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Theater Review: SONS AND LOVERS (Greenhouse Theatre Center & On The Spot Theatre in Chicago)
THE SON ALSO RISES It’s always fascinating to be present at the creation of a crucial writer. Like James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, D.H. Lawrence’s 1913 coming-of-age classic marks a metamorphosis: Sons and Lovers chronicles a writer’s conditional emancipation from a home that…
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Theater Review: CASA VALENTINA (Pride Films and Plays in Chicago)
THE WRONG WARDROBE? Clothes make the man — even if he dresses as a woman. An entire individuality, it seems, can hang in a closet, as transvestites have proven across the centuries. Casa Valentina, a 2014 period piece by Harvey Fierstein (Torch Song Trilogy, Kinky Boots), explores a lost world of cross-dressers in the Catskills…
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Theater Review: FEFU AND HER FRIENDS (Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in West L.A.)
FRIENDLY FEMINIST FIRE Fefu and Her Friends is one of the most famous plays by the recently deceased feminist avant-garde playwright María Irene Fornés, a Cuban American who has won nine Obie Awards including the award for sustained achievement. After seeing this production directed by Denise Blasor, I understand why. Fornés brilliantly captures the time…
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Theater Review: EARLY BIRDS (Moving Arts)
EARLY BIRDS GETS THE BIRD The phrase “early bird” generally denotes someone who is an early-morning riser or who shows up anywhere early, words usually attributed to the elderly. In Dana Schwartz’s light comedy, two senior women — one rich, one middle-class poor — find themselves on the first day of an ocean voyage beating…
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Theater Review: 33 1/3 – HOUSE OF DREAMS (San Diego Repertory Theatre)
TRIBUTE TO THE HITS FROM GOLD STAR Gold Star Recording Studio might not be a household name, but the musicians they recorded for certainly are: Tina Turner, Sonny and Cher, and the Beach Boys are just hint at the long list. Gold Star turned out over 120 Top-40 songs in their thirty year history. With…
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Theater Review: ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (Red Tape Theatre and Greenhouse Theatre)
ALL QUIET MAKES A BIG NOISE One of the saddest truths about humanity is that we always need to be warned against war, so tempting is its license to kill. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel, was not, alas, the anti-war novel to end all anti-war novels. It arrived half-way between…
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Theater Review: SHREK (3-D Theatricals in Cerritos)
SHREK IS A SHRUG OF A MUSICAL; BUT THIS PRODUCTION IS SURE AND SHARP Shrek The Musical is a mystifying experience. The whole thing is rather inane, versus the sophisticated silliness of Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The first time I saw the show was the final performance of the National…
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Theater Review: BOOGIEBAN (Chicago Dramatists and 13th Street Repertory Theatre in New York)
COLLATERAL HEALING It’s a justified transfer. A very enterprising theater called none too fragile from Akron, Ohio has come to Chicago (and later to New York City) to offer a pretty powerful play. Presented at Chicago Dramatists in the West Loop, it’s a world-premiere production of a one-act about the hard healing that comes after…
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Theater Review: SCRAPS (Matrix Theatre Company)
GIVE US A SECOND ACT WE DESERVE; ALL WE END UP WITH IS SCRAPS The angry young man syndrome is nothing new — think Protestant reformer Martin Luther! — but it sure found a home in the theater when British playwright John Osborne wrote the seminal Look Back in Anger in 1956. Jimmy, the uptight,…
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Theater Review: WEST SIDE STORY (5-Star Theatricals in Thousand Oaks)
A RESONATING STORY It rarely happens. “The Broadway Chill” I call it. That moment when an already amazing show is given the perfect and unexpected staging which heightens emotion, inducing moist eyes and gooseflesh as only can happen in the theater. Having seen West Side Story staged many times, I can say that rare is…
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Theater Review: YOU CAN’T FAKE THE FUNK (A JOURNEY THROUGH FUNK MUSIC) (Black Ensemble Theater in Chicago)
PUTTING THE FUN IN FUNK Taking us as far from death as is humanly possible, some shows just reward you for being alive. In perhaps their most joyous musical celebration yet, the 43-year-old Black Ensemble Theater continues its “Legends and Lessons” season with a major party: You Can’t Fake the Funk (A Journey Through Funk Music) is…
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Theater Review: STRAIGHT (Loud Fridge Theatre Group in San Diego)
WALKING THE STRAIGHT LINE 1982’s groundbreaking film Making Love gave us our first cinematic look at a man torn between the woman he loves and the man who fulfills his needs. Since then, we have been many such stories in the arts about one who genuinely cares about an opposite-gender partner while feeling incomplete because…
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Theater Review: INTO THE WOODS (Hollywood Bowl)
THRIVING WOODS Somewhere between “Once Upon a Time” and “Happily Ever After” there is a very adult world of tests, losses, disappointments, and grief. Despite this, we assert our agency; or as a baker’s wife sings in Into the Woods, “If you know what you want, then you go and you find it, and you get…
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Theater Review: ANOTHER ROLL OF THE DICE (North Coast Rep in San Diego)
LESSER LOESSER Well, here’s a jukebox musical just bursting at the seams with promise. And North Coast Rep’s production of Another Roll of the Dice is definitely kinda cute, a far cry from the overblown, disappointing jukeboxers we’re forced to endure. It may get a life at regional theaters with subscription audiences who thrive on…
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Theater Review: THE SPITFIRE GRILL (American Blues Theater at Stage 773 in Chicago)
SECOND CHANCES NEED SECOND ACTS Sit — and calm — down and make yourself at show. A captivating work extolling rural redemption, The Spitfire Grill, a 2001 musical of the 1995 film, shows how, if a wound goes deep, even the healing is bound to hurt. Its tender focus is on a female parolee who…
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Theater Review: MISS SAIGON (National Tour)
IT USED TO BE A MISS; NOW, THE HEAT IS ON IN SAIGON Infinitely stronger than the original Broadway outing, this national tour of Miss Saigon overcomes a still strangely muddled plot, some awkward sophomoric lyrics by Richard Maltby, Jr. and Alain Boublil, and a few scenes and songs that could be cut with no…
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Theater Review: THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX (The Old Globe in San Diego)
DESPEREAUX TIMES CALL FOR DESPEREAUX MEASURES More precious than profound, this new family musical is pure children’s theater with multilayered storytelling and plenty of songs that aid in exposition. The world premiere at The Old Globe is delightful, even if there are some flaws in the arc that keep the show from building in suspense….
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Theater Review: TRUE WEST (Steppenwolf)
SIBLING WARFARE Can lightning strike again after 37 years? In 1982 Steppenwolf Theatre Company put itself on the map with a landmark staging of Sam Shepard’s domestic disruption True West starring Jeff Perry, John Malkovich, and Gary Sinise (in the Broadway transfer). Nearly two generations later, it’s back — in a rightly reckless reprise directed by…
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Theater Review: THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG (National Tour)
THE PLAY ABOUT THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG GOES WRONG The title of this play is brutally honest ’” and you can’t say you weren’t warned. In the style of Monty Python and Michael Frayn’s farce Noises Off (an infinitely cleverer romp), The Play That Goes Wrong, a 2015 London hit written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and…
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Theater Review: PASSION (Custom Made Theatre Company in San Francisco)
A PASSIONATE PASSION Stephen Sondheim’s Passion is less a work of art than it is an art piece and the Custom Made Theatre Co., in its lovely and elegant chamber version, treats it as such. It is the jewel in the Sondheim canon, exquisite to some, an oddity to others, and it contains some of…
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