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REVIEWSREVIEWS BYTheatre ReviewsTom Williams
Tom Williams

Homecoming 1972

Chicago Dramatists, the playwrights’ theatre, has a 34 year history of developing and mounting new works. Their latest, Homecoming 1972 by Robert Koon is a nicely acted slice of life of life about the physical and emotional effects of war on a small town average guy. The work is played out in a series of two person scenes. The setting is in a small Minnesota town circa 1972 that finds Frank (Matt Holzfeind) as a physically wounded (bad back) and emotionally scared Vietnam veteran struggling to come to terms with the mundane simple world of rural Minnesota upon his return from the tram of War.

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London ReviewsMusic ReviewsPop/Rock/FolkREVIEWSREVIEWS BYSaul Reichlin
Tom Williams

Juliet Lawson, Songs From a Suitcase

Delving into her past, Juliet Lawson brings forth from her suitcase, songs and memories, as she says, ‘of angst and passion, with a smattering of self deprecation, humour and other delights’.

In the warm and intimate atmosphere of the Rosemary Branch Theatre, the soulful style and bittersweet wit and rhyme of Miss Lawson, brought sighs of appreciation from her faithful audience, and in numbers like ‘Is It Really You?’, ‘What a Waste Of a Woman’, and ‘At the Sign Of The Fallen Angel’, some truly wonderful songs are on show.

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London ReviewsREVIEWSREVIEWS BYSaul ReichlinTheatre Reviews
Tom Williams

The Hare And The Tortoise And Other Tales From Aesop

The enduring tradition and reputation of Movingstage Marionette Company, more popularly known as the Puppet Theatre Barge, founded by Gren Middleton and Juliet Rogers, and moored at Little Venice, is further enhanced by the engaging production of The Hare And The Tortoise, and six other Aesop fables. The enormous repertoire of the company, now in its 34th year, features captivating marionettes and staging by Middleton and Roberts.

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REVIEWSREVIEWS BYTheatre ReviewsTom Williams
Tom Williams

The Electric Baby

…the story was a convoluted intertwined mixture of people bound indirectly by loss. The players mostly over played their characters, especially Amanda Powell as Rosie. Add the over use of Romanian (Gypsy?) folklore against African folklore and we listen to so many age-old aphorisms and truisms that the story seemed to be interrupted by playwright’s need to send us into her world of metaphors Add the moon symbol and, of course, the electric baby and we put the story in second place.

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Tom Williams

The Misanthrope

As stuffed full of well-measured comedic performances and lush production values as you are likely to see anytime soon, Newell’s Misanthrope feels as hedonistically indulgent as any French courtier. Like an opulent Parisian banquet (or a drag ball in Harlem), it’s strengths are in its cultivation of the surface’s glittering allure. And in never deigning to take itself as seriously as Alceste takes himself, this production still manages to probe deeper than any hair-brained philosophy.

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Tom Williams

In the Company of Men

But if the consciously gray moral tones of Snyder’s production strike us as being overly conciliatory toward its anti-heroes, we should realize that it offers us something decidedly more interesting than its sharp moral disapproval. By opening us up to the subtle seductions of the rakish mindset, In the Company of Men dislodges us from the place where moral judgements feel simply automatic. Rather, we are afforded the opportunity to see our own objections for what they are: the strident disapproval of a middle-class railing against its self-proclaimed ‘betters.’

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MUST SEEREVIEWSREVIEWS BYTheatre ReviewsTom Williams
Tom Williams

Reverb

Without giving away too much, let me state that Reverb is a complex character study as well as a unique lover story that exposes the give new meaning to the term ” reverb. ” It demonstrates the power of wrath on relationships. Reverb is, indeed, a Chicago style in-your-face raw drama. Director Jonathan Berry told me that playwright Leslye Headland turned down a New York City production believing that Chicago actors and storefront theatres would do her work justice. That became a reality with Berry’s tightly nuanced production

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Tom Williams

Speech & Debate

American Theater Company’s Artistic Director PJ Paparelli has remounted Stephen Karam’s 2007 teen comedy Speech & Debate five years after ATC gave the play its original Chicago premiere. Featuring three hyper-articulate teen misfits as they learn to navigate early adulthood in the so-called “information age,” Paparelli’s current staging is still likably funny and warmhearted even as it continues to ask adult questions about privacy, self-expression, and being comfortable in one’s skin.

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