Harvey Perr

FLEUR ELISE NOBLE: 2 DIMENSIONAL LIFE OF HER This is to installation art what NEVA is to theater: a sublime illustration of the form. Noble’s collage (of projected images, cut-outs, drawings, puppets, paper, and Ms. Elise herself in constant movement somewhere in the space) creates a crisp black-and-white world, with more shades of grey in…

When a festival opens on as brilliantly shattering a note as the RADAR L.A. FESTIVAL did on Tuesday night with Neva, expectations for the rest of the festival run very high indeed. From Chile’s Teatro en El Blanco, vividly written and directed by Guillermo Calderón, who is the company’s leader, Neva brings a jolt of…

Editor’s note:   Brewsie and Willie is currently running as part of the Radar L.A. Theater Festival.   This review is reprinted from an earlier production of the show in July 2010. We are printing the text only.   To see the review as it originally appeared, visit http://old.stageandcinema.com/brewsie_and_willie.html The current production ends June 26, 2011.   For   tickets,…

LEARNING TO FLY WITH BROKEN WINGS “Blackbird singing in the dead of night/Take these broken wings and learn to fly/All your life/You were only waiting for this moment to arise.” Â  Would it have been too obvious to play the haunting Beatles song either before the start of David Harrower’s unsettling Blackbird (which is receiving a…

GOING, GOING…GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN One of the pitfalls of being a theater reviewer in Los Angeles is that it is impossible to see more than the smallest amount of the cascade of plays that open here in a single week; it is probably a source of great frustration as well to the many performers…

WE OF LITTLE FAITH Kate Fodor’s 100 Saints You Should Know is a mildly interesting play, given heft by its author’s obviously sincere attempt to deal seriously with the nature of faith, but, despite its basic decency, it doesn’t really provide one with particularly fresh insights, nor does it probe with great depth its central…

THE EPIPHANIES THAT COME TO US AFTER BEING HIT IN THE HEAD BY A BASEBALL BAT Among the happiest of theatergoing experiences is entering the theater, without any expectations whatsoever, and, upon exiting, feeling that your life has been upended to a degree, perhaps even altered. Â  Roger Guenveur Smith’s soul-stirring Juan and John provides just…

ONCE-A-WEEK Monday nights at 8:00 p.m. at the L.A. Gay and Lebian Center’s Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center (The Renberg Theatre): If you’d like to take a pleasant leisurely stroll down a very narrow path abloom with fresh wildflowers and strewn with patches of weeds, I recommend Standing On Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays….

THE OBSESSIVE PURSUIT OF ARTISTS There are few things funnier than watching John Fleck, sweating and crazed, walk perilously close to the edge of a high cliff, teeter towards falling off, and, by the neatest trick of balancing himself at the pivotal moment, catch himself from what seemed like inevitable disaster. There are few things…

RECIPE FOR SUCCESS Here’s a mouth-watering recipe for making people happy: 1) Take a great musical. (Kiss Me, Kate will do. If you need to ask why, then I’ll tell you: It’s both a wonderful backstage comedy romance and a scintillating interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and it combines the two in…

THE TALENTED MR. JACOBSON Tom Jacobson is nothing if not ambitious. He is not only the most prolific Los Angeles playwright of the moment, but he is the one, given the astonishing record of his successes, on whom one is counting to stay the course and win national recognition – which has eluded some of…

IN PRAISE OF ECCENTRICITIES It is not surprisng that Tennessee Williams preferred The Eccentricities of a Nightingale to Summer and Smoke. Freed of the conflict between Puritanism (repressed sexuality) and science (sexual liberation), Â Eccentricities is also freed from a good deal of the melodrama which afflicted Â Smoke. Instead, Williams offered up a delicate character study of Alma…

TIME SPENT WITH A MUSICAL GENIUS If ever a production fitted so perfectly within the walls of the elegant Pasadena Playhouse as George Gershwin Alone, I can’t imagine what it may have been. This is, quite simply, what refinement and good taste is all about. Even Yale Pardess’s stage design evokes the thirties in a…

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO LANFORD WILSON? The beautifully detailed lower Manhattan loft that Ralph Funicello has created – complete with fire escape and skylight, unfinished walls daubed with swatches of paint – for the revival of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This takes one’s breath away as one settles into one’s seat. But, as the saying goes,…

WHERE’S A TOUGH-MINDED AND PROLETARIAN WHORE WHEN YOU NEED ONE? The most interesting thing about Jane Anderson’s The Escort is the revelation that a Cadillac call girl takes on the attitudes of her high-rolling customers and, to her, as well as to her male consort, a client who takes her to a room at a…