Spring Awakening
Ruth Page Arts Center

As long ago as 1891, playwright Frank Wedekind apprised us of the destruction engendered by denying children sex education—not metaphorical tales of storks and angels, but blueprint-explicit depictions of human reproduction and the biological, behavioral, psychological, and social applications associated therewith that continue to exercise intractable power over youths whose pubescent bodies betray even those lucky enough to have free access to doctor dad's medical books.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2022
Minutes, The
Studio 54

It's a rare treat to get to see so many fine actors together on the stage. Tracy Letts has written The Minutes, a rather disturbing drama which, at times, is downright funny. Letts appears as Mayor Superba, who is chairing a meeting of the local school board.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
May 2022
Tootsie
Dolby Theater

The musical Tootsie comes to the Dolby Theater after enjoying successful and prize-winning runs in Chicago and New York. Based on the 1982 film directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Dustin Hoffman, it once again tells the story of a frustrated  New York actor who dresses as a woman in order to find professional work, only to learn he’s a better person female than he ever was male.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Hadestown
Ahmanson Theater

Hadestown is a musical that lives up to its hype. After sold-out runs—and numerous awards—in London and New York, Hadestown comes to L.A. (and Costa Mesa later) in a snazzy, brash production that casts a hypnotic spell.

The creative genius behind the show, Anais Mitchell, has written a wall-to-wall musical score in which all dialogue is sung, not spoken. Her jazzy songs are delivered by an 18-person cast that also dances spiritedly and pulsatingly (as choreographed by David Neuman) in non-stop fashion.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Middle Passage
Lifeline Theater

Passengers traveling on ocean vessels are, literally, unmoored, rendered utterly bereft of any fixed point by which to orient themselves (unlike the illusion of equilibrium an airplane's floor offers). When every perception, waking or sleeping, becomes unfamiliar and, therefore, fraught with possibility, those struggling for a foothold in the nebula of nature's uncertainty can come to accept phenomena unimaginable on land—an ancient tribe of African sorcerers, for example, or a mysterious deity capable of blasting the senses of mortals.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Harmony
Museum of Jewish Heritage

Harmony, the long-gestating musical about the Comedian Harmonists, a real-life German singing group destroyed by the Nazis, isn’t exactly harmonious. There are several revelatory moments when Warren Carlyle’s inventive staging combines with the clever, moving score by pop icon Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman to create new reactions to the oft-told tale of genocidal horror. But there are also overbaked melodramatic turns. Fortunately, the startling and innovative outweighs the cliched in this tuneful and harrowing musical.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
To My Girls
Tony Kiser Theater

Second Stage is currently offering a fascinating dual perspective on the gay experience in America. Broadway has a powerful revival of Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out, while off-Broadway, at the Tony Kiser Theater, a totally different view of the gay scene is presented with J.C. Lee’s To My Girls, a comedy about a group of friends sharing a Palms Springs AirBnB after the devastating COVID crisis and sexual betrayal. The former play is a complex chronicle of our attitude towards gayness, sports, masculinity, and even religion.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Take Me Out
Hayes Theater

Second Stage is currently offering a fascinating dual perspective on the gay experience in America. Off-Broadway, To My Girls is a silly sitcom of trivia stereotypes, but on Broadway, at the the company’s Hayes Theater, there is a powerful revival of Richard Greenberg’s 2002 Take Me Out, which focuses on a major league baseball player coming out of the closet. It’s a complex complex chronicle of our attitude towards gayness, sports, masculinity, and even religion.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Mrs. Doubtfire
Stephen Sondheim Theater

I have a confession to make. I liked Mrs. Doubtfire a lot, but Daniel Hillard, not at all. It just isn't funny to see a grown man with three kids, and a marriage going down the tubes, act like an idiot, and then not understand why the judge doesn't see him as a fit father. That Rob McClure brings both these characters to life so capably says everything good about his acting ability.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Birthday Candles
American Airlines Theater

