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Theater Review: TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS (San Diego’s the Old Globe)
LETTERS FROM THE LOVELORN LEAP OFF THE PAGE Dear Sugar, I have a problem. My editor assigned me to review a play that does not follow conventional theater techniques, has only one known character, and doesn’t actually have a plot. What should I do? Confused Critic in San Diego Dear Confused Critic, You don’t have…
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Theater Review: CRAZY FOR YOU (San Diego Musical Theatre in San Diego)
A SWEET EMBRACEABLE SHOW In 1930, a musical called Girl Crazy, with a score by George and Ira Gershwin, opened on Broadway to moderate success, running 272 performances. The rarely-revived show didn’t have the chops to endure the decades, but the music from it certainly did. Girl Crazy gave us memorable tunes, like “Bidin’ My…
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Theater Review: MINNIE’S BOYS (Musical Theatre Guild at the Alex Theatre)
BOY OH BOYS With a fun and intermittently funny score by Hal Hackady (lyrics) and Larry Grossman (music), perky, adorable, enterprising direction by J. Scott Lapp, and some shining performances, Musical Theatre Guild’s concert-staged production of the more-than-rarely produced flop Minnie’s Boys turned out to be a pleasant and occasionally hilarious outing. This had some…
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Theater Review: HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE (Raven Theatre in Chicago)
HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE THEATER Some plays take time to come into their own but they’re well worth a wait. Over two decades after its Off-Broadway debut, Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive is only now reaching full impact. That’s thanks to the consciousness-raising of #MeToo, among other seismic changes in the body politic. With…
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Theater Review: THE FATHER (Remy Bumppo Theatre Company at Theater Wit)
THE SOUND OF A BRAIN BREAKING Uncertainty is the default drive behind the 95 excruciating minutes of French playwright Florian Zeller’s The Father. Seldom has a staged mystery shifted so suddenly and strongly between competing realities. As the protagonist Andre says, “There’s something funny going on here.” But it’s not amusing: Yes, The Father is crammed with mistaken…
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Theater Review: JULIA SWEENEY: OLDER AND WIDER (Geffen Playhouse)
OUR LOVELY FRIEND RETURNS AT LAST I have never seen Julia Sweeney on film or television. Okay, almost never: there’s Pulp Fiction and Stuart Little. Yet while Sweeney is notable for having been in those films, I can’t quite remember who she played. She’s been working steadily in projects but I guess I haven’t had the desire…
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Theater Review: TITANIC (Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theater in Claremont)
A MORE INTIMATE TITANIC MADE EPIC It’s telling that the 1997 musical Titanic won Tony Awards for each nomination — Best Musical, Peter Stone’s book, Maury Yeston’s score, Jonathan Tunick’s orchestrations, and Stewart Laing’s colossal, four-story, tilting set — yet it didn’t receive one nomination for acting. (I saw the original on Broadway and you definitely…
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Theater Review: THE B-SIDE: “NEGRO FOLKLORE FROM TEXAS STATE PRISONS” A RECORD ALBUM INTERPRETATION (Wooster Group at REDCAT)
B-SIDE MYSELF Breathes there a soul who hasn’t sung along with a favorite album? And, ah, if the songs we sing were rare and challenging and related to one’s life, we might have all approached The Wooster Group’s Kate Valk, as Eric Berryman did with his 1965 Elektra recording Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,…
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Theater Review: HELLO, DOLLY! (National Tour)
BUCKLEY BUCKLES A BIT, BUT DOLLY DEFINITELY DELIVERS To start with, let’s agree to never say “Goodbye, Dolly.” Thornton Wilder’s genius for the common touch isn’t just a golden legacy in Our Town or The Skin of Our Teeth, both perfect comedies of life. There’s almost as much warm wisdom in The Matchmaker, Wilder’s craftily-plotted 1955 mating romp that…
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Theater Review: A GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO LOVE & MURDER (Porchlight Music Theatre; Ruth Page Center)
A DEATH OF FRESH AIR It’s a tour de force times ten as Monty Navarro, distant heir to the D’Ysquith fortune, slaughters his way to an earldom and marriage, for better or worse, with a doting cousin. A romp where vengeance gets served up hot and cold, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder is convulsing the Ruth…
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Theater Review: SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (South Coast Rep)
IT COULD HAVE BEEN MURDER Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a musical that never fails to impress, no matter how many times it’s been seen. It tells of Benjamin Barker, a Victorian-era barber who returns to London, having been imprisoned on false charges, to exact vengeance on those responsible for the tattering…
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Theater Review: US/THEM (Chicago Shakespeare)
OUT OF THE BLOOD OF BABES It’s a probably thankless and certainly unsettling undertaking: Us/Them is an hour-long performance piece by two young members of the Belgian troupe BRONKS. It dares to depict the 2004 Beslan school siege and massacre from the point of view of two child victims: One survives the take-over by 35 Chechen separatists….
