Loeb Drama Center
Boston
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Robert Reale and Richard Dresser’s musical about the 86-year “curse” that kept the Boston Red Sox from winning a World Series Championship is a work that “even a Yankee could love,” said Frank Rizzo in Variety. The show posits that the Sox’s decades-long vexation was not the “curse of the Bambino”—said to have kicked in when the Sox traded star pitcher Babe Ruth to the Yankees—but instead a sort of cosmic punishment for racism on the part of the team’s owners. In this telling, the curse begins when the team steps in to nix a burgeoning love affair between the show’s fictional protagonist, a pitcher for the Sox named Johnny O’Brien, and a beautiful black nightclub singer named Daisy Wyatt.
“Johnny Baseball is clearly out to be the next Great American Musical,” said Jenna Scherer in the Boston Herald. It’s “old-fashioned and earnest, almost to a fault,” combining the worlds of sport and song-and-dance in a way that recalls Richard Adler and Jerry Ross’ 1955 classic Damn Yankees. Reale’s songs summon the heyday of American musical theater, from “One More Run”—sung by a chorus of bleacher bums—to the Babe Ruth–led bar ditty “Brotherhood of Bastards.” As Johnny, Colin Donnell “is a natural leading man,” while Burke Moses oozes rakish charm as Ruth. Johnny Baseball may be a bit “too derivative to be a masterwork, but as a piece of Americana, it’s pretty great.”
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Twelfth Night or What You Will: a 'riotous' late-summer jamboreeThe Week Recommends Robin Belfield's 'carnivalesque' new staging at Shakespeare's Globe is 'joyfully tongue-in-cheek'
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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.