Chapter Two
Legler Benbough Theater

 Faye Medwick (Michelle DeFrancesco) is married and in search of an affair. Leo Schneider (Sven Salumaa) is a player and will play any woman that comes near him. Jennie Malone (Amy Fritsche) finally has gotten a divorce and has absolutely no interest in men. George Schneider (Howard Bickle, Jr.) recently lost his wife and is still in mourning. What do these four people have in common?

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo
Kirk Douglas Theater

The USA's misadventures in Viet Nam were captured in memorable theatrical fashion by David Rabe's trilogy and John DiFusco's Tracers. Now, the Iraqi War has spawned a play to match those important, ground-breaking works -- Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, by Rajiv Joseph. Set in 2003, the play centers on two young American marines, Tom (Glen Davis) and Kev (Brad Fleischer), who have been assigned to guard duty at the Baghdad Zoo, which has been bombed by the U.S. army as part of its "shock and awe" tactics in Iraq.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Dumb Show
Nova Southeastern University - Mailman Hollywood Center Auditorium

 The Promethean Theater's production of Joe Penhall's "Dumb Show" impresses even before it begins, and it doesn't let up through its two acts of silliness, satire and squirm-inducing drama involving celebrities and Britain's tabloid newspapers.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Old Wicked Songs
North Coast Repertory Theater

 Seldom does a play actually move an audience; most are stories we soon forget about people who will be remembered for a day or two. That is far from the case with Jon Marans' Old Wicked Songs.

The action takes place over several months in 1986. Young American pianist Stephen Hoffman (Tom Zohar) has developed a very serious artistic block. He has traveled to Vienna and is under the tutelage of renowned Professor Josef Mashkan (Robert Grossman). Director David Ellenstein cast an ideal contrast.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Pull of Negative Gravity, The
American Heritage Center for the Arts

 It would be difficult to find a cast more committed to a play than the four people performing The Pull of Negative Gravity at Mosaic Theater, and it would probably be as difficult to find staging so ably in support of a work. So it's disheartening that the play itself isn't more committed to its heartfelt, angry task of exploring the damage wrought on the body of a soldier wounded in Iraq in the present conflict and to his family's emotional equilibrium upon his return to Wales.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
May 2005
Fences
Geva Theater - Mainstage

 I don't know why August Wilson specialist Stephen McKinley Henderson, who was announced to direct this production, didn't; but, though he might have achieved a slightly more elegant subtlety [like his authoritative acting in Wilson's plays], I doubt he would have significantly improved Geva Theater artistic director Mark Cuddy's work on this beautiful revival of Fences. It is a landmark achievement for Cuddy and for his theater.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Tonight at 8:30: Brief Encounters
Shaw Festival - Festival Theater

 Ontario's great Shaw Festival's opening week of five productions began disappointingly but fortunately finished with two memorably fine revivals of modern classics, both new to Shawfest: a rewarding matinee of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon For the Misbegotten and a delicious new staging that evening of Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Moon for the Misbegotten, A
Shaw Festival - Court House Theater

 It's hard to imagine why the Broadway premiere of this searing, beautiful play was received with such indifference. Its first production in 1947 was a disaster for many reasons and withdrawn from a planned Broadway debut; but the apparently fine 1957 revival with the splendid cast of Wendy Hiller, Cyril Cusack and Franchot Tone left few O'Neill admirers convinced that this was one of his best plays, and it ran for only 68 performances. Not until the legendary 1973 Broadway revival directed by Jose Quintero and starring Colleen Dewhurst, Jason Robards Jr.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Nights of Noir
Attic Theater & Film Center

Somebody forgot to tell writer/director Kasey Wilson that satires of 40s private-eye movies aren't exactly hot ideas today, although it's possible that a comic sketch along those lines might have seemed briefly fresh and funny. Wilson, though, opted to make a full evening out of her parodies of films like "The Big Sleep" and "The Maltese Falcon." Big mistake.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Born Yesterday
Shaw Festival - Festival Theater

