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Theater Review: HAIRSPRAY (San Diego Musical Theatre at Horton Grand Theatre)
EVEN WHEN YOU’RE HAIR CAN’T HOLD UP, THIS MUSICAL CAN To say you like Hairspray really doesn’t cut it. Do you mean the 1988 John Waters film starring Devine and newcomer Ricki Lake? Or maybe you mean the 2003 Tony winner for “Best Musical,” which also yielded Harvey Fierstein a Tony for his role as…
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Theater Review: BAREFOOT IN THE PARK (The Old Globe in San Diego)
THE GLOBE MAKES IT LOOK LIKE A WALK IN THE PARK Barefoot in the Park, Neil Simon’s second Broadway hit after Come Blow Your Horn, played a staggering 1,530 performances in its initial run, winning a Tony Award for director Mike Nichols. It’s somewhat inconceivable that a play this frothy, containing less pathos than Simon’s…
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Theater Review: WAITRESS (National Tour)
SWEET AS PIE, FLAKY AS CRUST, OR BOTH? If the heat in the kitchen is getting you down, you may want to head on over to Hollywood, where the Broadway hit Waitress arrived last night for a limited four-week at the Pantages Theatre August 3-26, 2018, and then continuing on tour after that through the…
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Theater Review: ANNIE (Hollywood Bowl)
SHE’S BA-A-A-ACK For those who think the sun won’t come up until 2020, here comes another Annie, that 1977 optimistic spitfire of a musical — based on the Harold Gray comic strip Little Orphan Annie — which insists that simply thinking about a brighter tomorrow will perk you right up. Although a national tour just wrapped…
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Theater Review: A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM (North Coast Rep in San Diego)
A FUNNY THING’S HAPPENING AT NORTH COAST REP Only in Ancient Rome! Pseudolus, the wise-cracking slave (Omri Schein), can earn his freedom if he can somehow get the pretty, bubble-headed virgin (Noelle Marion) staying next door to become the beloved of his twenty-something master, Hero (Chris M. Kauffmann). Alas, she is promised to uber-masculine Army…
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Theater Review: UNDER MILK WOOD (Open Fist Theatre Company at Atwater Village Theatre)
THE PLEASURES OF WEBFOOT COCKLEWOMEN AND MINCED CAT Under Milk Wood is a vivid combination of poetry, drama, and music that was first performed as a radio play in 1954, and it is squarely rooted in language. Set in a seaside town in Wales called Llareggub (“bugger all” backwards), it is described as a place…
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Theater Review: BLISS (OR EMILY POST IS DEAD!) (Promethean Theatre Ensemble)
CLASSICAL MARTYRS AS NEW JERSEY HOUSEWIVES MYTHS SOMETHING Imagine Medea, Clytemnestra, Antigone, and Cassandra transported to a New Jersey suburb in 1960. There the same cycle of repression and revenge repeats itself. The ancient victims — two anti-heroines with loathsome mates, one religious martyr, and a disrespected prophetess — are now, respectively, two pill-popping, grievance-nursing…
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Theater Review: DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE (The Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Davidson/Valentini Theatre)
ITCHING TO BE SWITCHING ROLES Burt Grinstead and Anna Stromberg’s take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde switches between comedic farce and serious scenes just as slickly as Jekyll, the affable, handsome physician, becomes Hyde, a maniacal, marauding murderer. Blessedly not as silly and madcap as the stage…
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Theater Review: SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM (Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles)
EMOTIONAL TURMOIL AND MUSICAL BLISS One of the pleasures of the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble’s production of Side by Side by Sondheim is the experience of hearing voices without amplification. I have never been to a Broadway musical without a sound system and have often wondered what it was like. Did it always take an Ethel…
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Theater Review: RICK STONE THE BLUES MAN (Black Ensemble Theater)
WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR SONG This time it’s up close and down home. Rick Stone the Blues Man departs from the Black Ensemble Theater’s standard tributes to superstars like Patti LaBelle or Dionne Warwick. Bringing things down to basics, B.E.T.’s new revue salutes their own singers in founder-playwright Jackie Taylor’s most personal musical labor of love. A…
