Harker Jones - Page 3

With the state of the world these days, we need a heroine like Annie. With her positive outlook, her moxie, she should be a role model of hopefulness. We just need a better Annie. And Annie deserves a better vehicle.

The set-up of BROKEN STORY is interesting, it just never catches fire in this lackluster production.

It doesn’t help that director Matthew Dunster plays much of Danny Robins’ script for laughs when it could have been amping up some suspense. It would have been more cohesive and had a bigger impact if it hadn’t played as a comedy for most of its 2-hour run time, though it wouldn’t have been enough to make the story land.

The show is a blistering expose of a political campaign and the tenuous loyalty, fierce ambition and blinding hubris that takes place every day in every office across the country.

The ’80s are remembered as the most fun decade in recent memory but they were rife with strife and upheaval that affected everyone, even if they were living in a Broadway bubble, and this show looks back with clear-eyed, unsentimental affection.

EVERYBODY, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ contemporary riff on a 15th-century morality play, is a creative and chaotic allegory about Christian salvation which is, in the end, an uneven production for the usually consistent Antaeus Theatre Company. 

This is a sensitively crafted and introspective drama is. It isn’t easy to watch, but it can be cathartic.

Bridging the 1985 original with the contemporary leaves one with a sense of disconnection

In the end, the pathos that jut through the humor are jagged and piercing, leaving audiences with a lingering sense of both emptiness and hope, like a light flashed on and off in a dark room, the afterimage seared onto the memory.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM is given a fresh spin by the Open Fist Theatre Company, changing the setting from Athens, Greece, to Athens, Georgia, in the antebellum South to mixed results.

What did our critic think? Audiences can’t help but compare and contrast, especially when the production is jumping through hoops to remind us of what made the film special. That becomes a bigger problem when the show itself fails on its own merits. While remaining faithful to its source material, PRETTY WOMAN lacks all of the fizz that made the film such a sensation.

The show couldn’t be more relevant today. The world feels like a hopeless place so much of the time that it’s difficult to remember that in the end, we’re all connected and need each other to get by. Perhaps that’s why COME FROM AWAY is so poignant. It reminds of us our own humanity and the need for that in others.

The absorbing script by S. Asher Gelman tries to take on the insensitivity and transitory nature of dating in the age of the internet and hook-up apps, though in the end, it’s really about the more organic and timeless issues of humans just trying to connect.

Edward Albee’s Tony Award–winning play about discontent and despair in 1960s academia is brought to blazing, blistering life by director Gordon Greenberg at the Geffen Playhouse, its themes and anxieties as relevant as ever on its 60th anniversary. Read our critic's review.

Read our critic's review. TOOTSIE is a contemporary take on an old trope: a man unconvincingly passes himself off as a woman, everyone in his world buys it, and hilarity tries to ensue. It's been done countless times, going back past Shakespeare to the ancient Greeks. That doesn't mean it always works, however, and TOOTSIE is a mixed bag.

Pulitzer Prize nominee Tanya Barfield’s brilliant BRIGHT HALF LIFE is smartly and artfully realized by director Amy K. Harmon, adding up to another solid project from The Road Theatre, which consistently stages challenging and rewarding productions.

Its warnings of the trappings of materialism and conformity are universal and timeless.

The script is amusing, moving with sparkling briskness. The characters are defined and distinct, and the performers bring them to life in energetic and well-modulated ways. And while the meaning of life isn’t necessarily unveiled, it is sought and the intertwining relationships do find both unique destinations and common ground.

The smash hit LOVE ACTUALLY LIVE sparkles like a tree full of ornaments on Christmas Eve at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.

Saint Clare of Assisi’s story of devotion, austerity, and understanding, while at first glance not comedic, is brought to vivid and laugh-out-loud life by playwright Chiara Atik.