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This new concert-style musical all but resurrects Janis Joplin, said Missy Frederick in Washingtonian.com. Mary Bridget Davies’s voice is “so raw, so powerful, and so eerily similar” to that of the late singer that the audience is transported back to that tumultuous era when the ’60s rock legend was at the height of her powers. The story, by writer/director Randy Johnson, is largely told through 24 songs, but we do get “brief, often poignant glimpses” of Joplin’s inner life as she talks about her East Texas upbringing and the profound debt she owes to the black blues singers she heard as a child. The concert format could have made for a show that lacked real drama, but Davies’s magnetic stage presence, so uncannily like Joplin’s, “packs one mighty punch.”
It’s important to note what Johnson’s story omits, said Peter Marks in The Washington Post. Joplin died from a heroin overdose at 27, but “the only acknowledgement of her drug and alcohol addictions is a bottle of hooch from which she takes a single swig.” Still, the show “sure sounds good.” Davies is sometimes accompanied by Sabrina Elayne Carten who, displaying “a variety of vocal gifts,” plays several of the divas who influenced Joplin. The scenes that segue from Carten’s credible portrayals of Nina Simone or Odetta to the next blues-tinged song by Joplin are “some of the production’s most rewarding.” You might wish for deeper insight into the singer’s self-destructive tendencies, but it’s hard to complain when Davies is up there “practically surrendering a lung for you.”
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Corruption: The spy sheikh and the presidentFeature Trump is at the center of another scandal
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If/Thenfeature Tony-winning Idina Menzel “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents.
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Rocky
feature It’s a wonder that this Rocky ever reaches the top of the steps.
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Love and Information
feature Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span.”
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The Bridges of Madison County
feature Jason Robert Brown’s “richly melodic” score is “one of Broadway’s best in the last decade.”
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Outside Mullingar
feature John Patrick Shanley’s “charmer of a play” isn’t for cynics.
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The Night Alive
feature Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension.”
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No Man’s Land
feature The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written.”
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The Commons of Pensacola
feature Stage and screen actress Amanda Peet's playwriting debut is a “witty and affecting” domestic drama.