The Good GermanPlaywright and novelist David Wiltse is defeated by his daunting subject -- the Holocaust -- in his new play "The Good German." Although there is much fact (probably too much) woven into the play, neither its basic situation nor its characters have the ring of theatrical truth. The play is more a stilted tract than a living piece of theater.7/2/2003 2:03am PT
The Threepenny OperaThe same week that Macheath escaped hanging in the Broomhill Opera's South African adaptation of John Gay's 1728 "The Beggar's Opera" at New Haven's Intl. Festival of Arts & Ideas, Macheath was reprieved at the Williamstown Theater Festival. If only the production had the brio, imagination and brevity of the South African offering.7/1/2003 12:04am PT
Nijinsky's Last DanceIf ever an actor deserved an A for effort, it's Jeremy Davidson in the Berkshire Theater Festival's technically brilliant production of Norman Allen's one-man play/monologue "Nijinsky's Last Dance," in which Davidson gives his all for nearly 90 highly physical minutes. He shows his all, too, in an extended nude scene in which the legendary Russian ballet dancer Nijinsky poses for and apparently has sex with the sculptor Rodin (although the dancer's mentor and lover, the impresario Diaghilev, soon put a stop to that). Yet for all the strengths of the play, actor and production, the audience never gets beneath the surface of historic facts about Nijinsky. Davidson, a thoroughly modern, American-sounding and -looking man with a superb physique and nary a suggestion of neurosis, never for a moment evokes the early 20th century Russian ballet dancer of Polish extraction, "an odd, strange boy" who ultimately succumbed to insanity.</B>
6/27/2003 1:44am PT
Ibali Ioo Tsotsi (The Beggar's Opera)The primarily South African Broomhill Opera, whose London home is the restored Wilton's Music Hall, saw great success at last summer's Intl. Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven with its South African interpretation of the Chester Mystery Plays, which it has toured internationally.6/25/2003 6:40pm PT
Enter LaughingIt's 40 years since "Enter Laughing" was the vehicle for the ascent to stardom by Alan Arkin. The backstage comedy was never a great play. It hasn't improved with age, and the Berkshire Theater Festival's revival gets its 75th season off to a less than salubrious start. "Enter Laughing" is definitely the sort of play they don't write anymore.6/23/2003 6:42pm PT
The Sound of a VoiceAlthough they do offer musical and visual pleasures, these two new chamber operas by Philip Glass and David Henry Hwang are not convincing examples of East-West fusion. Glass' score makes good use of non-Western instruments. But the score's talk-sung style and the supertitles serve to underline the lack of subtlety in Hwang's libretto.6/23/2003 6:37pm PT
Much Ado About NothingShakespeare meets the Mafia in 1950s Sicily in Shakespeare & Co.'s new production of "Much Ado About Nothing." At nearly three hours it's too long, and it has a weak performance in an important role. On the other hand, its text is clearly and meaningfully projected. Mafia or no, here's an "Ado" that for the most part entertains handsomely.6/23/2003 6:32pm PT
SalomeThe play, the opera, the reading and now "Salome" the one-woman show. French actress Guandaline Sagliocco has taken her one-hander to several arts festivals since its debut in 1990. Now it is part of this year's eighth annual New Haven Intl. Festival of Arts & Ideas. Unfortunately, the childlike rendering doesn't have much of an impact.6/22/2003 8:20pm PT
Me and My GirlAge and experience count, as is being most entertainingly proved by a posse of veteran character actors led by M'el Dowd and Bob Dorian in "Me and My Girl." Gray of hair they may be, but these old-timers are stealing the scene from the show's younger generation. Add the inventiveness of director Scott Schwartz and you have, despite its limitations, a production that projects happiness.6/19/2003 6:20pm PT
The Long Christmas Ride HomeProfoundly sad and shot through with fiercely beautiful writing, "The Long Christmas Ride Home" is Paula Vogel's 23rd play. With its adventurous blend of puppets, live actors and Japanese theatrical elements, it's also Vogel's most daring work -- and one of her best. It's one of most absorbing evenings in the theater to come along in some time.6/18/2003 9:25pm PT
Hay FeverIf you like your Noel Coward without an ounce of subtlety, the Westport Country Playhouse has opened its summer season with a real treat for you -- Darko Tresnjak's bulldozer production of the young Coward's 1925 comedy of bad manners, "Hay Fever." Here's a production that gives overacting a bad name. Even the wigs are out of control.6/18/2003 9:14pm PT
