Royal George Theatre
Chicago
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The blaring lights, goose-stepping, and anti-Semitic lyrics in the opening number of this new musical promise a lot more than the rest of the night delivers, said Jonathan Abarbanel in TheaterMania​.com. With Whoopi Goldberg among its producers and a cast “over-the-top with talent,” this show about the rise to pop stardom of two pretty white-supremacist teenagers never disappoints as spectacle: It offers “100 minutes of slam-bang, high-tech, rock-concert-style wizardry.” But the satire and the story fall flat. Matte O’Brien’s script provides only “the flimsiest reason” why Eva and Eden Siller became neo-Nazis, and Max, their “amoral and cynical” producer, comes off as little more than a cartoon villain.
It shouldn’t be that hard to rework the book to make it a “more credible cautionary tale,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. The sisters played by Mackenzie Mauzy and Emily Padgett are based, after all, on a pair of real-life California twins who gained attention in the early 2000s for pairing catchy pop songs and racist lyrics. “Predictably enough, various media outlets expressed outrage while simultaneously ensuring that their cameras focused aplenty” on the eye-catching girls. If White Noise satirized the sensationalist media that nurtures such hatred, it might have a chance to make some noise with a move up to Broadway. For now, though, its message is merely that Nazis are bad—something “most of us have figured out.”
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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.