Harvey Perr

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A CAST MAKES Let me tell you a story. A tale of two casts. Once upon a time there was a playwright whose name was Lillian Hellman. You may have heard of her. She had a taste for melodrama, it’s true, but, at her best, she wrote some of the most effective…

THE GHOSTS OF GAMBLERS PAST AND PRESENT AND NO FUTURE Someone once said that the only poet Los Angeles ever produced was Raymond Chandler. It must have been said before John Steppling came along. Steppling is the one playwright who has located the rot at the core of our city and its environs and who…

OTHELLO! THE MUSICAL A thousand years ago, when Los Angeles theater was still taking baby steps (1968, to be precise), an Englishman, Jack Good, had the idea of a musical version of Othello – it wasn’t the first time, of course, Verdi’s opera having quite brilliantly executed the same idea quite a few years before…

“ANOTHER THING I LIKE IS THE HOME-RUN TROT†It is not so much that time has been unkind to Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out but that we were perhaps too kind to it in the first place. Now, stripped of its self-importance and with enough time having elapsed since it won all its prizes and…

REMEMBERING TOM If revivals are to be the mainstay of our national theater – thereby turning our theaters into museums – then interpretative artists are going to have to find ways to guarantee that theater continues to be a living, breathing organism. One way is to rediscover the elements that define a classic and unify…

PERFORMANCE POWER Question: Why revive They’re Playing Our Song? Answer: Stephanie J. Block. Question: Why create a musical like Leap of Faith? Answer: Raul Esparza. Suggestion: Why not write a good musical for Stephanie J. Block and Raul Esparza? Reason: They would send a good song soaring into the stratosphere. Question: How can you be…

A MIXED DRAG If Parasite Drag were a product of Playwriting 101, its author, Mark Roberts, would be the brightest kid in the class. He has an ear for dialogue, a sure way of shaping a scene, and beautifully subtle insights into women, a rare enough gift these days, especially in a male playwright. Â  And…

PULL THE CHAIN AND FUDGE IS MADE! MilkMilkLemonade is the sweetest – and most incendiary – gay love story this reviewer has ever seen. It is the story of a couple of children – Emory, who wants to be a girl, and Elliot, a bully who torments Emory but who, of course, really likes him…

WHEN A MARRIAGE GOES WRONG Let’s not pull any punches. The Los Angeles critical community is under attack. And this reviewer is leading the charge against them. Just as they admired en masse the woefully inadequate revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s How The Other Half Loves in Long Beach a few months ago, they have lavished…

A WONDROUS BUT TARNISHED OLD BOOK While sitting through The Good Book Of Pedantry And Wonder, I had the feeling, both reassuring and discomforting, that this was not a new play, but rather the fragments of a play discovered in an attic somewhere in England, dusted off, and somehow stitched together, with a nod to…

A REVIEWER AND HIS FRIEND SOON TO BE PARTED — Friend: Wasn’t that fabulous? I mean, what can you say? Didn’t you just love it to bits? Reviewer: What are you talking about? Friend: Hello. Where are you? The show we just saw. Â  “[title of show].” Â  Didn’t you think it was just fabulous? Reviewer: No….