world in Scene Partners. Wet Brain had a family dealing with the father’s alcoholism and descent into madness fused with allusions to sci-fi and outer-space aliens.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2023
Harmony
Ethel Barrymore Theater

Harmony, the long-gestating musical about the Comedian Harmonists, a real-life singing group in 1920s and ’30s Germany, whose careers and lives were destroyed by Hitler’s anti-semitic policies, has its heart in the right place, but hits a few discordant notes along with melodious ones.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2023
Spamalot
St. James THeater

The new production of Spamalot, the 2005 spoof “lovingly rippped off” from the classic Python parody of the Arthurian legend, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” is riotously funny. Directed and choreographed with guffaw-inducing abandon by Josh Rhodes and first seen at Washington’s Kennedy Center, maintains the outrageous irreverence of the group’s original TV series and films as a cast of expert zanies reenacts the familiar bits from the film and expanded musical sequences.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2023
School of Rock
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

Don’t be late for this class: the School of Rock is astonishing audiences at Milwaukee’s Skylight Music Theater. Based on the successful 2003 film, School of Rock was prime material to be produced on stage. No less a composer than Andrew Lloyd Webber bought the rights to School of Rock and launched his own Broadway outing of Rock in 2015.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2023
Crazy for You
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

The title of the new season’s show at Asolo Rep may be the same as earlier versions of it, but this “Crazy for You” isn’t just equal. It’s hard to imagine a better one, especially scenically and as a musical highlighting dancing. Still the script’s been updated, mainly in style, from the one that took Broadway honors (itself an adaptation of a 1930 musical and other shows) in 1992. Result: an excellent contemporary take on a ‘30s romantic classic story.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2023
Little Shop of Horrors
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

It’s not surprising that to open its 50th anniversary, Florida Studio  Theater would stage an amazingly popular rock satirical musical that premiered 1982. It was based loosely on a 1960 film that satirized horror dramas, urban plight concerns, and efforts to powerfully and financially dominate the world.  At FST, Sean Daniels has directed the drama to be more realistic without losing any of the satirical humor.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2023
Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley
Acacia at Norvill Commons

This year, Scrooge isn’t the only show in town this holiday season. In addition to the perennial A Christmas Carol soon to be playing downtown at the Victorian-themed Pabst Theater, there’s another play from merry Old England that is sure to capture hearts everywhere.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2023
Poor Yella Rednecks
City Center - Stage 1

Comic books, kung fu movies, ’80s TV shows and pop music all collide with hilarious and touching results in Qui Nguyen’s raucously funny and extremely moving Poor Yella Rednecks at Manhattan Theater Club’s Off-Broadway City Center space. A sequel to his autobiographical Viet Gone (presented by MTC in 2016), Rednecks chronicles the rocky and jagged road his family trod as they immigrated from South Vietnam after the fall of Saigon to the tiny, ironically named town of El Dorado, Arkansas.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2023
Sabbath's Theater
Pershing Square Signature Center

Two shows opening on the same night, one on Broadway, the other off, have many surface resemblances. Both sport a cast of three, run a little over 90 minutes with no intermission and focus on a late-middle-aged male protagonist facing serious issues of mortality and the quality of his relationships.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2023
I Need That
American Airlines THeater

Like Sabbath’s Theater, which opened off-Broadway on the very same night, Broadway’s I Need That sports a cast of three, runs a little over 90 minutes with no intermission and focuses on a late-middle-aged male protagonist facing serious issues of mortality and the quality of his relationships. Dig a little deeper, though, and the two are worlds apart.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2023
Three Sisters, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Asolo

Put together author Anton Chekhov, superb American translator Paul Schmidt who makes Chekhov easy to listen to and understand, and director Andrei Malaev-Babel, who’s an ace at interpreting Russian drama, directing and at teaching the Demidov method of acting. Result: The Three Sisters is a rare treat in performance by students of  Asolo/Florida State University’s Conservatory for Actor Training with some alums, faculty, and acclaimed local actors as guests.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2023
Refuge Plays, The
Laura Pels Theater

In the first act of The Refuge Plays, Nathan Alan Davis’s massive family saga, the elderly matriarch Early (the magnificent Nicole Ari Parker) advises her great-grandson Ha-Ha (yes, that’s his name, played with sweet innocence by JJ Wynder) to read and re-read Ralph Ellison’s classic novel of African-American alienation, “Invisible Man.” She tells Ha-Ha that Ellison writes in code and you have to experience the book many times to crack the code and find the author’s meaning.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2023
Aladdin
Marcus Performing Arts Center

Showman P.T. Barnum may have declared that his circus was the “greatest show on Earth,” but as far as musicals go, Disney’s ‘Aladdin’ may be the greatest musical to hit Milwaukee in a long time. The national touring production of this well-known show is currently playing through Sunday.

