Michael M. Landman-Karny

BACON SIZZLES If you’re in search of a play that simmers with tension before scorching the stage with raw, emotional fire, English playwright Sophie Swithinbank’s Bacon, currently searing audiences at the tiny Henry Murray Stage upstairs at the Matrix, will leave you thoroughly singed—and perhaps a little brittle. Bacon is less a coming-of-age story and…

THE END OF THE WORLD COMES WITH A COFFEE BREAK There’s something eerily familiar about the way Michael Redfield and Hugo Armstrong zip and unzip their parkas in Will Arbery’s haunting new play Evanston Salt Costs Climbing by Rogue Machine Theatre. Like characters in a Samuel Beckett fever dream reimagined for our climate-addled era, these…

LA CAGE: STRIPPED OF ITS FEATHERS In Sam Pinkleton‘s well-intentioned but ultimately discordant revival of La Cage aux Folles at the Pasadena Playhouse, that old showbiz maxim about the show must going on feels less like a triumph than a duty. This production of Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s landmark 1983 musical about love, family,…

A WELL-PLAYED PIANO Though the surface plot of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson is fairly simple ’” an estranged brother and sister argue over whether to sell or keep a beautiful piano that has been in the family for generations – that simplicity is very deceptive. For the piano is not only a valuable instrument…

A RIVETING TALE OF ART AND IDEOLOGY AT ITS FINEST In Tom Jacobson’s Crevasse, playing at the Victory Center Theatre, the curtain rises on a fractured world where art, love, and propaganda intersect amidst the gathering storm clouds of World War II. This ambitious play, set in the fall of 1938, deftly traverses the fraught…