Noah Haidle’s new play Birthday Candles (Roundabout Theater Company at the American Airlines) feels like its been on the bakery shelf a bit too long. Starring Debra Messing of “Will and Grace” fame as an everywoman housewife-mother-dessert entrepreneur named Ernestine, this Thornton Wilder-lite diversion crams 90 years of living into 95 minutes with very little insight or depth.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
For colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf
Booth Theater

 In this theater season when African-American women playwrights such as Lynn Nottage, Dominique Morriseau, Antoinette Chinoye Nwandu, and the late Alice Childress are receiving major productions of their work, it’s appropriate that we are also seeing the first Broadway revival of Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. First produced in a women’s bar near Berkeley, California, then Off-Broadway at the New Federal Theater and the Public, and on Broadway at the Booth where the revival is now playing, 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Intimate Apparel
Northlight Theater

The tenants of Mrs. Dickson's boarding house for Colored Women may not be precisely destitute—most are employed, receive regular (if meager) income and many are pursuing specific goals, whether it be marriage, fame or independent prosperity—but this is 1905 and we are in New York City's Lower Manhattan district, where, as the widowed landlady observes, life is hard for immigrants who toil in solitary squalor far from home and kin.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Minutes, The
Studio 54

Dark humor pervades two new Broadway productions, Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen and Tracy Letts’s The Minutes, both delayed years by the COVID crisis and finally opening in an atmosphere of disquiet and insecurity. Both plays address injustice and political turmoil with satire and conclude we live in nasty times with little brightness to look forward to.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Hangmen
Golden Theater

Dark humor pervades two new Broadway productions, Tracy Letts’s The Minutes and Martin McDonaghs Hangmen, both delayed years by the COVID crisis and finally opening in an atmosphere of disquiet and insecurity. Both plays address injustice and political turmoil with satire and conclude we live in nasty times with little brightness to look forward to.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Little Prince, The
Broadway Theater

The Cirque du Soleil-like adaptation of the classic The Little Prince at the Broadway Theater soared above my head, but not nearly enough. Anne Tournie’s colorful production featured diverting acrobatics, video projections, and modern dance but lacked the charm and substance of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s allegorical interplanetary fable.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Oratorio for Living Things
Greenwich House Theater

Heather Christian’s Oratorio for Living Things from Ars Nova features lovely music and admirable sentiments on peacefully maintaining our place in the universe, but the plotless piece, sung partially in Latin by a marvelous cast of 18 crammed into a tiny playing area at the Greenwich House, left me dazed and confused. The libretto handed out to audience members doesn’t help much. The text has something to do with time, memory, and microbiology, all set to luscious music by Christian.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Suffs
Public Theater

Shaina Taub’s Suffs is an ambitious musical on the Women’s Suffrage Movement, brings off this difficult assignment of being historically accurate with aplomb, conviction, and economy. Though the show does have several surface resemblances to a certain smash hit historical musical, namely Hamilton, Suffs is a fascinating and compelling portrait of a political conflict on a huge canvas. The cast includes 24 ethnically diverse actresses playing multiple roles of both genders.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Paradise Square
Ethel Barrymore Theater

The cliched but entertaining Paradise Square attempts an American version of epic melodramatic European tuners like Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera, and Aspects of Love. Set in the notorious Five Points neighborhood of Civil War-era Manhattan, the soapy book by Christina Anderson, Craig Lucas, and Larry Kirwin (three authors is always a bad sign) romanticizes poverty and crams in enough plot for several Netflix mini-series.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Strange Loop, A
Lyceum Theater

Though a critical and audience smash when it played a limited run at Playwrights Horizons in 2019 and subsequently won every award going including the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical, I never thought Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop would make it to Broadway. With such credentials, a Main Stem transfer would normally follow, but Jackson’s inventive autobiographical work focuses on a black, gay, plus-sized aspiring theater writer working on a show about a black, gay, plus-sized aspiring theater writer working on a…etc.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Knoxville
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Thanks to music and song, the story fictionalized by James Agee about his father’s death and how it affected him and family is more than a pastiche of various ways of dramatizing it. Still, the brand new-musical Knoxville has a number of dramatic antecedents.  Happily, they’re mixed well in Frank Galati’s script and his direction of it.

