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Some called him a prophet. When he died of AIDS-related causes in 1997, more than a million people attended his funeral.

And now Fela lives. At least as long as Tony nominee Sahr Ngaujah is playing him on stage, the Afrobeat pioneer and political activist from Nigeria is brought to life in an astonishing performance. Ngaujah sings with his explosive band, grabbing a sax and taking the instrumental lead on several occasions. He dances with his “queens” and vamps effortlessly with the crowd in a show designed to portray the final show ever at his Lagos nightclub, The Shrine. He rouses the audience with his story of fierce activism in trying to change his corrupt government, even in the face of immense persecution and personal loss. Read the rest of this entry »

Pat Whalen and Andrew Swanson

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Jackalope’s latest is a taut pas de deux that examines life’s banal cruelty. The piece’s central issue (do you know who you are?) transforms into the larger, more sinister question: Does anybody know anyone?

Royall (Andrew Burden Swanson) waits for the arrival of actor Gerry (Pat Whalen), who hopes to rent Royall’s lake house. The interview digresses to wide-ranging tangents concerning  survival and sacrifice. Read the rest of this entry »

Emily Shain, Nathaniel Swift, John Wehrman/Photo: Scott Cooper

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Eugene O’Neill’s work takes patience; the playwright often says the same things over and over in the bleakest way possible. But if you can stick it out, his insights carry a big payoff.

Robert (John Wehrman) looks forward to leaving the family farm and traveling the world at sea. But once he confesses his love for Ruth (Emily Shain), plans change and brother Andrew (Nathaniel Swift) takes his place. Subsequent years follow the brothers struggling at jobs they never wanted and failing to attain their goals. Read the rest of this entry »

Justin Adair and Rachel Klippel

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After being developed at the Goodman Theatre almost a decade ago and heading off for a very successful, multi-Tony Award-winning Broadway run, “The Light in the Piazza” is having new life as a regional theater piece.

This is a show with a lot of heart and, as a love story, it succeeds wonderfully well, Adam Guettel’s naively optimistic score serving to intensify the emotions of the characters. The problem has always been with the source material itself: A novella that became a famous movie sans music, the work is shrouded in a mortifying 1950s sense of shame when it comes to mental deficiencies, whether real or imagined. These are things that simply weren’t talked about in those days, and it being the major plot device here reminds us of how far we have mercifully come. Read the rest of this entry »

Carolyn Ann Hoerdemann/Photo: Liz Lauren

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That Barcelona-based Calixto Bieito, the notorious and gloriously radical revisionist director of opera and theater, polarizes audiences is undeniable; it’s not clear that even advance warning will prepare certain minds from displeasure with his first American production, a re-imagination of Tennessee Williams’ “Camino Real” at the Goodman Theatre. At an opening in Goodman’s sister theater a week earlier, I overheard chatter among the snack-bar staff and the ushers, murmuring about unhappy audiences in the other theater. That same day the New York Times profiled the production, writing of an orgy (which turns out to be more bacchanalian euphoria than Penthousian porno) and, well, expectations for mayhem were properly raised for its official debut. So what happened? Read the rest of this entry »

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John Milton is a canonic voice in Western literature but you wouldn’t know it. He’s missing from high-school English courses and passed over in favor of other college electives. That’s why Jonathan Holloway’s update/homage is so compelling; we see how relevant Milton’s themes remain today.

Holloway intersperses segments of Milton’s epic “Paradise Lost,” detailing Adam and Eve’s fall, within the narrative of married businessman Peter (Corey Noble) and nanny Veronica (Anna Robinson) who contemplate and then conduct an affair. The piece charts the descent of man (and woman) as they ignore morality. Read the rest of this entry »

Rich Logan, John Arthur Lewis and Sasha Grishkov/Photo: Ben Fuchsen

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Jean Genet was the literary patron saint of the outcast. A petty thief who spent his youth in juvenile institutions, Genet identified with those on the fringes. “The Maids” exemplifies Genet’s attempts to dramatize the struggle of the oppressed; the piece takes inspiration from the 1933 Papin sisters case, in which two maids murdered their employer and her daughter. Read the rest of this entry »

Kate Buddeke and Kevin Stark/Photo: Liz Lauren

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A powerful work of dystopian agitprop, “The North Plan” depicts a grim and far too plausible nightmare in which America’s Department of Homeland Security is exercising totalitarian powers under the guise of restoring order after some unnamed “incident.” As disturbing as Jason Wells’ play is, it’s just as hilarious. That’s because, in a part that could have been written for her, Kate Buddeke roars and soars as Tanya, a South Missouri redneck who stumbles into a situation far more intense than she imagined when she soberly turned herself in for what would otherwise have been an unobserved act of drunk driving. Though her cellmate is far too serious to match her over-the-top antics, Kevin Stark’s Carlton manages to hold his own as the State Department official “gone rogue” in the name of preserving human rights. Tom Hickey and Brian King, as the DHS agents who take him into their “care,” are frighteningly stern feds channeling Laurel and Hardy. Read the rest of this entry »

Zainab Jah, LeRoy McClain and Pascale Armand/Photo: T Charles Erickson

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There is something decidedly conventional in the structure of playwright Danai Gurira’s “The Convert,” now in a three-way world-premiere production at the Goodman, the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton and Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles. The historical drama, set in Southern Africa during the early days of Victorian British colonialism in what became Rhodesia and later Zimbabwe, centers around a devout Christian catechist and his cultivation of a “savage” into a highly effective protégé, sounds very much like something we’ve all seen before. And its three-act structure and three-hour-fifteen-minute running time are most definitively retrograde in an era of one-act eighty-minute shows. But something more is at work here. Especially novel for the audience of overwhelmingly white and white-haired patrons at the Goodman, I suspect, is the depiction of this world without any Brits (i.e. white characters): No colonialist with a heart of gold, for example, who perceives the true nobility of the savages she’s been sent to simultaneously save and subjugate. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Pacas and Sandy Elias/Photo: Johnny Knight

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Are you a trout or a carp? Believe it or not, it’s a fundamental question in this new play by Jayme McGhan, which leaves no fishing metaphor unturned. The show begins innocently enough as a comedy about a family of fishing enthusiasts in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. But it suddenly becomes deathly serious when the two airline-mechanic brothers Carl and Chucky learn that they’re about to lose everything in a series of layoffs that will affect them as well as 500 of their coworkers. Read the rest of this entry »