Barnaby Hughes

BLACK BOX BASEBALL Rise Above Theatre Movement has proved once again that it is not afraid of performing difficult material. In the young theatre company’s first show, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, many of the actors were challenged by the play’s unconventional religious content and its lead actor bared his body on stage. In…

THE PERFECT PINOT PAIRING Pinot Noir is presently one of the most popular wine varietals in California thanks to Sideways. First published as a novel by Rex Pickett in 2004 before being made into a feature film starring Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh, Sideways is now a play making its…

INTIMATE OPERA Bringing opera to a wider audience is the noble goal of many a musical entrepreneur, but few succeed as well as Josh Shaw and Stephen Karr, founders of the Pacific Opera Project (POP). The company has been around less than a year, in which time it has already found its own home at…

THE TRIUMPH OF IRONY When Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (R&G) premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1966, the critics hated it. While a poor production may have been partially to blame, the ensuing decades have certainly vindicated him. Stoppard’s talent for reworking Shakespeare earned him a 1999  Oscar for Shakespeare in Love….

NEW BEGINNINGS “You are bafu!” is an insult hurled many times throughout Danai Gurira’s new play The Convert. Bafu means traitor; in this context, it is used to describe Africans who collaborate with Europeans in ways that go against tribal customs. Much of the drama in The Convert centers on those who are considered traitors…

A YOUNG MAN’S PLAY Would-be writers are often given the advice, “Write what you know.” Of the many reasons why writers should write what they know is that it lends authenticity to their creative output. Anton Chekhov’s first full-length play, Ivanov, proves the truth of this dictum. While Ivanov is not exactly an autobiographical play,…

BORN-AGAIN PORN STAR? Nudity can have a sacred character to it, depending on one’s motives. There are Christian nudist colonies, for example, whose goal is to return humankind to its prelapsarian state, that is, to be as naked and innocent as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In The Dream Team (1989), Christopher…

WHAT IS AN AFRICAN AMERICAN? While many plays purport to examine race issues, few tackle them head on. Ensemble Studio Theatre’s production of The Many Mistresses of Martin Luther King, by debut playwright Andrew Dolan, certainly does. It may not say anything new about race in America, but it does discuss race issues in a…

A NEGLECTED CLASSIC GONE AWRY The story of Antony and Cleopatra shares with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet those two indispensable elements of tragedy: love and death. While Romeo and Juliet is perhaps Shakespeare’s best known play, Antony and Cleopatra is all but neglected. This is all the more surprising considering contemporary interest in its principal…

RISE ABOVE THEATRE MOVEMENT HANDLES THE TRUTH Just three years after Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men (1989) was produced on Broadway, the play’s popularity was eclipsed by the film version with Tom Cruise. Revivals of the play are rare, but based on the vivid production by Rise Above Theatre Movement (RATMO), the courtroom drama…

A TENNESSEE WILLIAMS CARICATURE A number of theatres in Los Angeles have marked the 100th anniversary of Tennessee Williams’ birth by staging productions of his plays. Following upon the successful runs of A House Not Meant To Stand at The Fountain Theatre and Five Beauties at the McCadden Theatre is the Elephant Theatre Company’s production…

A FOOL-IPINO FOR LOVE Just as the “problem” of immigration continues to be debated by our politicians, so does it continue to be presented in our theaters. Earlier this year, in the springtime, Tom Jacobson’s new play The Chinese Massacre (Annotated) was presented at the Atwater Village Theatre. His complex historical drama, which provided little…

AN ANACHRONISTIC LOOK AT RACE IN AMERICA There’s no doubt that Arthur Miller’s 1947 play All My Sons is an astonishing piece of theatre. Not only is the writing brilliant, but the themes addressed are timeless and important. It’s difficult to imagine how the play could possibly be improved. Yet that is exactly what the…

FAUSTIAN PHANTASMAGORIA “There is nothing new under the sun,” said a Jewish writer more than two thousand years ago. While such a sentiment may not have been intended to discourage creativity, it can’t help but betray a certain weariness with the world. And such seems to be the present mood in Hollywood, where the big…