Reviews
GableStage’s Ruined Is Powerful Tale of Atrocities and Suvival
GableStage’s powerful Ruined examines our species’ simultaneous capacity for a bottomless cruelty absent in animals and an inextinguishable humanity that borders on divinity. This engrossing rendition of Lynn Nottage’s play about people struggling to survive the hellish civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo also has a duality. It is one of the finest pieces of local theater seen this season, featuring superb acting, notably from Lela Elam as an indomitable owner of a bar/brothel.
Alliance’s Home Sweet Funeral Home Is Imaginative If Uneven
A group of loopy scenarios fuel eight daffy short plays by local playwrights thumbing their nose at Death in an often funny if markedly uneven collection commissioned by the Alliance Theatre Lab entitled Home Sweet Funeral Home.
New Theatre’s Collection Keeping A-Breast Is Intriguing, Heartfelt But Badly Uneven
The success of theater often depends on the audience plugging in their own experiences to enhance what’s happening on stage. So perhaps part of this reviewer’s hot-and-cold reception of Keeping A-Breast at New Theatre – an earnest, heartfelt examination of the agonizing upheaval resulting from breast cancer – is because I’m a man.
Plaza Theatre’s Irving Berlin Songbook Will Please The Greatest Generation
In Irving Berlin Salutes America at The Plaza Theatre, four capable performers plus the pianist/ arranger delivered the musical equivalent of a familiar old down comforter and a hot toddy for a nightcap. There was nothing electrifying, no fresh insights for those born after World War II, just an unabashedly pleasant, entertaining evening and that’s what the audience wanted.
Island City Stage ‘s 20th Century Way Is Dizzying Swirl Of Ideas
Island City Stage’s The Twentieth Century Way is an intellectual theater game worthy of Pirandello or Stoppard in which facets swirl at such a dizzying speed that individual ideas become too blurry to discern.All you can do is admire the chameleonic agility of the actors, the dexterity of the playwright and watch a particle of light careen around the mirrored facets inside a gem, unable to track what is happening more than fleeting seconds.
Special Theater Shelf Extra: Gorging on Gershwin
Sometimes it seems George Gershwin isn’t gone at all. Even now, Broadway is blessed with the revival of Porgy and Bess and the new Nice Work If You Can Get It. In regional theater, hardly a month goes by without …
Naked Stage’s Turn of the Screw Is Superbly-Crafted Ghost Story
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James’ psychological thriller gets a superbly accomplished production as The Naked Stage’s first outing in almost two years featuring flawless performances by Katherine Amadeo and Matthew William Chizever, and director Margaret M. Ledford deftly creating a world of half-shadows and whispers.
Mad Cat’s Hamlet Dog and Pony Show Makes You Laugh, Think and Scratch Your Head
Playwrights Paul Tei and Jessica Farr’s Hamlet Dog and Pony Show at ad Cat Theatreis a stylized mashup of Shakespeare, Brecht and 21st Century performance art that examines existentialism versus nihilism by setting the vacillating Dane in a fantasia of modern American politics and power. Like an atom careening around a chain reaction, it is by turns inventive, self-indulgent, exciting, boring, and, above all, sometimes insightful, sometimes incomprehensible. And entertaining.
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