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Theater Review: LERNER AND LOEWE’S GREATEST HITS (Music Theater Works)
WELL, LERNER & LOEWE ME DOWN Seldom has a dream team had a shorter span: It was all over in only 13 years. But between 1947 and 1960 Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe ran a glorious gamut. It happened both on Broadway and in Hollywood transfers of five very different successes. The powerful partnership…
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Theater Review: LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (Pasadena Playhouse)
A GREEN NEW DEAL As Little Shop of Horrors teaches us: sometimes you just need fresh blood. In that vein, the Pasadena Playhouse more than delivers. Their audacious revival of the quirky cult classic – directed with exemplary vision by Mike Donahue – offers audiences something they may not have realized they craved. In this…
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Theater Review: BARNUM (Musical Theatre Guild at the Alex Theatre in Glendale)
I LIKE YOUR STYLE P. T. Barnum claimed there’s a sucker born every minute, but composers like Cy Coleman come along only once in a lifetime. His vigorous score was in the capable hands of musical director Jan Roper for Musical Theatre Guild’s staged reading of Barnum at the Alex Theater. Score, book and lyrics…
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Theater Review: NEVER IS NOW (Skylight Theatre in Los Angeles)
NEVER TAKE FOR GRANTED THE PHRASE “NEVER AGAIN” Wendy Kout, the playwright of Never Is Now asks the question, “What happens when people from diverse backgrounds experience the firsthand accounts of ten survivors who were labeled ‘undesirable’ and thrust into Hitler’s systematic genocide?” She shows us exactly what happens in a very powerful, emotional and…
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Theater Review: TOP GIRLS (A.C.T. in San Francisco)
YOU’RE THE TOP, GIRLS For the most part, Joyce, a working class Englishwoman in Ipswich is not a sympathetic or likeable person: She is annoyed by her teenage daughter Angie (who admittedly is belligerent and daft), and begrudging toward her sister, Marlene, whom she views as a ball-busting, career-driven, selfish, soulless abandoner (not that there…
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Theater Review: A PLAY IS A POEM (World Premiere by Ethan Coen at the Mark Taper in Los Angeles)
SHOWTIME AT THE VANITIES Ethan Coen’s A Play Is a Poem at the Mark Taper Forum strikes me as neither a poem, nor, strictly speaking, theater. I don’t know what it is. For the most part the five short playlets come across as sketches — and not in a good way. Coen attempts to project…
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Theater Review: BERNHARDT/HAMLET (Goodman Theatre in Chicago)
TO BE OR NOT TO BE SARAH BERNHARDT Well, with “Bernhardt” and “Hamlet” sharing the marquee, Goodman Theatre’s season-opener must be larger than life if not literature. Sprawling and stuffed at 150 minutes, Theresa Rebeck’s multi-focused 2018 drama Bernhardt/Hamlet takes a quizzical look at a bizarre chapter of theater lore. We’re witness to the sensation-seeking choice of…
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Theater Review: HELLO AGAIN (Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre in Evanston)
A MUSICAL CIRCLE JERK You could call it a daisy chain of horizontal encounters, this chronicle of sexual partisans whose sleeping around creates a sort of chain letter of lust. A ton of talent reduced to silly shenanigans — a miscalculation dogs director/choreographer Brenda Didier’s revival of Hello Again, Michael John LaChiusa’s 1993 musical trivialization of…
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Theater Review: THE KING’S SPEECH (The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare)
MY FAIR MONARCH We love levelling. Mark Twain’s prince and the pauper, Queen Victoria and her Scottish and Indian boyfriends, Queen Anne and her favorites, a British schoolteacher and the King of Siam, King George III and his equally mad doctors — these equalizing polarities keep history real. Add to these opposites that attract another…
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Theater Review: OSLO (TimeLine Theatre at Broadway Playhouse in Chicago)
DANCE OF DIPLOMACY Clandestine and volatile, high-stakes diplomacy can be as taut as any courtroom drama. It’s hard to imagine a story more intrinsically theatrical than the real-life crises and complications that transform Oslo into a foreign-affairs thriller. Now at the Broadway Playhouse in a crackling collaboration between TimeLine Theatre Company and Broadway in Chicago, it’s history…
