Stage and Cinema Reviews Theater, Dance, Music, Etc.
KEEPING US TOGETHER WHILE WE’RE APART For some, sitting at home can during our long shut-in can be crazy-making, but not because there isn’t enough to stream. It’s just that so much of it is blather. Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel believes a major ingredient missing during these trying times is […]
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AN EDUCATION VIA STREAMING THEATER As schools are turning to at-home learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, many teachers are struggling to find relevant, high-quality distance learning resources. Stage and Cinema is hoping you’ll spread the word to let teachers know about L.A. Theatre Works’ Setting the Stage for Learning educational arts program, which harnesses the […]
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PARTS OF A BODY Part Albee, part Ionesco, part mystery thriller, part Doubt, part Groundhog Day and — sadly — all red herrings, Lee Blessing’s 2005 A Body of Water can’t decide what it wants to be in the end — which is a shame because individual parts of this body are bracing. (Actor Co-op’s […]
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WHAT A WONDER Childhood whimsy is seen through the looking-glass of adult sophistication at A Noise Within. Based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), this 1932 stage adaptation — co-written by Eva Le Gallienne and Florida Friebus — faithfully honors its source materials, […]
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A HOME RUN What do you think of when you think of home? Is it the place where you were born? Is it where you are living now? Is it where you followed your growth by measuring yourself against one of its walls? Is it the home you built? Is it the home you inherited […]
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SINGING AGAINST HATE If it takes a village, the Black Ensemble Theater creates one nightly. Actually, it’s a “healing circle” that’s literally at center stage and figuratively at the heart of Legends the Musical: A Civil Rights Movement, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Written and directed by founder Jackie Taylor, this generous new work departs from […]
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OUR INKBLOT INTERPRETATIONS: SPLAT, SPLAT, SPLAT, SPLAT, SPLENDID Theater isn’t just what it brings to us, it’s also what we bring to it. At least, that’s the general idea behind Open Fist Theatre Company’s Rorschach Fest, a series of five experimental one-act plays from risk-taking playwrights: John O’Keefe, Harold Pinter, Daniel MacIvor, and Caryl Churchill. […]
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OUTSIDE OF THE BOX Norma Desmond‘s iconic pronouncement “We had faces then” might well have been written specifically for Louise Brooks. This is a face that defies time and period, and is as relevant today as it was in 1929 when she was lured to Germany by G. W. Pabst to play the doomed Lulu […]
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GLORY GLORY GLORIA I don’t know if Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has ever worked in a Manhattan publishing house but he sure knows his way about the workplace. In Gloria, he paints an extraordinary portrait of the workings of an office whose conflicts revolve around some writers with their own agendas, a sense of emotional intensity on […]
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WHAT A QUEEN! Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikosky’s ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker are both beloved and celebrated, yet his operas are scarcely known. Indeed, we don’t get much Russian opera at all, at least in Chicago. Lyric produced Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin in 2017, while Chicago Opera Theatre produced his Iolanta in 2018 and Rachmaninoff’s Aleko […]
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