Paul Birchall

MUTANT — AS IN FREAK OF NATURE After watching the roaring, sputtering, and cursing along with regretful descriptions of drug use and parental abuse back in the “bad old days,” I had to ask myself, “Wha’ kind of crazy fucking show is this?” I’m not really one to use such language, but writer-performer Mitch Hara’s…

STAY FOR DINNER, WON’T YOU? She’s an ancient crone who lives in a tiny cottage deep in the forest, feared by those near and far.   She brews strange elixirs and ointments, and is rumored to have turned little boys into piglets to feed on during her midnight feasts.   Her rivals end up drowned in the…

BITCHY, BITCHY If you like your camp served by the bucket, then this outlandish tour de farce is steaming with it. Imagine if you will one of those appalling movies from the 1990s in which a group of Mean Girls reign supreme and battle for the role of Top She-Devil in their school’s cheerleading squad….

COLD DEAD HANDS America’s bittersweet love-and-hate affair with guns is the target of playwright Victor Kaufold’s thought-provoking but lopsided satirical revue, which premiered in 2000 at the Blank Theatre’s Young Playwright’s Festival, their annual showcase of works by teen authors. The play was an immediate response to the massacre at Columbine High School, where a…

DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME Ah Hollywood.   How it glitters.   How it glistens.   How true it is that when you scrape off the layers of tinsel, you find, well, more tinsel.   This musical (Adrian Bewley, book; Joe Blodgett, music; Chana Wise, lyrics) is an affectionate paean to the Good Ol’ Days of Hollywood, when Movie…

PERHAPS THE POPE WAS BORED TO DEATH The Ahmanson stage is awash with white-haired old men in long sweeping gowns.   No, it’s not the old folks’ home production of Priscilla Queen of the Desert.   Rather, the touring production of The Last Confession crackles and blusters with Cardinals, Archbishops, and Popes; these are the characters inhabiting…

AFRICAN MYTH ON THE BAYOU An atmosphere of mythic mystery suffuses Tarrell Alvin McCraney’s compelling drama about family, sacrifice, and deceit.   Awash with undercurrents of melancholy and rage, here’s a drama that manages to wrestle both powerful themes and ferocious emotions, even within a remarkably intimate context. It’s admittedly true that we find ourselves occasionally…

FLESH MADE TEDIOUS In my day job as a public librarian, I can tell you with certainty there is nothing more dreaded than finding E. L. James’ turgid lust romancer Â Fifty Shades of Grey in the book drop Â after some woman’s book group has read it.  Â The condition those books are returned in! Â  Â The limp, slightly damp pages. Â  Â The…

A VILE  VILLON MAKES FOR VILLAINOUS VIEWING Art isn’t pretty – and neither is Murray Mednick’s sharp, cynical comedy about the life of the great artistic poet François Villon, who, in 15th century France, wrote some of history’s great romantic poetry, all the while living the life of a boozing, whoring, murderous scoundrel. In the production’s…

RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES It was the shot heard round the countercultural world – the Big Bang of the Beats, as it were. At a party one night in Mexico City in 1951, writer William Burroughs drunkenly talked his wife Joan Vollmer into standing against the wall with a water glass on her head while…

AN OCEAN OF TIME If you ever climb to the top of the Granite Park Chalet trail in Montana, you will find at the end of the hugely winding, desperately steep pathway a log book containing entries by fellow hikers.   One of the entries reads something like, “I have come up here every year for…