Rumor has it that Garson Kanin got gag-writing suggestions from George S. Kaufman for Born Yesterday. In any case, the comedy, Kanin's most successful, has become a recognized classic, fairly crackling with witticisms and endlessly timely in its political satire. Its only problem is the popularity of the 1950 film which preserves Judy Holliday's incomparable, award-winning performance as Billie Dawn: inevitably, actresses following her in the role get compared to Holliday as often as actors playing the King in The King and I are compared to Yul Brynner.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Sunday in the Park With George
Shaw Festival - Royal George Theatre

 
I am not one of this Pulitzer Prize-winning musical's many admirers. I like its ideas and was knocked out by the Act One curtain tableau (on Broadway) which reproduces George Seurat's famous painting, "A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte."

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Baby with the Bathwater
North Park Vaudeville

 When one decides to see a play written by Christopher Durang, one must be prepared to be challenged. In Baby With The Bathwater all forms of logic must be suspended. You simply sit back to be bemused as the playwright twists and turns farce, satire and wackiness in a strange tale.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Marvelous Party, A
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

 Punctuating Noel Coward's witty songs, lyrics, aphorisms, chatter with both sonorous sophistication and often high pacing, A Marvelous Party nonetheless comes up short of the talent it celebrates.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Four Dogs and a Bone
New Village Arts Theater

 Two actresses, claws full extended. One sleazy film producer and a tyro playwright who just want to get a film completed... just another day in a not-to-far-from-reality satirical look Hollywood. Prolific playwright John Patrick Shanley (Sailor's Song, Doubt, Psychophathia Sexualis, and many more) has an intimate knowledge of Hollywood. His hilarious Four Dogs and a Bone, currently at New Village Arts in Carlsbad, severely slashes at stereotypical Hollywood characters.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Souvenir
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

 I laughed 'til I cried.

Souvenir prompts both reactions because, though its self-deceived coloratura heroine gives unbelievably bad vocal performances (except "in her head"), her pianist accompanies her to a relationship that's mind-changing and heartfelt.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Bad Night in a Men's Room Off Sunset Boulevard
Compass Theater

 We all make mistakes. Most are inconsequential and private. Some, however, are life changing; especially in 1982. In the case of Michael (Douglas Myers), an indiscretion in a gay restroom ends his budding film career and makes him question his sexuality. Thus begins Ira Bateman-Gold's Bad Night in a Men's Room Off Sunset Boulevard, currently running at Compass Theater.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Festival, The
Swedenborg Hall

 H. P. Lovecraft's The Festival is an experience. House lights dim, both the house and stage are bathed in black light when we hear Walter Ritter's deep voice echoing in Swedenborg Hall with, "I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me."

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Lonesome West, The
10th Avenue Theater

 As I climbed the stairs to my seat at the 10th Avenue Theater, I saw the audience and wanted to shout for joy; I was the oldest by a couple of generations. There were senior high school and university students. San Diego, there may be hope for theater after all.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Cygnet Theater

 Six years ago, Cygnet Theater opened its doors to the public for the first time. It is fitting that the first show, a glam-rock musical titled Hedwig and the Angry Inch should be the last show at Cygnet's Rolando stage. We had been to the space many times when it was called the Actor's Asylum. It was also the theater where I saw Fridays with Maureen, the work of another reviewer, Cuauhtémoc Quetzalcoatl Kish. Ah the memories of the plays presented in the space.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Importance of Being Earnest, The
Stratford Festival - Avon Theater

 Internationally acknowledged as a master of Comedy of Manners, both as actor and director, Brian Bedford unsurprisingly gives us a classic, landmark revival of Oscar Wilde's masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest. Bedford's directorial hand is evident in the elegance and wit of this exquisitely designed production, not least in his actors' perfect delivery of the dialogue, which – although familiar to most of us and easily the most clever use of language in English drama – here makes us attend to every speech and delight in it as if only now encountering it.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Butcher of Baraboo, The
Diversionary Theater

