Harvey Perr

THE STURDIEST DILAPIDATED HOUSE IN TOWN When she enters her house, so badly in need of repair that it might as well be razed as restored, she walks with a strange somnambulistic slowness, one foot seeming to go forward and the other simultaneously taking a step backward. She doesn’t seem to mind being drenched, as…

CUT THE PRE-CURTAIN SPEECH! If any evidence is needed to prove that Los Angeles is – as a theater town – still somewhat provincial, I present, for your delectation, the pre-curtain speech. At the Odyssey production of Adding Machine: A Musical, Ron Sossi encouraged the audience to tell their friends about it’¦whether they liked it…

BRUSH UP YOUR LOPE DE VEGA How easy life would be for reviewers if every time they went to the theater, they could see something as absolutely delightful and as thoroughly skillful as The Capulets And The Montagues happens to be. The coup here is the discovery that Lope de Vega, a Spanish contemporary of…

MAKE NOISE: ARTISTS AT WORK There is nothing more liberating than going to the theater in complete ignorance of what one is going to see. If context is everything, then it is no accident that this is exactly what this reviewer experienced just last weekend on two consecutive nights. The results couldn’t be more joyous….

VARIATION ON 33 VARIATIONS Since I feel pretty much the same as I did when I first saw 33 Variations, and since it is virtually the same production with virtually the same cast, I have decided to reprint my original review, along with an addendum that follows afterward. — THE CURIOUS CASE OF LUDWIG VAN…

HAVING YOUR CAKE AND CHOKING ON IT There is, at the heart of Neil LaBute’s The Break of Noon, an implicit cry to build slowly in a rising arc and, hopefully, toward a rousing crescendo. But, while his director, Jo Bonney, has found a way to jolt us from scene to scene, she has not…

SHORT TAKES 2011 has arrived and, with it, a flurry of activity in the theater. Here’s a sample of some of the plays that have opened in recent weeks. ME, AS A PENGUIN by Tom Wells This odd and delightfully quirky play offers the little pleasures that come with discovering a new playwright. His name…

STORIES BY AND FOR THE HEART At the start of the second half of Stories By Heart, John Lithgow tells us that, originally, the first half was all there was; but his audience, like children, having heard one story, wanted “more.†In this instance, more proves to be less. If I had left at intermission,…

OH, DADDY, POOR DADDY, SOMEONE’S TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF YOUR GOOD NATURE (AND GUESS WHO IT IS?) When you watch Dan Via, the actor, play the part of a wise-cracking, heart-lonely “best friend,†you will get an idea of what the style of Dan Via, the playwright, consists. He acts earnestly and straight-forwardly and totally without…

AN UNABASHED LOVE LETTER TO MICHAEL McKEAN Dear Michael McKean, I hereby declare that I am unashamedly besotted with love for you. Why? Because last night, I saw you take a handful of songs by Randy Newman and watched you become a different character with every song, turning each into an exquisitely dimensional one-act play….