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Theater Review: IRVING BERLIN’S WHITE CHRISTMAS (National Tour)
LET THEM SING AND WE’RE HAPPY Given the daylight deprivation that comes with December, music works like light to dispel the darkness. This musical couldn’t be brighter: White Christmas, of course, salutes the similarly named 1954 film that itself builds on the 1944 delight Holiday Inn, the film that in the middle of a war premiered the…
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Theater Review: THE CHRISTMAS FOUNDLING (Pride Films and Plays in Chicago)
A GOLD RUSH NATIVITY You could call it a second coming of Christmas from our Golden West. Delivered with the grit and gusto of 19th century raconteur Bret Harte, The Christmas Foundling is a likable tale from the California Gold Rush, specifically a late-blooming nativity on Christmas Eve. Norman Allen’s 2001 period piece, now warmed up by directors…
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Theater Review: FROZEN (National Tour)
CAN FROZEN MELT YOUR HEART? Direct from Broadway, Disney’s Frozen officially kicks off its national tour at the Hollywood Pantages after a tryout in Schenectady, NY, and it’s the hygge snowblast we need. Based on the 2013 Academy Award-winning animation (currently the 15th highest-grossing film of all time), this stage musical adaptation — directed with…
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Theater Review: AN UNFORGETTABLE NAT KING COLE CHRISTMAS (Mercury Theater Chicago)
A MELLOW YULE Back in the day velvet-toned Nat King Cole practically owned Christmas. His TV specials were characterized by what his recreator Evan Tyrone Martin calls “bold simplicity.” His trademark was his famously smoky voice (ironic because he died at 45 of lung cancer). Nat King Cole made inroads where mainly white performers had…
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Theater Review: COLD TOWN/HOTLINE: A CHICAGO HOLIDAY STORY (Raven Theatre)
A WELL-MEANING YULE CONFECTION THAT’S A BIT DIFFICULT TO SWALLOW For dogged seekers of sentimentality for whom The Gift of the Magi or It’s A Wonderful Life are insufficient tinsel treacle, help is on the way! You will love Raven Theatre’s unashamedly heartwarming, aggressively feel-good Cold Town/Hotline: A Chicago Holiday Story. An 80-minute world premiere written and directed by Eli Newell, this…
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Theater Review: THE SANTALAND DIARIES (Diversionary Theatre in San Diego)
ELF-DEPRECATING HUMOR PAYS OFF It’s hard to go wrong with this script, as writer David Sedaris’s biting wit, which has made him an NPR favorite for years, delights the cynic in us all. While it’s fine-and-dandy getting into the holiday spirit, one cannot be completely blind to the craziness that goes with it. Now multiply…
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Theater Review: CLOUD 9 (Custom Made Theatre Company in San Francisco)
CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF SATIRE Has it really been 40 years since Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 was first presented? The biting satire is so topical — containing cross-dressing, gay relationships, and patriarchal and colonial rule — that one would think it just arrived on the scene. It’s every bit as entertaining, contemporary, and downright…
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Theater Review: AMERICA’S BEST OUTCAST TOY (Pride Films & Plays)
ODDBALL OUTCASTS It pays homage to the goofy compassion exhibited by claymation holiday specials, especially the iconic classic where the inhabitants of the Island of Misfit Toys are rescued by Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Now a world premiere musical by Pride Films and Plays staged by director/choreographer Donterrio Johnson, America’s Best Outcast Toy — An…
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Theater Review: SALVAGE (Lounge Theatre, Hollywood)
GET YOUR SOUL SALVAGED The minute I sat down at the Lounge theatre and saw the rundown bar on the stage equipped with a few tables, a jukebox and several guitars hanging on the walls along with a photograph of a famous country musician named Floyd Whitaker, I was transported to some small rural town…
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Theater Review: GROUNDHOG DAY THE MUSICAL (San Francisco Playhouse)
DOES GROUNDHOG DAY BEAR REPEATING? At the center of San Francisco Playhouse’s first regional premiere of Broadway’s Groundhog Day the Musical is the brilliant, perfectly cast Ryan Drummond, playing local TV news weatherman, Phil. This arrogant, uncaring teaser must relive Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney until he learns to care about other people. This musical adaptation of the…