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Theater Review: KISS MY AZTEC (La Jolla Playhouse)
SHOULD EVERYONE KISS MY AZTEC? IT DEPENDS: For fans of John Leguizamo, the notion of a full-length musical written by him is a thrilling draw. Whether a fan from his numerous edgy one-man Broadway shows like Ghetto Klown and Latin History for Morons, or his dramatic roles in Carlito’s Way and ER, or his comedic…
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Theater Review: SKINTIGHT (Geffen Playhouse)
THE NEW NORMAL A weird dynamic takes over the house at Skintight, Joshua Harmon’s comedy, now at the Geffen Playhouse. In broad terms, it feels like a battle of the sexes — with men in the audience, straight and gay alike, cheering for Elliot (Harry Groener), a seventy-year-old billionaire clothier who defines love as something…
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Theater Review: THE GREAT LEAP (Steppenwolf)
HOOP DREAMS IN THE CELESTIAL KINGDOM No question, Lauren Yee is a wonderful new voice in theater. With Cambodian Rock Band she made crucial connections between iconic survivors and unspeakable genocide. Victory Gardens Theater’s 2018 local premiere was a powerful work of witness and redemption. Just as remarkable in its fusion of sport and history, people…
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Theater Review: FIVE PRESIDENTS (American Blues Theater at Stage 773 in Chicago)
A CONVERGENCE OF HISTORY It was supposedly the “end of an era,” the memorial service for Richard Nixon in the Nixon Library in his birthplace Yorba Linda, California, on April 27, 1994. And we are there: Five Presidents, a recently revised 2015 drama by Chicago favorite Rick Cleveland, delivers 85 minutes of fascinating “fly on the…
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Theater Review: THE CHINESE LADY (Greenway Court Theatre in Los Angeles)
DECORATIVE CHINA I saw this beautifully sad, poignant, dark play last Saturday evening and I’m still thinking about it. Thanks to the wonderful writing, acting and directing this two-person outing based on a true story is that memorable. In 1834 a 14-year-old Chinese girl, Afong Moy (the excellent Amy Shu), arrived in New York from…
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Theater Review: LATIN HISTORY FOR MORONS (Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles)
MORON THAT NOW One-man stage phenom John Leguizamo, who has popularized the stories of his Columbian/Puerto Rican/Bronx Ghetto peeps and their culture in semi-autobiographical shows Mambo Mouth, Freak, Spic-O-Rama, and Ghetto Klown, returns with lefty, sobering, highly entertaining monologue that brings home the tragic 3000-year history of Latino Americans. While the show is titled Latin History for…
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Theater Review: SPAMALOT (Mercury Theater Chicago)
NOT DEAD YET It’s at least a chuckle a minute. Half the hilarity is verbal sallies, half sight gags. This cheeky, subversive, and unashamedly sidesplitting Spamalot, described in the press release as “ridiculous men in tight pants,” is a labor of laughter. Its irreverence feels contagious, its target-shooting flawless. Nothing is spared its satire as it…
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Theater Review: MIDSUMMER [A PLAY WITH SONGS] (Greenhouse Theatre Center)
LOVE IN THE FAST LANE “Love will break your heart; sometimes you want it to.” That curious contradiction is the opening shot in MIDSUMMER (A Play with Songs). This theatrical roller coaster merrily chronicles a weekend “stand” in Edinburgh between convulsively disparate thirtysomething partners, a quirky encounter that may indeed have a future. Now in a…
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Theater Review: WITCH (Geffen Playhouse)
A PITCH FOR THIS RICH WITCH Written by Jen Silverman and directed by Marti Lyons, Witch is inspired by William Rowley’s Jacobian 1621 play Witch of Edmonton. The classic story follows Elizabeth Sawyer, a woman forced to the outskirts of society who finds revenge on her bullying neighbors by selling her soul to the devil. Well,…
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Theater Review: HOWARDS END (Remy Bumppo Theatre Company at Theater Wit)
MAY HOWARDS END NEVER END “Only connect..! Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.” Seldom has a classic novel so strongly followed its defining drive as Howards End, E.M. Forster’s seminal 1910 good-will offering. As seen and…
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