Phantom PalaceNew Haven's annual Intl. Festival of Arts & Ideas has taken a bold step in commissioning its first opera. And even if the end result, "Phantom Palace," is less than compelling, festival director Mary Miller is to be applauded for exposing fest audiences to the contemporary music of Mexican-born, English-trained composer Hilda Paredes and the bold vocal explorations of Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart.6/17/2003 6:58pm PT
The Night of the IguanaAll praise to Annalee Jefferies, whose gentle strength as homeless Nantucket spinster Hannah Jelkes is the still, small voice of humanity at the heart of Tennessee Williams' 1961 sex-and-religion melodrama "The Night of the Iguana" and the saving grace of Michael Wilson's otherwise overwrought, ear-splitting revival.6/3/2003 3:06pm PT
The Fly-BottleToronto-based Harvard philosophy graduate David Egan certainly jumped in the deep end when he decided on an incident involving philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell as the basis of his first play. It's to the credit of Egan and the premiere production of his play that the results are as persuasive as they are.5/29/2003 1:28pm PT
The Black Monk"Curiouser and curiouser" aptly sums up David Rabe's adaptation of Chekhov's story "The Black Monk," itself a curiosity, and director Daniel Fish's odd staging for the Yale Repertory Theater. Why did Rabe decide to dramatize it? And why did Sam Waterston opt to play a supporting role in it? At least Rabe isn't repeating himself.5/26/2003 4:37pm PT
Springtime for HenryFirst seen on Broadway in 1931, Benn Levy's sex comedy "Springtime for Henry" provided welcome light relief from the Depression. Now it's been revived by Boston's resident Huntington with the avowed hope that it will relieve our current depression. It is indeed light, even frivolous. But it's also fun and, at its best, as when the quips are flying, it brings to mind Coward and Wilde.5/26/2003 4:37pm PT
PericlesAndrei Serban is by no means the first director to give Shakespeare's late romance "Pericles" the full fairy-tale treatment. But in this American Repertory Theater production he does so with such pleasurable panache and style that the play springs to kaleidoscopic life.5/21/2003 5:27pm PT
DiosaInspired by the 1946 Rita Hayworth film "Gilda," Edwin Sanchez has attempted to write a play about the trials and tribulations of Latin performers in Hollywood during the period. But his fictionalized life of Margarita Carmen Cansino, who eventually became "screen goddess" Hayworth, is a failure. "Diosa" -- Spanish for goddess -- is, put simply, amateurish.4/27/2003 3:32pm PT
Two DaysIt's perfectly reasonable to be sadly disappointed by Donald Margulies' two one-act plays "Two Days." The longer of the two, "July 7, 1994," barely achieves medical soap-opera status, while "Last Tuesday" is mostly an irritating cacophony of cell-phone conversations aboard a train that quite fails to illuminate its apparently serious theme.4/20/2003 3:58pm PT
The Taming of the ShrewMark Lamos, Connecticut's most experienced Shakespeare director, has turned his hand to "The Taming of the Shrew" for the Yale Repertory Theater, giving the comedy a contemporary barrio setting and an all-male cast. The result isn't great Shakespeare (neither is the play), but it is divertingly good-natured, and spirals into slapstick.3/30/2003 5:34pm PT
Tom StoppardThe self-described "bounced Czech" of playwrights and screenwriters, Tom Stoppard has long believed that biographies are impossibilities. He contends that "the past could not be reproduced, only invented," to quote Canadian critic and biographer Ira Nadel's introduction to his invaluable "Tom Stoppard: A Life."3/30/2003 5:00am PT
A New War"A New War" was a big hit when first seen in October at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater on Cape Cod, and Gip Hoppe's lampoon of cable TV saturation coverage of a war "in the near future" could scarcely be more topical in its current transfer to Jimmy Tingle's Off Broadway in the Boston suburb of Somerville.3/25/2003 6:37pm PT
2 LivesOne of the title characters in Arthur Laurents' new play, "2 Lives," is an 80-year-old gay playwright, suggesting the play has partly autobiographical dimensions. Why then is it so puzzlingly opaque?3/20/2003 4:13pm PT
Paper DollGive Mark Hampton and Barbara J. Zitwer a point or two for sheer chutzpah. In their biographical wallowing in the life of Jacqueline Susann, they have dared to be as trashy as Susann was in her bestselling novels. Maybe the biggest joke, unfortunately, is that "Paper Doll" isn't really a play at all. It's a series of emotionless monologues.3/18/2003 12:44am PT
