Dan Zeff

PAYING ATTENTION TO THE WOMEN Eleanor Burgess’s new play Wife of a Salesman is a riff on Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Burgess (The Niceties) has adapted the Miller original into an intimate revision, placing two women as adversaries in their competition for a man, Willy Loman, the central character of Miller’s 1949 play…

A ROCKIN’ REVIVAL OF WEST SIDE STORY AT MARRIOTT Fans of musical theater in general and West Side Story in particular should thoroughly enjoy the Marriott Theatre revival. The production offers everything this demanding classic requires — intelligent directing, skilled high energy choreography, and a large talented cast, most of them triple threat singers, dancers,…

GROUNDHOG DAY DOES NOT BEAR REPEATING The Paramount Theatre has a well deserved reputation for presenting classy productions of musicals that approach Broadway caliber. That certainly can be said about the Paramount’s revival of Groundhog Day: The Musical. Unfortunately, a classy production is all the compliment that can be offered a tiresome show that runs…

EVITA: SURPRISINGLY GOOD FOR YOU Evita at the Drury Lane Theatre is a prime example of a revival that preserves the virtues of the original musical while injecting enhancements that should refresh the viewing experience of even veteran fans of the show. This is the real life story of Eva Duarte as a teenager, who…

THE SECRET IS OUT: COUNCIL IS A WINNER The First Folio Theatre has come up with an unexpected winner in David Rice’s world premiere adaptation of Agatha Christie’s light novel of international intrigue The Secret Council, originally titled The Secret Adversary when it was first published in 1922. Andrés Enriquez and Melanie Keller The novel…

FIREFLIES SHINES BRIGHT AT NORTHLIGHT Fireflies at the Northlight Theater takes audiences back to the fraught year of 1963 in the Deep South, where racial tensions burn hot, as black people attempt to assert their Civil Rights in the face of violent, often deadly white resistance. Playwright Donja R. Love has concentrated his single-act drama…

WASHING AWAY DOUBTS ABOUT GREAT THEATER And now for something completely different for the holiday entertainment season, a one-man show called Dishwasher Dreams performed by a Bangladesh actor and playwright named Alaudin Ullah. For about 90 continuous minutes at the Writers Theatre, Ullah escorts the audience on a memory trip through his life as a…

AN UPDATED AND STILL OUTDATED KISS In William Shakespeare’s 16th-century comedy The Taming of the Shrew, a wandering fortune hunter named Petruchio does battle with a fiery independent woman named Katherine. The woman’s wealthy father, weary of dealing with his bumptious daughter, hires Petruchio to woo and wed Katherine for a considerable reward. Petruchio proceeds…

Pretty Woman: The Musical is an adaption of the 1990 motion picture that made a star of Julia Roberts as Vivian, a Hollywood prostitute who wants out of her life on the streets. Providentially, and illogically, Vivian meets starchy unmarried billionaire business man Edward Lewis and turns his cold heart to love in time for…

English novelist Charles Dickens once actually used his hat to carry water to victims of a train wreck in Victorian England. Playwright Michael Hollinger uses that odd historical incident as the slender reed that’s the core of his comedy Mr. Dickens’ Hat at the Northlight Theatre. The Hollinger play runs about 95 minutes without an…

A SOBERING EXPERIENCE When Harry Met Rehab is a new play at the Greenhouse Theater Center that takes on the uninviting subject alcoholism. The title may suggest that the play intends a light-hearted view of the topic, and there are plenty of laughs scattered throughout the 90-minute production. But the show comes to grips with…

THIS BUGABOO WILL FOLLOW YOU HOME The Steppenwolf Theatre’s extraordinary production of Tracy Letts’s Bug was winding down its highly praised production in March 2020 when the drama was forced to close, like other theater activity, because of the pandemic scourge. Now the Steppenwolf is reviving that production for a limited run with the key…

Sister Act at the Mercury Theater is the 2011 Broadway adaptation of a 1992 movie that became a surprise box office hit, largely elevated by a star performance from Whoopi Goldberg. The show asks the audience to buy into the premise that a cabaret singer is temporarily placed in a convent disguised as a nun…

SEEING THIS REVUE MAY BE THE BEST DECISION YOU’VE EVER MADE I entered the Second City e.t.c. on opening night with a sense of unease. Two weeks earlier the Second City mainstage company, the major troupe in its cabaret theater roster, had premiered a show I thought was not up to the iconic standard of…

WHAT A GREAT SHOW CAN MEAN TO YOU What the Constitution Means to Me is back at the Broadway Playhouse after a two year pandemic hiatus. Again, it is delivering an entertaining, thoughtful, humorous, insightful, and sometimes disturbing examination of the United States Constitution, its glories and what playwright Heidi Schreck sees as the document’s…