If at all possible never, never accept an invitation to visit Valerie (Linda Libby), the town butcher, or her daughter Midge (Wendy Waddell), the local pharmacist. Their kitchen's crowded countertop features a full knife block and an extremely menacing meat cleaver. Valerie seems to fondle the cleaver with way too much tender loving care. Note, too, that there may or may not have been several murders, suicides, or runaways in recent history.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
New Perspective Festival
Swedenborg Hall

 The New Perspective Festival returns with 24 new short plays by 17 San Diego Playwrights performed by about 60 actors under 21 directors. The principals behind the festival are Festival Director Kelly Lapczynski, Tech Director Marie Miller, Company Stage Manager Lizzie Silverman, and Publicity Coordinator Sally S. Stockton. My regret is that because of scheduling conflicts, I'll only see one night of eight plays, sadly missing sixteen others.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Night Sky
Baruch Performing Arts Center - Rose Nagelberg Theater

 Night Sky, a play by Susan Yankowitz, tells of an intellectual woman whose life comes to a crashing divergence with the onset of aphasia as a result of an accident. While the process the woman, brilliantly played by Jordan Baker, goes through is academically interesting, the writing is, in a way, naïve in terms of theater. There is quite ordinary familial interaction both before and after the accident as the main character goes through the slow, painful process of rehab.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Coming Home
Fountain Theater

 The Fountain Theater has done well with South African playwright Athol Fugard's previous plays, but it stumbles badly with his latest, Coming Home, which is now in a West-Coast premiere run. The problem, though, is with the play, not the production.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Chorus Line, A
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

"And a five, six, seven, eight -- " with those words, another performance of A Chorus Line kicks off, and the audience is transported to the strange world of musical dancers. Ironically, this musical about chorus "boys" and "girls" has given jobs to hundreds of real-life dancers/actors over the years. The original production ran for years, just as the revival did. And, as predicted in the musical's storyline, some members of the original cast have become well-known names in musical theater, while others disappeared from show business.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Over the Tavern
North Coast Repertory Theater

 I laughed so hard tears rolled down my cheeks, and that was just the first ten minutes of North Coast Rep's San Diego premiere of Tom Dudzick's Over the Tavern.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Macbeth
Stratford Festival - Festival Theater

 Oddly enough, the only production Des McAnuff had directed at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival before becoming its artistic director in 2008 was a not-well-received Macbeth in 1983.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Three Sisters
stratford Festival - Tom Patterson Theater

 It's difficult to stage Chekhov. His plays are exquisitely detailed and rich in poetic realism so that what he called comedy can be played [and famously has been played] as tragedy, and his subtly developed characters are beloved challenges for actors, who are seldom wholly successful playing them. Chekhov is regularly prescribed in culturally elevating, if not curative, doses, but even a great play this comic, tragic and beautiful is more often a leaden, and sometimes soporific, theatergoing experience than a triumphant one.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Beauty Queen of Leenane, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

 Thank the Banyan for the cool theater and gripping drama that provide relief from Sarasota's summer heat outside and claustrophobic air of the bleak Connemara cottage recreated inside. Dimly lit, with living room-kitchen cabinets and walls turned a tint like bile, Jeffrey Dean's meticulous set holds props that act as spokes on a wheel. At its command center of table and rocker reigns lumpy, squinting, gray Mag Folan (Kim Crow), continually at war with daughter Maureen (Jessica K. Peterson).