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Theater Review: BUS STOP (Eclipse Theatre in Chicago)
RIGHT PLAY, WRONG STOP The plays of William Inge, featured this season by Eclipse Theatre Company, offer a bedrock realism that fuels the down-home decency of his small-town characters. But this closeted playwright made one emotion his particular domain — loneliness. In Picnic, Come Back, Little Sheba, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (to close the Eclipse…
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Theater Review: CRY IT OUT (Echo Theater Company at Atwater Village Theatre in Los Angeles)
WE NEVER STOP CRYING IT OUT The term “cry it out” refers to the practice of letting babies bawl until their fit subsides without parents coddling and mollifying them; assumedly this causes the child to become more self-sufficient later in life. In Molly Smith Metzler’s persuasive west coast premiere, three adult women find themselves in…
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Theater Review: THE COLOR PURPLE (National Tour)
BLACK AND BLUE After winning a Tony last year for best revival of a musical, Oprah’s once and future movie-turned-musical has finally hit her home town, part of a national tour. As alive as the genre gets and as overwrought as the original Spielberg film, this sprawling saga of life for African-American women in the…
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Theater Review: EVERYBODY (Brown Paper Box Co. at the Pride Arts Center in Chicago)
SIN AS CRAZINESS You don’t see morality plays like Everyman anymore — and not just because it’s not the 15th century. We shy away from such absolutes as Death and even Good Deeds. Everybody, with its nonspecific title an improvement on the original, modernizes a hugely popular medieval masterwork. The anonymously written Everyman was an allegorical depiction of the titular Christian’s…
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Theater Review: HEARTBREAK HOTEL (Broadway Playhouse in Chicago)
BEFORE THE CROWN PRINCE BECAME THE KING Legends require reclamation and renewal: Created by Floyd Mutrux, the huge hit Million Dollar Quartet reprised a once-in-four-lifetimes recording session in a Memphis studio that brought together Sun Records’ once and future icons: Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash — and Elvis Presley. We see rock ‘n’ roll history…
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Theater Review: BIG FISH (Chance Theater)
FRIED, STEWED OR BROILED, THIS FISH WILL NEVER TASTE GOOD So here’s what baffles me: A show which is middling at best is suddenly showing up at regional, community and high school theaters with alarming regularity around the country. Well, maybe not so alarming. The show was, after all, on Broadway. Musical Theatre West in…
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Theater Review: ON YOUR FEET (National Tour)
DANCE DELIRIUM As jukebox musicals go, the rags-to-riches bio On Your Feet! definitely earns its exclamation point. No question, the upbeat tunes, with their irresistible Cuban-fusion street beat, would justify this 2015 tribute to the flashdance fervor of Gloria and Emilio Estefan and their Miami Sound Machine. But their lives warrant a work too: Alexander Dinelaris’s predictable and…
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Theater Review: THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA (Midsommer Flight at Lincoln Park, Touhy Park, Gross Park, and Chicago Women’s Park and Gardens)
IT’S LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT WITH THE BARD’S FIRST LOOK AT LOVE Happily, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare’s first play, is not like the first pancake — a test case to be thrown away. A trifle depicting the too-forgivable treachery of fickle Proteus to everyone around him — especially his faithful Julia — it employs…
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Theater Review: AVENUE Q (Mercury Theater Chicago)
OPEN SESAME SEASON Peter Pan never grew up. Likewise Alice in Wonderland, the Hardy Boys, Freddy the Pig, Nancy Drew, Huck Finn, or Donald Trump. It’s a pity people do: Why must grown-ups leave behind innocence and imagination after we mistakenly blunder into adulthood? You can take it with you — when it’s Avenue Q. This 2003 musical…
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Theater Review: TAR (Playwrights’ Arena at Atwater Village Theatre)
TARANTINO IN THE STICKY SWAMPS OF SADNESS Tom Jacobson’s Tar is from his The Ballad of Bimini Baths, a triad of works playing concurrently in Los Angeles. For half a century (1902-1951), the hot springs resort actually existed here in L.A., and Jacobson means to examine how far society has, or hasn’t, come by setting…
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