Milo Shapiro

ALICE IN STUNNED-ERLAND Lewis Carroll sure never saw this version coming. His 1865 novel Alice In Wonderland, probably best known from the 1951 Disney animated film, has been reinterpreted time and again. This rocking musical version (with music by Duncan Sheik, lyrics by Steven Slater, and book by Slater and Jessie Nelson) reworks the original…

MACROBATS The one challenge in writing this review is my atypical, completely-blank notepad taken home from the theatre. But that’s with good reason.   Duel Reality — which opened last night — makes it challenging to decide just what to look at on stage at times, let alone dare to look away for something as mundane…

NOT LARSON’S BIGGIE, BUT IT PAID THE “RENT” One of the great heartbreaks of theater history is that Jonathan Larson, the author and composer of the rock opera Rent, his modern telling of Puccini’s La Bohème, died suddenly at 35 of an aortic aneurysm on Jan. 25, 1996, 10 days before his 36th birthday and…

MOMMIE McDEAREST Irish playwright Martin McDonagh quickly makes it abundantly clear that dysfunctional mother/daughter relationships are not just the stuff of Hollywood. In the tiny town of Leenane in Western Ireland in the 1990s, Maureen is in a situation many families can relate to: she is the only daughter out of three willing to be…

IN THIS CASE, NINE IS A PERFECT SCORE In Nine, the musical adaptation of Federico Fellini’s 1963 film 8 ½  now playing at Coronado Playhouse, Guido Contini (William Henry Schneider), an internationally famous film director of the 1960s, is turning forty and is at an impasse in several ways. After three critically and financially successful films, his…

THIS AMERICAN FELT LIKE AN IDIOT UNTIL READING A SYNOPSIS When MTV hit the airwaves, a young generation stopped dead in their tracks and watched hours and hours of endless videos. Frequently, they made no sense because, in most cases, the video had far less to do with the words of the song and more…

STIRRING UP A RECIPE FOR FAMILY REVELATIONS It may seem like a lifetime ago, but can you remember way back to April of 2021?   Washing canned goods with gloves on?   Masking to accept a package?   Envying 80 year olds because they had first crack at a vaccine?   It’s staggering, as we’re fully caught up in…

WAS BLONDE, BUT NOW I SEE! It’s easy to say that everyone wants to be taken seriously, but for Elle (Johnisa Breault) that notion has never really crossed her mind. She’s happy, perky, pretty, wealthy, loves her UCLA sorority friends and has the perfect boyfriend in Warner (Eli Wood). Life is perfect, so why would…

A SWEET OFF-THE-GRID MUSICAL With the unexpectedly huge American response to Netflix’s Virgin River, there seems to be a great longing to see what life might be like in a tiny, forested community instead of the hustle and bustle of semi-anonymous city life. From It’s a Wonderful Life to The Andy Griffith Show to Northern…

FASCIST LOGIC CAUSES US TO LOOK HARD IN THE MIRROR When we think of all the Nazi monsters, Adolf Hitler’s name reigns supreme. But it’s only a short step down the ladder to be revolted by men like Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, and Hermann Göring. Many such key figures committed suicide before they could stand…

BEDAZZLED WAR AND PEACE SIZZLES ON STAGE Let’s face it: If you haven’t read Leo Tolstoy’s 1869 novel War and Peace by now (with its 1400-plus pages), you probably aren’t ever going to. Fortunately for you, Dave Malloy read it and apparently loved the heck out of it. So much so, in fact, that he…

THE LOVE CHILD OF LAURA INGALLS AND ANNE OF GREEN GABLES In this novel-turned-musical, it’s 1899 and the world, even in rural Texas, is changing. Just not nearly fast enough for Calpurnia Tate (Aubriella Navarro), who is “age 11-3/4, practically 12!”, as she mentions (and sings) quite often. The Cast Calpurnia isn’t quite a tom-boy,…

YOU’LL BE DANCING IN THE SHEETS ALL OVER AGAIN Sitting in a movie theater, in 1984, we teens were spellbound by the original film version of Footloose — and not because it was an amazing story or full of brilliant acting performances (spoiler alert: it wasn’t). Recall that MTV had begun to mesmerize us less…

OUR PUPPET, WHO ART IN HELL, HALLOWED BE THY BLAME When a newly widowed mom tries to lead three teens in a wholesome, Lutheran, extra-curricular church class, tasked with creating a Christian puppet show, what could go wrong? Thankfully for us, plenty, in Robert Askins’ gripping, darkly-comic drama which premiered Off-Broadway in 2011. Adam Daniel…

ALWAYS A BRIDESMAID:SEVER THE BRIDE In 2000, screenwriter Alan Ball won an Oscar for his hit screenplay American Beauty, followed by his powerfully edgy HBO series Six Feet Under and the Emmy-winning series True Blood. To reach this apex, his storytelling career had to start somewhere and that initiation, in 1993, was the dramedy play…

A FASCINATING JOURNEY INTO THE AUTISTIC MIND Mark Haddon’s novel is a first-person tale shared by the autistic main character: 15-year-old Christopher Boone, who lives in a small lower-class town in southwestern England. Playwright Simon Stephens (Heisenberg) frames Haddon’s tale as a play-within-a-play: Christopher (an astounding Daniel Patrick Russell) has journaled his experiences in a…