Reviews
Mosaic’s Madman Blessed With Ken Clement’s Tour De Force
The deteriorating orbit into insanity is tracked with impressive skill and infinite variety in Ken Clement’s bravura tour de force as the government drone Poprishchin under Richard Jay Simon’s direction in Mosaic Theatre’s 12th season opener, The Diary of a Madman.
Andrews’ Steel Magnolias Touches Hearts With Pathos, Fails To Nail Whipcrack Humor
What continues to enchant critics who have to see more productions of Steel Magnolias than most civilians is what a truly funny, finely observed and genuinely touching script that Robert Harling constructed back in 1987. What’s different about Andrews Living Arts Studio’s uneven new production is that, atypically, it’s the pathos that works far better than the comedy.
AAPACT Dutchman Starts Too Slowly; Finishes In Blazing Anger
The script of Dutchman, Amiri Bakara’s classic 1964 play of racial and sexual politics, crackles with the explosive rage that Langston Hughes’ predicted in “A Dream Deferred.” The fact that this production doesn’t find that passion or electricity until two-thirds of the way through the 40-minute play doesn’t prevent the audience from appreciating Bakara’s themes or enjoying the laudable aspirations of the ambitious production.
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.
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