Judson Feder

MORE VICTORIAN THAN NEW ROMANTIC Long Beach Shakespeare Company delivers Wilde’s classic with clarity and charm, even if its concept never fully blossoms Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest hardly needs reinvention. More than a century after its premiere, its razor-sharp epigrams, social satire, and exquisitely constructed farce remain as funny as ever. Long…

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARRRR A spirited cast and an unforgettable setting help this classic weather a few rough seas in Ellen Geer’s adaptation Driving up the twisty road along Topanga Creek to Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum for the first time and walking into the sprawling wooded compound, I was already halfway charmed before the…

THE WAR AFTER THE WAR A powerful family drama examines the lasting wounds of Vietnam and the Chicano Moratorium Some family dramas simmer, others explode, and still others leave emotional shrapnel embedded under the skin long after curtain call. Soul Sacrifice, currently having its world premiere at CASA 0101, does all three. Written by Consuelo…

THE POSTWAR AMERICAN NIGHTMARE STILL RESONATES A gripping Antaeus revival reminds us how easily communities excuse the unforgivable A successful small-town businessman, a distraught wife, a lovelorn idealistic son, and the ghost of a missing pilot haunt the yard. The themes that moved audiences in the 1940s still touch us today in Antaeus Theatre Company‘s…

SHABBAT, SLAPSTICK, AND THREE SUITORS IN 1968 CHICAGO The comedy cracks open plenty of laughs, then lets the shell sit too long. A domineering Jewish mother, her sharp-tongued teenage son, three oddball suitors, a hippie pimp, and two Chicago cops walk onto a stage. Chaos follows. The question is whether the play knows when to…