“Knoxville” is a grand opening song that introduces the city in 1915 and a lot of townspeople who will figure in the play. It is a Tennessee equivalent of Grovers Corner in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Live at the Purple Lounge
Beverly Hills Playhouse

The five female writers of Live at the Purple Lounge, the new comedy which just opened at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, are all members of Crimson Square’s Writers’s Lab. Each has written a short play set in the green room of the Purple Lounge comedy club, with a different female comic taking central stage. One of the writers, Elisabeth Tsubota, also directed the play, making for a heavy dose of feminist theater.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Take Me Out
Hayes Theater

The current production of Take Me Out is a tale of two terrific Jesses; Fire and Ice. Jesse Williams, as baseball ace Darren Lemming, never lets us see him sweat. Even though this is his first play, the actor, widely recognized from his role on the hit show "Grey's Anatomy," has worked hard to make sure he's learned the technique needed to carry this show. He took voice lessons, personal training, breath work, and physical therapy. And there is no doubt, Williams is fit.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Relentless
Goodman Theater

The chamber at Theater Wit where this Timeline Theater play premiered just three months ago is so small that you could fit at least four of them into the Goodman Theater's Owen auditorium, making it lucky indeed that its Loop-district hosts found themselves with an empty slot on their calendar and proposed its occupation by the show that the Tribune's Chris Jones declared ready for its own miniseries on Netflix.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Island, The
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

After viewing The Island in a virtual production last year, this reviewer was more than curious to see how reactions differed when seeing the same production live, in a theater. Milwaukee theatergoers have that chance with this production by Milwaukee Chamber Theater, now staged live in the intimate Studio Theater, a 200-seat space that follows the “black box” formula.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Little Prince, The
Broadway Theater

Imagine two aspects of Cirque du Soleil — lyrical acrobatic dancing and twisty aerial work — set against evocative, colorful costumes, lighting, and projections and telling the semi-beloved story of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s durable fable of an ingenuous alien boy learning the ways of mankind.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Birthday Candles
American Airlines Theater

Is it too great a pun to say that Debra Messing is incandescent in Birthday Candles? She is, by turns, an adorable teenager, a loving mother, a devoted sweetheart, a deceived wife…and then, the circle begins again. Because this play is a circle of our lives, and if it isn’t exactly what we’ve personally experienced, it’s close enough. Laughs and tears are in close proximity.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Legend of Georgia McBride, The
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

Casey, an Elvis impersonator, can’t attract customers to Eddie’s bar-nightclub in a tanky, though beachy, Florida town. Too bad because Casey’s overdrawn at the bank, his old friend but now landlord needs the rent, his loved wife’s revealed she’s pregnant, and Eddie’s just fired him.  Miss Tracy Mills, a drag diva, enters extravagantly to fill the bill for Eddie. Since her young co-star Rexy is drinking too much, Miss Tracy solicits Casey to fit the bill, teaching him how to become the play’s titled legend.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Twelfth Night
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

“If music be the food of love, play on*—the best known line of Twelfth Night — couldn’t be more appropriate for Director Jonathan Epstein’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s deliciously sweet and tart comedy. Daniel Levy’s original music enlivens throughout, whether sung or used for underscoring and scene transitions. How lovely to have a cast of singing and instrumentalist student actors!

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations
Marcus Performing Arts Center

From the streets of Detroit to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations traces an amazing ride to success for The Temptations, one of the building blocks in Motown’s empire. The musical group’s name proves ironic over the course of this delectably organized show, which does indeed show the temptations that the group member fall prey to over the years. Remarkably, 2022 marks the 60th anniversary for this soulful group.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Molly Sweeney
Chopin Theater

The debate over corrective measures for disabilities didn't just begin with cochlear implants or gender-reassignments. As long ago as 1994, Brian Friel—after reading Oliver Sacks's account of a man's recovery from lifelong vision loss—wrote a play exploring the epistemological repercussions engendered thereby.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
Plaza Suite
Hudson Theater

“Adorable!” The word rang throughout the theater during this old comedy chestnut, mainly for leading lady Sarah Jessica Parker, who, even through the most dire scenes, is perky and..well, adorable. Her real-life husband, Matthew Broderick, not so much. But he’s won two Tonys and has a great theater following, so his low-energy persona apparently works well for him.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
It's Just Like Coming to Church: Welcome to the Church of YOU
Black Ensemble Theater