Highway UlyssesCommissioned from Rinde Eckert by the American Repertory Theater, "Highway Ulysses" is a music-theater work with operatic aspirations that more often than not achieves them. It's at its best when being sung, even though its deliberately archaic-sounding music is as much heightened speech and chant as actual song.3/11/2003 5:53pm PT
The Trip to BountifulThe stage version of Horton Foote's 1953 teleplay "The Trip to Bountiful" failed to prosper in either its late-1953 Broadway production or a 1959 Off Broadway stint. Now it's receiving a 50th-anniversary production, but the passing years have only exacerbated its simplicity and "sudsy woes," to quote the Chicago Tribune's Claudia Cassidy.2/27/2003 4:00pm PT
The Psychic Life of SavagesWhat is Amy Freed's "The Psychic Life of Savages''? Parody, spoof, black comedy? Surely it is not meant to be a serious attempt to illuminate the fine line between poetic genius and madness, as inspired by the lives of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell. This production suggests "Saturday Night Live" on a bad night.2/20/2003 7:41pm PT
Sixteen WoundedEliam Kraiem's first play, "Sixteen Wounded," holds out no hope for any resolution of the endlessly appalling Israel-Palestine conflict. It bleakly suggests that mutual hatreds are far, far too deeply rooted. Unfortunately, Kraiem's fraught subject has not been handled with sufficient skill.2/13/2003 6:32pm PT
Nickel & DimedSomething has gone seriously wrong with Joan Holden's play after its apparently well-received premiere last year by Seattle's Intiman Theater (which commissioned it) in association with L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum.2/11/2003 4:59pm PT
La DisputeMarivaux is filtered through the contemporary sensibilities of translator Gideon Lester and adapter-director Anne Bogart in this new production of "La Dispute." Very chic visually, and with an almost too powerful performance by SITI's Ellen Lauren to propel it, it ultimately seems pointless and also dated in a retro avant-garde way.2/11/2003 4:37pm PT
ElectraArea stages are awash with blood, all in the service of Greek tragedies. On Broadway it's Euripides' "Medea." At the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., it's his "The Children of Herakles." Now, hard on the heels of Eugene O'Neill's "Mourning Becomes Electra," comes Sophocles' "Electra" at Hartford Stage.1/21/2003 5:12pm PT
Straight Face, The AutobiographySix bottles of Guinness and Joan Littlewood changed Nigel Hawthorne's life forever, the late actor claims in the lively autobiography he wrote while battling cancer and completed just days before dying last Dec. 26. "I owe everything to her," he says of legendary British director Littlewood, who also died recently, crediting her for his career.1/21/2003 4:47pm PT
The Blue DemonHuntington Theater Co. artistic director Nicholas Martin says he was "utterly beguiled" by a free, open-air, non-Equity version of this fairy tale at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 1998. But moved indoors, at a $64 top ticket price, with an Equity cast and lavish production values, "The Blue Demon" is more tedious than beguiling.1/16/2003 8:15pm PT
The Children of HeraklesAccording to director Peter Sellars, the first performance of Euripides' "The Children of Herakles" in Athens in 430 B.C. "served as a town meeting about refugee issues." In light of the world's current overwhelming refugee issues, it is that aspect of this seldom-produced Greek tragedy that he attempts to emulate in his modern-dress production.1/14/2003 5:51pm PT
Fighting WordsThe death-by-boxing of Welsh champion Johnny Owen was the inspiration for playwright Sunil Thomas Kuruvilla's "Fighting Words," a more complete piece of playwriting than his "Rice Boy," produced by Yale Repertory Theater two seasons ago. It's also a more effective production, with potent perfs and aptly tough staging by Liz Diamond.12/4/2002 8:02pm PT
Mourning Becomes ElectraSuch is the visceral power of Eugene O'Neill's writing that it burns through this severely cut, ultimately inadequate production of the playwright's massive "Mourning Becomes Electra," directed by Long Wharf Theater's new a.d. Gordon Edelstein and previously seen at Seattle's ACT.12/1/2002 7:43pm PT
Spider-Man Live!Here comes "Spider-Man Live!," a "stunt spectacular" aimed at preteen boys. Primarily a combo of gymnastics, aerial acrobatics, martial arts and carefully choreographed wrestling and street fighting, plus a lot of explosions and crashes, it's lively enough to do well on its apparently lengthy planned road tour.11/19/2002 4:30pm PT