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Theater Review: AN INSPECTOR CALLS (The Wallis)
MAKE A CALL ON THIS INSPECTOR In Stephen Daldry’s architectually inspired revival of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, an astute mixture of comedy of manners/tragedy of class/family crisis/ socialism versus capitalism/whodunit, the audience is asked, along with a trio of curious children, to get past that heavy red velvet curtain and enter a world of…
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Theater Review: HIR (Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles)
CRUEL INTENTIONS Now at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, Hir had its world premiere at Playwrights Horizon in 2015, engendering a rave in the The New York Times and going on to play internationally to enthusiastic reviews everywhere. I searched for other reviews because while the stated tone and subject matter of the show are what…
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Theater Review: THE REALISTIC JONESES (Shattered Globe Theatre and Theater Wit)
IS IT TOO REALISTIC, OR NOT REALISTIC ENOUGH? Is it smoke and mirrors or a trick of the light? No matter — the fact that nothing urgent is at stake in the 100 minutes of Will Leno’s The Realistic Joneses is not beside the point: It is the point. Next-door neighbors in a cookie-cutter suburb, four married characters —…
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Theater Review: LAST CALL (Open Fist Theatre Company at Atwater Village Theatre)
RAGING AGAINST THE DYING LIGHT Elderly parents losing their independence is more significant demographically in America now than at any time in our history. Most still-living Greatest Generation parents of Baby Boomers are in their seventies to nineties or even early one-hundreds. After lifetimes of gritty independence, often forged during the Depression, they tend to…
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Theater Review: DADA WOOF PAPA HOT (About Face Theatre at Theater Wit in Chicago)
FRIENDS WITH CHILDREN Gay parents — for centuries that seemed a contradiction in terms. How could promiscuity engender anything beyond itself? But, if, as Delmore Schwartz said, “With dreams begin responsibilities,” along with (modern) marriage comes children. A lot of stuff suddenly altered in 2015 when marriage equality passed. Theater is just now catching up…
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Theater Review: LINDA VISTA (Mark Taper Forum)
BEAUTIFUL HONESTY The title of Tracy Letts’ play Linda Vista, Steppenwolf Theatre’s production now at the Mark Taper Forum, translates as “Beautiful View.” In a literal sense, it refers to a San Diego apartment complex with a tiny slice of ocean visible (if you know where to look). It is also ironic. Nothing here looks…
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Theater Review: CARDBOARD PIANO (TimeLine)
THEATER AND RECONCILIATION Love never seems greater than when hate sets it off. Then, as if to prove its power, it finds so much to rise above. A huge hit at the 2016 Humana Festival of New American Plays and now making its Chicago premiere in a forceful staging by TimeLine Theatre, Cardboard Piano is an exercise…
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Theater Review: 1776 (La Mirada Theatre)
YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION? How remarkable to have been a fly on the wall when the creators of 1776, the 1969 musical receiving a terrific La Mirada Theatre/McCoy Rigby revival, were deciding the 11 o’clock number (the trope given for the big, late in the second act number by a self-realizing main character…
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