Ernest Kearney

THANKS TO ANTAEUS, CYMBELINE RIDES AGAIN Who knew Cymbeline could gallop? Director Nike Doukas’s new staging at Antaeus Theatre Company turns one of Shakespeare’s most notoriously unwieldy plays into something brisk, lucid, and surprisingly delightful. Though often dismissed as a late-period jumble, this Cymbeline proves that with intelligence and judicious trimming, even Shakespeare’s strangest hybrids…

A MILD CASE OF THE CREEPS Ah, Halloween — All Hallows’ Day, Allhallowtide, Jack-o’-lanterns, the madcap lads of West Hollywood, the troops of pint-sized witches, Iron Men and Disney princesses marauding the city’s better neighborhoods lugging trick-or-treat bags bulging with Gummy Bears, Bit-O-Honeys, and Bazooka Gum, and of course the edgy saturnalia that infests Hollywood…

OH, WHAT A NIGHT Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana (1961) may be viewed as the finish of a journey the playwright began twenty years earlier with The Glass Menagerie (1944). The one was his first critical and commercial success, the other his last. After Iguana, Williams would continue to write plays and one-acts…

A GEM OF A PRODUCTION FOR THERESA REBECK’S DAZZLING SUNDAY ON THE ROCKS Solid. Diamond Solid. Strength and luster. That is what’s most striking about Sunday on the Rocks by playwright Theresa Rebeck, now at The Actor’s Company Theatre.   The finest razzle-dazzle that money can buy? Not in this production; there is just good old-fashioned…

FLY ME TO THE SUN… AND LEAVE ME THERE I confess, playwright Brian Quijada was an unknown quantity to me, and after attending Fly Me to the Sun at the Fountain Theatre, I was of the mind that he could remain so. But, I’ve a good deal of experience with the Fountain, which is one…

ACHILLES’ HEEL IN ARCADIA There is a misunderstanding of critics among some circles, a sense that they are all cast in the mold of Ellsworth Toohey, the sniveling, Machiavellian art critic from Ayn Rand’s heavy-handed, objectivist treatise masquerading as a novel, The Fountainhead. Toohey is a vile creature who resents anyone who displays the talent…

A MASTERPIECE OF MUSICAL MISCHIEF In 1911, the Louvre was the largest building in the world, containing more than a thousand rooms, spread out over 45 acres and housing over a quarter million works of art.  As it had a security force of just over a hundred guards, it is not surprising that someone was…

TIME IS OUR FRIEND A Victorian inventor travels thousands of years into the future, only to discover that humanity has evolved—and devolved—into two radically different species. The 14/48 Hollywood Company’s production of The Time Machine gleams with ingenuity, its low-budget aesthetic burnished by a fiercely imaginative ensemble and a clear reverence for the source material….

Let there be no mistaking it, Mark Vigeant is so funny that if he was performing on an amphitheater set up in front of Mount Rushmore, after the first five minutes milk would be shooting out of Lincoln’s nose, Washington would be laughing so hard his cumbersome dentures would go flying out of his mouth,…

DEAD BLONDES TELL NO TALES — EXCEPT THIS ONE Conspiracy theories have surrounded the death of actress and restaurateur Thelma Todd since 1935, when her lifeless body was discovered in a garage slumped behind the wheel of her parked Lincoln Phaeton convertible. Alexandra Kopko, as the actress’s ghost, presents a bio of Todd’s life to…

WAITING FOR COWDOT Normally, a surfeit of hyphens in any production assures trouble ahead, but Aaron Francis, the writer-director-designer-producer of this subversive, potent indictment of the lethal potential of passivity, has shown himself the exception that either tests or proves that rule. In Betsy & Patty Find Out at the Broadwater Second Stage, seven cows…

A KNOCK AT THE HEART With her staging of Dolores, Edward Allan Baker’s two-woman drama about domestic violence, director Stephanie Feury—at the theatre that bears her name—has placed on display a small gem of immense worth. Deedee Woche is Sandra, the married sister struggling to hold her lower-middle-class Providence family together. Davonna Dehay is the…

OFFTIME Abi Watkinson’s one-woman show 5:45 is a poor receptacle for a great deal of talent—one that feels underdeveloped and not fully thought through. The trouble starts with the title. A good title should grab attention, pique curiosity, and function as either clue or bait to lure in a potential patron: The Hundred Years’ War…

A TAIL OF LOVE ON A LEASH Playwright Benjamin Schwartz and director Natalie Nicole Dressel, in league with actors Callie Ott and Spencer Weitzel, have served up in Dog of Carnage one of the sharpest comedies in the Hollywood Fringe. Set in a courtroom—presided over by a grating, tonal, squawking, authoritarian judge—Ott and Weitzel are…

SOUNDCHECK FOR SURVIVAL “Aha…sure…uh-huh…yes…ummm…you say….†And so begins NO, dancer/actuation artist Annalisa Limardi’s intriguing, minimalistic dissertation on the social pressures exerted on women, and men as well, to be amenable, positive and passive to the point of evaporation. Limardi hurls about the sizable stage at the Eastwood Performing Arts Center, weaving in and out of…

NICAEA TRY Oh, Constantine! at the Zephyr Theatre is an odd nut to crack. Or I should say review. One of the best-produced shows at the Fringe, this is the brainchild of playwright / director / producer Jan-David Soutar, with producers Athena Rethis and Clent Bowers, production designer Courtney Stepleton, lighting designer Miles Berman, and finally…

PAGING DR. DRAMA, STAT! VITALS NOT STABLE Nursing Is My Life was a heart-breaker for me. Charley Karlotta has spent decades as a registered nurse, raising her family, and dreaming of one day doing a show proclaiming how “nursing is her life.” Karlotta is a petite elfin of a person, and you cannot but be…

HOW TO RAISE A DAUGHTER (AND YOURSELF) Woven from his essays featured in Cosmopolitan and O The Oprah Magazine, gay Armenian-American Haig “Hike” Chahinian recounts his humbling and oft-time hilarious adventures as he fumbles through fathering a bouncing biracial baby girl. A compassionate contemplation of all the hardships and hazards the heart is willing to endure for the joy of…