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Theater Review: DISHWASHER DREAMS (Writers Theatre)
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…
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Theater Review: KISS ME, KATE (Marriott Theatre)
AN UPDATED AND STILL OUTDATED KISS In William Shakespeare’s 16th-century comedy The Taming of the Shrew, a wandering fortune hunter named Petruchio does battle with a fiery independent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…
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Theater Review: PRETTY WOMAN, THE MUSICAL (National Tour)
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…
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Theater Review: MR. DICKENS’ HAT (Northlight Theatre in Skokie)
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…
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Theater Review: ALWAYS… PATSY CLINE (North Coast Rep)
CRAZY FOR LOVIN’ ALWAYS PATSY CLINE Is it a musical? A play with music? A tribute act? A duo cabaret act? Always:Patsy Cline is a little of each, coming together sweetly to be something unto itself. APC tells the true story of Louise Seger (Becky Barta), a devoted fan of country-music legend Patsy Cline, adoring…
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Theater Review: WHEN HARRY MET REHAB (Greenhouse)
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…
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Theater Review: TICK, TICK… BOOM! (Up Next Productions at the Thymele Arts Atlas Space)
SEASONS OF TICK, TICK… BOOM! One of the fortunate effects of the world spiraling into madness and postponing what was supposed to be Up Next Productions’ thirty-year anniversary tick, tick… BOOM!, slated for Spring 2020, is prodigious timing. The recent passing of Stephen Sondheim (a looming presence throughout the work), a year-and-change of having to…
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Theater Review: GEORGIANA AND KITTY: CHRISTMAS AT PEMBERLEY (Marin Theatre Company)
CHRISTMAS AT PEM-BAH-LEY Let me start off by saying that I belong to that camp that would like to see a moratorium on all things Jane Austen and an edict to return to her novels would be the best way to start to do that. I happen to feel that, good intentions towards one side,…
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Theater Review: THE BAND’S VISIT (National Tour)
LOST IN THE DESERT Winner of 10 Tony Awards including Best Musical of 2018, Itamar Moses’s The Band’s Visit is one of the most highly-awarded shows in musical theater history. And yet, those expecting the razzmatazz of a Big Broadway Musical in The Band’s Visit’s “post-shutdown” North American Tour are likely to be at least somewhat…
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Theater Review: FROZEN (North American Tour)
THIS SHOW STAYS FROZEN The Walt Disney animated film Frozen grossed about $1.28 billion dollars during its international run, and when there is a commercial success like that, reworkings and adaptations cannot be far behind. The franchise has included an animated short in 2015, an animated featurette in 2017, and a feature-length sequel, Frozen II,…
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Theater Review: A CHRISTMAS CAROL (Ahmanson Theatre)
SCROOGED After a year or two since Covid shutdowns made in-person theater nearly unheard of, a new adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has made its way from London to Broadway to sunny L.A. to liven our world-weary spirits. And luckily, surprisingly : eventually : it manages to do just that, if only in…
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Theater Review: WINTERTIME (Berkeley Rep)
A SOLITUDE OF ICICLES Where to begin. Wintertime, which brings live theater back to Berkeley Rep, was written by Charles Mee, who has a devoted following among the theatrical cognoscenti, due to his eccentrically witty takes on life, love, and the pursuit of wherever life and love takes the people in his very special and…
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Theater Review: SHE THE PEOPLE (Second City at San Diego Rep)
WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A COMIC BREAKDOWN The Second City school of comedy never held back on giving funny women stage time, even going back to the sixties and seventies. From Joan Rivers to Gilda Radner to Catherine O’Hara, showcasing funny women has been one of their triumphs, leading many of them to SNL…
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Theater Review: THE CHILDREN (Fountain Theatre in Hollywood)
SLOW TO DIE, OR FAST TO LIVE? The setting is the story in The Children, Fountain Theatre’s L.A. premiere. Set designer Andrew Hammer depicts a hand-me-down yet tidy seaside cottage off the east coast of England. This remote shelter, which gets power only after 10pm, stands on a cliff just outside an “exclusion zone,” the site of a…
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Theater Review: HEAD OVER HEELS (Pasadena Playhouse)
MY HEAD SAID “STAY” BUT MY HEELS SAID “RUN”, OR A BEAT OFF You may have never heard of the musical Head Over Heels, but this screwy mash-up of Sir Philip Sidney’s sixteenth-century poem Arcadia and the songs of the iconic 1980s’ female rock band The Go-Go’s has been around the block since 2015. From…
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Theater Review: PARADISE SQUARE (Pre-Broadway Engagement in Chicago)
PARADISE, INDEED The eyes of the theater world, both in Chicago and New York City, are likely now focused on the James M. Nederlander Theatre where Paradise Square is performing before its transfer to Broadway to begin previews on February 22, 2022. There are high hopes that this will be an early new Broadway musical…
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Theater Review: BUG (Steppenwolf Theatre)
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…
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Theater Review: BUG (Remount at Steppenwolf Theatre’s New Theater Building in Chicago)
[Editor’s Note: This week, Steppenwolf raises the curtain once again on its blistering and extraordinary revival of Bug. This time, audiences will return not to the same building they left, but to a stunning new 50,000 sq. ft. theater building and education center on Halsted Street. As the world came to a pause in 2020,…
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Theater Review: MY FAIR LADY (National Tour)
MY FAILED LADY Let’s make one thing clear. When a national touring company of a Broadway success comes to your city, proclaiming it is a duplicate of the original production, what is meant by “production” is that it is guaranteed to have the same sets and costumes and sound design. It will look great and…
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Theater Review: SISTER ACT (Mercury Theater)
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…
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