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Theater Review: PUNKPLAY (Circle X Theatre Company at the Atwater Village Theatre)
PUNK’D In many ways, Gregory S. Moss’s 1980s-themed punkplay feels like a dream. Props and seasons are generically labeled. Flights of fancy are realized like make-believe. Even the era itself is presented as a distant memory we’re not sure really happened. Unfortunately, the wistfulness of a nighttime enigma doesn’t always make for compelling storytelling. Co-directed…
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Theater Review: JITNEY (Mark Taper Forum)
A JOYOUS JITNEY The late August Wilson (1945-2005) was a truly great American playwright, the most prolifically produced African-American playwright of all time. Jitney, now at the Mark Taper Forum until December 29, was his last play of his “Century Plays” to be produced on Broadway (winner of the 2017 Best Revival) but was the…
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Theater Review: ‘TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE (Cirque du Soleil in Chicago and New York)
CHRISTMAS AS A CIRCUS There’s a beloved poem behind these multiple circus acts in one act: Clement Moore was never that fond of his famous 1837 poem A Visit from Saint Nicholas (better known as ’Twas the Night Before Christmas). Written in a jog-trotting anapestic tetrameter, the now-treasured verse was for its author a mere…
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Theater Review: KEY LARGO (Geffen Playhouse)
NOT AS KEYED UP AS IT SHOULD BE The Geffen Playhouse has really been on a roll under the newest Artistic Director Matt Shakman. There are many more interesting scripts, and many more chances are being taken. And as always, both of Geffen’s playhouses are given Broadway-caliber production values. Shakman is also to be thanked…
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Theater Review: UNCLE VANYA (The New American Theatre in Hollywood)
CYNICS UNITE These days when directors revive a classic, they have to decide whether their approach will be either to modernize the play or mount it as a period piece, true to the spirit of the times in which it was created. Sometimes, as in the case of The New American Theatre’s Uncle Vanya, director…
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Theater Review: A CHRISTMAS CAROL (Goodman)
REAPPRAISING A CASH COW Consider this a kind of conditional mea culpa: In past reviews of Goodman Theatre’s A Christmas Carol, I’ve faulted the production’s trivialization of Charles Dickens’ 1847 ghost story, a tale intended to scare Victorian readers into avoiding the ugly life and dire fate of Ebenezer Scrooge. Rather than deal with a contemptible,…
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Theater Review: LINDIWE (Steppenwolf)
THE PLOT THIN-ENS Can lightning strike thrice? Over two decades later, it’s happened again — a third collaboration between author/director Eric Simonson and the world-famous, nine-member Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Like The Song of Jacob Zulu in 1992 and Nomathemba in 1996, Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s world premiere Lindiwe, co-directed with Jonathan Berry, is imbued with the ensemble’s seamless a…
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Theater Review: WAITING FOR GODOT (Dennis ZaÄek Productions at Victory Gardens in Chicago)
DÉJí€ VU MEETS GROUNDHOG DAY “Birth was the death of him”: Terse to the point of cruelty, Samuel Beckett devours the human experience in six words, repeatedly juxtaposing graves with cradles. Waiting for Godot, his minimalist masterpiece, takes nearly three hours for the same result. But Beckett succeeds in his life-long task — to “find the…
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Theater Review: RUTHERFORD AND SON (TimeLine)
AN EDWARDIAN WAKE-UP CALL You can’t keep a good play down. Produced under the pseudonym of K.G. Sowerby, the Edwardian drama Rutherford and Son was a huge hit in 1912 — until the playwright was later revealed as a woman, Githa Sowerby. Perhaps due to male resentment of the play’s depiction of a brutish dad, it disappeared…
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Theater Review: THE THANKSGIVING PLAY (Geffen)
THANKS BUT NO THANKS I can’t imagine a riper subject for satire than the chokehold that far-left liberal political correctness has on America. Playwright Larissa Fasthorse offers her 2015 comedy at The Geffen that is chock-full of the ridiculing we need, but satire without a story gets old fast. Instead of farce, which is grounded…
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