Don't be fooled by the title. The Gospel of Jackie Taylor is not constructed on Old Rugged Crosses, Poor Wayfaring Strangers, or Walks Through Lonesome Valleys. To be sure, there's a collection box at the entrance, but money doesn't grant you a VIP pass. On the contrary, the word most often repeated in the score's song lyrics is "LOVE"—not erotic objectification, but the kind arising from acceptance of one's self, without which there can be no love for other creatures, mortal or divine.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
April 2022
MJ: The Musical
Neil Simon Theater

Two new Broadway productions offer boatloads of entertainment but skirt around serious examination of their subjects. That’s perfectly okay; neither the revival of Plaza Suite, nor MJ: The Musical, the jukebox-bio musical of the late King of Pop, are meant to be anything more than a lighthearted night out. Yet they hint ever so slightly at the darker issues lurking just beneath their jolly surfaces. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2022
On Sugarland
New York Theater Workshop

The offstage war in On Sugarland, Aleshea Harris’s poetic and riveting new play at New York Theater Workshop, is unnamed. It could be the Persian Gulf War or the conflict in Afghanistan. It could even be the one in Vietnam, except apparently there is no draft to force young people into harm’s way since the characters both living and dead have been recruited rather than forced to serve. But the war is ongoing and disproportionately preys on communities of color, like the titular one.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2022
Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, A
Odyssey Theater

Walt Disney hoists himself by his own petard in A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney, the Lucas Hnath play now in a West Coast premiere at the Odyssey Theater. First done off-Broadway five years ago, the clever, sardonic drama has a set-up and style all its own.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2022
Last Train to Nibroc
St. Christopher's Episcopal Church

Acacia Theater, Milwaukee’s Christian faith-based theater company, presents a tiny gem of a play in Arlene Hutton’s Last Train to Nibroc. Set in late December in 1940, the tale begins as two strangers are seated together on a crowded eastbound train from Los Angeles. He is Raleigh, a washed-out serviceman (still in uniform) who dreams of visiting the bright lights of New York City. She is May, clever and sweet, who is returning home from a Christmas visit to her serviceman boyfriend that did not end well.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2022
Indecent
Milwaukee Chamber Theater - Cabot Theater

The Tony-nominated playIndecent, by Paula Vogel, comes vividly to life in Milwaukee’s perfect space for it: the Cabot Theater, a glorious recreation of Europe’s old-style “jewel box” theaters, created by a local philanthropist for Skylight Music Theater and Milwaukee Chamber Theater. It is the latter troupe that is offering a spine-tingling and gorgeously presented version of this play, and it is a not-to-be-missed addition to the spring theatrical season.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2022
Broadway in Black
Westcoast Black Theater Troupe - Donelly Theatre

A revised version of versatile Nate Jacobs’s compilation of Broadway Music and Lyrics by, about, and featuring blacks in performance, “Broadway in Black” is heavier on recent black creations. But how blacks came to The Great White Way, especially with Shuffle Along, is clearly explained between demonstrations. Lavishly costumed and choreographed, performers don’t suffer compared with Broadway’s today. WBTT’s hold up so well that audiences may wonder at their enviable energy—all so physically close on WBTT’s new polished-floor stage.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2022
Trayf
Geffen Playhouse - Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater

TRAYF (Yiddish for forbidden or impure food) is an intimate drama about two friends whose intense religious and personal bonds are strained to the breaking point by the pull of the secular world. The two friends are Zalmy (Ilan Eskenazi) and Shmuel (Ben Hirschhorn), teenagers who belong to the Chabad community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, circa 1991.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2022
Lady from the Sea, The
Court Theater

The question of What Women Want was answered long ago (by Shakespeare,no less) and the merits of Marriage For Convenience have grown more equivocal with the waning of 19th century Romanticism—all of which should render the arguments in Ibsen's fable of a "settled" wife reconsidering her options accessible to playgoers in 2022.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2022

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