The show is a huge, well-organized musical machine, filled with Middle East flavor and paying homage to the 1992 animated film on which it is based. It’s not the only musical currently playing in town, but it’s certainly got the largest budget.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2023
Once on this Island
West Coast Black Theater Troupe

A folktale told to TiMoune, a little Caribbean girl, Once on This Island becomes her story as a young girl who saves the life of a mixed-race nobleman hurt in a storm. Having fallen in love with him, she leaves the parents who adopted her and seeks him in his palace. Goddesses of the elements will go to watch over her in her quest of marriage, but there’ll be conflict not only with social and racial mores but also with opposing devilish-God. Besides, the prince’s choice may already been determined.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2023
Gutenberg! The Musical
James Earl Jones Theater

Gutenberg! The Musical! is as sweet, light and fun as a big chocolate-chip cookie—and about as nourishing. But that’s okay. This fluffy, insider meta-musical for those who love musicals is nothing more than a diversion, mildly tweaking the conventions of Broadway and ribbing those who are obsessed with them.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2023
Laughs in Spanish
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

In a bilingual twist on mother-daughter relations, Laughs in Spanish attempts to keep the comic vibe flowing in all but a few of the play’s more thoughtful moments. The play, which opens Milwaukee Chamber’s 49th season, is extremely successful in keeping things light while also tackling some more serious subjects.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2023
Splash Hatch on the E Going Down
Next Act Theater

Milwaukee’s Next Act Theater opens its fall season with a sizzling urban drama, Splash Hatch on the E Going Down by Kia Corthron. This Wisconsin premiere is a not-to-be-missed highlight of Milwaukee’s current crop of plays. Corthron’s story focuses on the intimate tale of a young woman who faces both ends of the life spectrum, birth and death. Simultaneously, the 1997 play explores broader social issues in regards to race, poverty and environmental awareness.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2023
Copenhagen
Unicorn Theater

Michael Frayn’s heady and intense Copenhagen, at Berkshire Theater Group, asks what if Adolph Hitler, had atomic bombs in his arsenal? The answer to that question lay with Nobel Laureate, Werner Heisenberg (Harry Smith), who headed the potential nuclear program for Nazi Germany. Kept on a short leash by the Gestapo, he went to great effort to deliver a paper in occupied Copenhagen.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
October 2023
English
Barrington Stage

The play English, by Iranian-American playwright Sanaz Toossi, was selected by freshman artistic director, Alan Paul, well before it won the Pulitzer Prize in May. Because the original actress was unavailable she has stepped in to portray Elham. Thereby, the Barrington Stage production, directed by Knud Adams, is a double triumph. The play is complex, topical and timely while her acting proves to be utterly charming.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
October 2023
Melissa Etheridge: My Window
Circle in the Square

Melissa Etheridge was the rock queen of longing in 1980s and ’90s with soulful yearning ballads like “I’m the Only One” and “Come to My Window.” Her sandpaper voice caressed her lyrics producing a tender ache. In addition to her chart-topping music career, she has become an activist for climate change and LGBTQ rights, a breast cancer survivor, and supporter of research to end opioid abuse.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2023
Jaja's African Hair Braiding
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

The workplace play is a tried and true template affording opportunities for dramatic conflict and comic interplay among staff and customers in a single setting. The formula has accommodated such diverse works as A Memory of Two Mondays, Superior Donuts, Glengarry Glen Ross, Skeleton Crew, Tabletop, Jitney, Steel Magnolias, Seared, and  Clyde’s. The “Barber Shop” film franchise is another example.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
October 2023
Parental Advisory: a breakbeat play
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stiemke Studio

In honor of hip hop’s 50th anniversary, Milwaukee Repertory Theater presents Parental Advisory, a breakbeat play. The Rep’s intimate Stiemke Studio stage has been turned into a recording studio for the show, with theater patrons representing a sort-of concert audience.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2023

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