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Theater Review: YEN (Raven Theatre in Chicago)
TODAY’S LOST BOYS Theater takes us places and shows us stuff that we might never freely choose to go or see. Exhibits A-Z are Yen, a 2013 visit to Gorki’s “lower depths” by British playwright Anna Jordan. Depicting marginalized misfits in a broken west London neighborhood, Yen impressively manages to both chronicle the outrages of outcasts…
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Theater Review: NOTES FROM THE FIELD (ZACH Theatre | Kleberg Stage in Austin, TX)
GRACE NOTES Now on the Kleberg Stage in Austin, TX, Anna Deavere Smith’s powerful, engrossing and resonant solo play — Notes from the Field — has been updated for four actors by ZACH’s Producing Artistic Director David Steakley. As always, Ms. Smith has crafted a series of first-person portrayals culled from hundreds of her own…
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Theater Review: FAITH HEALER (Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in Los Angeles)
THE BUSINESS OF FAITH The late Irish playwright Brian Friel’s Faith Healer premiered some 40 years ago and is now considered one of his greatest works. It is a memory play with three characters, told in a series of monologues. Frank is an Irish faith healer who takes his one-man show to isolated villages and…
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Theater Review: MELANCHOLY PLAY (Organic Theater Company at The Greenhouse Theater)
PRECIOUS NONSENSE MAKES MELANCHOLY PLAY A FORTRESS OF ARTIFICE If you ever feel “slightly dead,” you may be prey to the temperament of melancholy. Melancholy Play: A Contemporary Farce, a 2002 drama by the prolific and unpredictable Sarah Ruhl, treats the condition with singular intensity, delivering a histrionic polemic on the virtues and perils of…
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Theater Review: INCOGNITO (Son of Semele)
BRAIN CRAMPS One of the brainiest plays since, well, British playwright Nick Payne’s other brainy play, Constellations, Incognito (2014) contains Payne’s usual assortment of short scenes and quantum physics-like, obfuscating construction. But I don’t buy it this time. And not because I don’t get it. (Although I don’t get it.) This is Payne showing off…
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Theater Review: THE WOLVES (Echo Theater Company)
TEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA I’m not really sure if director Alana Dietze could have done anything more with The Wolves, a dramatically inert slice-of-life one act that follows an all-female indoor soccer team over a succession of pre-game warm-ups. Playwright Sarah DeLappe’s Pulitzer-finalist (?!?!?!?!) is awash in the perfect patois of…
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Theater Review: ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST (The Actors’ Gang in Los Angeles)
ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF A PLAY Anarchy is not chaos. The former means “without law” and the latter means “without form.” This is an important distinction to consider in a play that intends to make an argument for anarchy. After a government scandal, a schizoid anarchist poses as certain government officials at a police station in…
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Theater Review: SWEAT (Goodman Theatre)
DIVIDED AND CONQUERED If the American Dream needs an obituary, Lynn Nottage’s 2017 Pulitzer winner is it. If Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty celebrated the power and promise of labor unions, Sweat chronicles a worker’s nightmare. Creating nine palpable characters in crisis, a richly empathetic playwright plunges us into a harrowing tale of deindustrialization in Reading,…
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Theater Review: CATS (National Tour, 2019)
KITTY LITTER If I had my way, the slogan for Cats would be changed from “Now and Forever” to “Not Now, Not Ever.” Even when I saw the show back in the early 80s and again in the early 90s, I simply couldn’t make it through another act and bolted at intermission. After seeing the…
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Theater Review: NO, NO, NANETTE (Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theater in Claremont)
A YES AND NO NANETTE When the 1925 musical No, No, Nanette was revised and remounted in 1971, it was predicted to be a flop by folks in the Biz, but it was the buzz of the season with nostalgia-seeking audiences who were sick of assassinations and war; they were ready for a delightful, carefree…
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Theater Review: A BRONX TALE (North American Tour)
A BRONX CHEER Unpretentious and unpreaching in its streetwise survival lore, the gangster fable A Bronx Tale is, as the name implies, just one of many small sagas from the lesser borough. Now on tour, this 2016 musical has a book by Chazz Palminteri, based on his semi-autobiographical solo show and the 1993 film directed by…
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Theater Review: THE CHOIR OF MAN (National Tour)
IN PRAISE OF THE PUB There’s no need for a plot, three-dimensional characters, or conflicts pending resolution — no, not when the setting and its songs sell themselves from the start. That feel-good premise pays off over 80 minutes in The Choir of Man, a British import now playing Chicago’s Broadway Playhouse on its first…
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Theater Review: STEVE (New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco)
THE BOYS IN THE BLAND “Every day a little death/In the parlor, in the bed.” Thus spake Stephen Sondheim in his waltz time operetta A Little Night Music. And it is not totally frivolous to start a conversation about Mark Gerrard’s interestingly fresh oddball comedy, Steve, with a musical comedy reference since it is about…
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Theater Review: THE JUDAS KISS (Boston Court)
LOVE CONQUERS COMMON SENSE My takeaway about Oscar Wilde in David Hare’s intellectually stimulating but overly static play of ideas, The Judas Kiss, now at Boston Court, is this: The literary genius, raconteur and bon vivant was not the wisest of men, making him largely liable for his own downfall. It may have been that…
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Theater Review: HER PORTMANTEAU (A.C.T.’s Strand Theater)
CARRYING BAGGAGE Although it is written with an almost childlike simplicity, Mfoniso Udofia’s Her Portmanteau tells a wrenching tale of the profound effect that separation creates when a woman who has left her family behind in Nigeria to start a new family in America has to face again her daughter, who has now come to…
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Theater Review: SOUTHERN COMFORT (Pride Films and Plays at the Pride Arts Center)
TRANS-CENDENT Rather than dwell on the similitude of roses, Gertrude Stein might better have said love is love is love. It certainly is in one particular North Side storefront: A 2016 blue-grass musical with a heart and a half is now a warm and winning Chicago premiere from Pride Films and Plays. Southern Comfort offers just…
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Theater Review: TOO MUCH SUN (Indie Chi Productions at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles)
TOO MANY CHOICES If Chekov’s characters could be said to be trapped by society, circumstance, and their own neuroses, the characters in playwright Nicky Silver’s Too Much Sun, now at the Odyssey Theatre, are more spoiled for choice. Money and opportunities give them physical possibilities; the guilt of those who have failed them and their…
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Theater Review: THE CRIPPLE OF INISHMAAN (Antaeus Theatre)
CRIPPLE THE FUN Funny and heartbreaking, Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan is nothing less than a slalom run of emotional ups and downs and plot twists and turns. Antaeus Theatre’s production doesn’t necessarily hug every curve like Olympians, but the many snow jobbing characters in this 1996 dark comedy still leave an impression. As…
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Theater Review: HYPE MAN (Fountain Theatre)
HYPER-ACTIVISM A promising hip-hop group formed by two childhood friends — a white writer and a black hype man — is thrown off its beat by racial tensions in the West Coast premiere of a powerful, funny and meaningful drama: Hype Man by Idris Goodwin. The Fountain Theatre has opened it’s 2019 season with the third…
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Theater Review: WITNESS UGANDA (The Wallis)
WITNESSING UGANDA IS AMAZING, EVEN THOUGH THE SHOW NEEDS WORK Griffin is a young black New York actor in search of more than a career. When he is kicked out of his church choir because he’s gay, it prompts him to join a volunteer program working with orphaned youth in Uganda. Once there in the…
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