King of HeartsFrom time to time, Goodspeed Musicals comes to the rescue of underdog musicals, as it's doing twofold with a mainstage "King of Hearts" and a second-stage development production of a new version of "The Baker's Wife", both of which are set in France. There's always hope, these revivals seldom, if ever, reveal a lost jewel.11/18/2002 1:38pm PT
Adult EntertainmentThe moral of "Adult Entertainment," Elaine May's shambles of a new play, is this: Never expose your bird-brained porn stars to literature. Why? Because they'll soon start talking about metaphors and motivation while worrying about Emily in "Our Town," and you'll never again be able to churn out 75 porn pics a year.11/11/2002 2:57pm PT
Going NativeThe trouble with writing a play about how trivial gay men can be is that the end result might well end up being trivial. Steven Drukman hasn't avoided that trap in his first play, "Going Native," premiering on Long Wharf Theater's intimate second stage.11/6/2002 7:20pm PT
MartyIn the nearly half-century since Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty" first won the hearts of audiences, the world has become a far less simplistic place. As a result, Chayefsky's tale about the love affair between two wallflowers, first televised in 1953 and filmed in 1955, now seems naive and dated.11/4/2002 7:21pm PT
Edgardo MinePerhaps the oddest aspect of Alfred Uhry's disappointing new play "Edgardo Mine" is that he has chosen to write about a deeply serious 19th century Vatican scandal in a comedic vein, presenting the play's narrator and primary villain, Pope Pius IX, as a sort of standup comic.11/3/2002 7:40pm PT
Fever! A Tribute to Miss Peggy LeeClub singer Lezlie Anders believes that the late Peggy Lee, to whom she has been compared, was "the most important woman in American music." Anders and her husband of 11 years, Buddy Greco, have created and star in a musical tribute to Lee featuring the Benny Goodman Tribute Big Band and the Judy Bayley Dancers.10/8/2002 5:16pm PT
Dracula: A Chamber MusicalRichard Ouzounian and Marek Norman's vampire tuner, which ran for six months at Canada's Stratford Festival in 1999, is unlikely to repeat such success in the U.S., at least in the unfortunate production director Barry Ivan has provided for the big in-the-round North Shore Music Theater in Beverly, Mass.10/8/2002 3:57pm PT
Bobrauschenberg-americaRather than a scripted play, Anne Bogart's production of "Bobrauschenbergamerica" is a visual and aural montage that attempts to create an overview of America as seen through the eyes of pop and assemblage artist Robert Rauschenberg.10/2/2002 3:06pm PT
Same Time, Next YearTime hasn't been kind to "Same Time, Next Year" since Ellen Burstyn and Charles Grodin created Doris and George, its once-a-year lovers, on Broadway in 1975. Its six scenes that cover 24 years (from 1951 to 1975) seem dated today. And though likeable Mackenzie Phillips and Adrian Zmed work hard in this touring revival of it, they lack the charisma and charm needed to make the play's basic situation believable.9/26/2002 9:00pm PT
Medea/Macbeth/CinderellaAn attempt at an extravagant theatrical tour de force that bombs isn't the best way for a new artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater and dean of the Yale School of Drama to introduce himself. But such is the case with Bill Rauch and Tracy Young's unfortunate "Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella."9/26/2002 3:14pm PT
Spinning Into ButterWith an all-Equity cast of New York-based actors and a beautiful set, "Spinning Into Butter" more than lives up to TheaterWorks' ambitions. This is an assured, sensitively cast, produced and directed production with a splendid performance by Henny Russell in the central role. It would stand tall on any resident theater's stage anywhere.9/24/2002 5:10pm PT
Same Time, Next YearTime hasn't been kind to "Same Time, Next Year." Although likeable Mackenzie Phillips and Adrian Zmed work hard and honorably in this unsubtly directed touring revival of it, they lack the charisma and charm needed to make the play's basic situation, and their characters' personality changes, believable.9/22/2002 1:16pm PT
Much Ado About NothingFormer Hartford Stage a.d. Mark Lamos opens the company's 39th season with this anyone-for-tennis? staging of Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing." Set mostly in the garden of an English country house in the 1920s, this "Ado" looks glossily expensive and is clearly and intelligently spoken, complete with a variety of English accents.9/18/2002 1:05pm PT