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Hair

 It would be impossible for any recording to fully capture the thrill of experiencing the revival of the seminal Gerome Ragni-James Rado-Galt MacDermot rock musical, Hair at the Al Hirschfeld Theater, but Ghostlight Records' cast album comes very close. This is one of those cases in which it might have been interesting to record the show live in performance, but of course, that method entails tremendous challenges.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
July 2009
West Side Story

 
The cast album for West Side Story is emblematic of what's wrong with the current revival of this musical theater masterpiece. It starts off on a bad note with a sluggish, slack reading of the prologue by music director/conductor Patrick Vaccariello -- but not as sluggish and slack as "The Rumble" that ends Act I. There are plenty of other blunders throughout, such as the ludicrous "soprano sing-off" in "I Feel Pretty," one of the songs that have unwisely been translated into Spanish for this production.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
July 2009
Rock of Ages

 When the London cast recording of Mamma Mia! was released, I predicted that it probably wouldn't sell all that well. After all, I thought, even if multitudes of people loved the show, why would they want an album packed with ABBA covers that were crafted to sound as close to the originals as possible when they could buy the ABBA Gold collection and have the real thing instead?

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
July 2009
Next to Normal

The sad word on that street is that 2009 Tony Award winner Alice Ripley has been having trouble getting through eight a week of Next to Normal at the Booth Theater, her voice apparently having been compromised by her no-holds-barred performance and, in my analysis, by flawed technique. (Ripley sang consistently flat during the performance I attended, and she yielded the role of bipolar wife and mom Diana to her understudy for the show's first performance after the Tonys.)

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
July 2009
Allegro

 This is something of a miracle: A complete, two-disc, state-of-the-art, all-star studio recording of a lesser-known show by the greatest musical theater writing team of the 20th century, a show that was previously (mis)represented only by the severely truncated, monophonic original Broadway cast album.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
July 2009
Les Miserables

 The recent, belated release of a CD of highlights from the original London cast album of Les Misérables gives me an excuse to rant about something I noticed a while ago: Cameron Mackintosh, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and other movers and shapers behind Brit musicals and cast albums apparently have so little respect for performers that they sometimes exclude their names from CD covers.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
July 2009
Farragut North
Geffen Playhouse

 It's not a pretty picture, the making of politics. Beau Willimon, who was a campaign aide to Sen. Charles E. Schumer and former Vermont governor Howard Dean before becoming a playwright, has tapped into his past to fashion a drama, Farragut North, which exposes just how awful our political system is.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
West Side Story
Stratford Festival - Festival Theater

 After the tumultuous response at the end of the opening performance of this production, I was thinking fussily of my reservations about the chorus and orchestra sounding less impressive than in the 1999 West Side Story under the previous musical director and this Tony's unfortunate tendency to sing like an American Idol contestant and other small gripes. Then I saw the granddaughter of a friend, who is a Canadian theater critic, and she brought me back to my senses.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Ever Yours, Oscar
Tom Patterson Theater

 Unsurprisingly, Oscar Wilde was a great letter writer, and this selection from his earliest to his final letters presents an impressive biography of an extraordinary person and a gigantic talent. It is arranged to expose the private as well as the famous public Oscar Wilde and develops from his beyond-precocious early ideas and wit through his great fame and celebrity to his chastened, unhappy, but movingly humane final thoughts during and after his brutal imprisonment.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Free Gift
Community Actors Theater

 Israel Horovitz's Free Gift is a sweet, tender play. Yes, I wrote "sweet."

Roselle (Kathryn Kelly), a white English woman, found a baby in a box on her doorstep 15 years ago. It was Heather's (LaNae DePriest) baby. Heather, a black girl, had just turned 15 years old. After years of legal machinations, Roselle and her husband legally adopted the child, which they named Max (Ty'Reek Hill). Subsequently, her husband died leaving her a single mom.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2009
Shirley Valentine
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz Theater

 When Kate Alexander directed Susan Greenhill last season as the frumpy conservative Haddie in "...And L.A. is Burning," I wrote that the two were becoming a first-class FST team, bringing out what's deeper in women characters than seen on the surface. With Shirley Valentine, the team scores again, sending an empty-nest wife, too long bound to routine and house like a prisoner in limbo, on a voyage of self-rediscovery.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2009

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