Paul Birchall

STATIC ELECTRA Your college classics teacher be damned:   For all the talk about the Greek literary themes of hubris and arête, the Greek tragedies are just gussied up soap operas, with atrocity, lust, and rage being served up in heaping, blood-soaked portions.   The fusty professors can ruminate all they want; these plays are about violent…

A SHOW THAT’S BETTER THAN PROZAC Been to the drugstore lately?   Sick of taking semi-useless pills three times a day every day?   You’ve got your Losartan and your Lisinopril.   You’ve got your yummy Sarafem and your delicious Celexa.   There’s Venlafaxine and Mirtazapine.   Zoloft and Paxil.   To paraphrase the line from the movie The President’s Analyst,…

SIC SEMPER BORE-ANNUS This solo musical effort by musician performer Hersey Felder has all the trappings of a work that is rich with worthy subject matter and culture.   Peppered with songs from what we’d charitably call “the American songbook” (Gershwin, Stephen Foster, Louie Gottschalk),  Abe Lincoln’s Piano is Felder’s tightly crafted autobiography, which is somehow threaded…

EXPENSIVE VANILLA-SCENTED PERFUME For its inaugural stage dramatic production at the glittering new Bram Goldsmith Theater, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is presenting a charming candy box of a play that seems as much as an audition piece for the venue as it is a night of stagecraft in its own right.  …

JUST IN TIME FOR THE HOLIDAYS:   A DARK CARNIVAL OF DEATH AND TERROR! This tour de force of trickery from creators Todd Robbins and the magician Teller (the traditionally silent half of the famous magician duo Penn and Teller) is a magic show.   However, be warned before attending:   This is not a cheerfully sweet show…

THE HAM IN WINTER Here’s a show that means well, but which somehow falls a little short of expectations.   It’s actually somewhat difficult to put one’s finger on why:   By rights, the play should astound.   It’s written by William Luce, considered one of the great writers of solo biographical shows, whose works include the transcendent…

ROCK AND ROLL DREAM (MAYBE, IF YOUR DREAM IS VERY SMALL) Becoming a rock star is a uniquely American dream.   And who wouldn’t want to live a life of rock and roll excess and decadence?   When you think about rock, and in particular about this fantasy of the rocker life, the mind drifts inescapably to…

NOT JUST A GAY BAR ANY MORE It is the unfortunate nature of some gay dramas to hammer home or leadenly evangelize a theme with a heavy hand.   You know the sort of thing I am talking about:   The drama about a homophobic thug who beats a gay person, with the beater portrayed as a…

A HEAD SPINNINGLY GOOD EXORCIST ROMP THAT DOESN’T SUCK C#CKS IN HELL A year or two back, wily producers crafted a stage version of the chilling 1970s horror flick, The Exorcist, and gave it a lavish staging at the Geffen Playhouse.   It was a thudding flop, in spite of a cast whose members included Brooke…

NOT MUCH UNDERGROUND Author Neil Gaiman writes for the anime and graphic novel era – rollicking adventures that are tonally glib, suffused with whimsy and wit, and full of puns, extraordinary concepts, and vivid characters.   Attempting to adapt these novels for the theater is an audacious idea – and so much more so to stage…

YOU CAN SKIP THESE SKETCHY SKETCHES Those of us who are of a certain age reverently remember the National Lampoon as being one of the great humor magazines of the 1970s and early 1980s.   Yes, the film Animal House essentially brought the Lampoon “brand” into the mainstream, but prior to that, the ribald humor and…

I’D LIKE TO RETURN THIS GIFT, PLEASE The Geffen Playhouse has a proud tradition of staging crackerjack productions of dramatic works by some of the modern theater’s greatest playwrights. To their misfortune, though, these works invariably turn out to be the celebrated playwrights’ most excruciatingly dreadful plays – the ones, you suspect, that the authors…

BAD GIRL DONE GOOD Here’s a play with a fascinating history for you.   Early-mid 20th century Chicago playwright Phillip Yordan originally intended this play to be set in the Polish American community, but when he couldn’t find a producer, he re-wrote it for the American Negro Theater, which, in its famous 1944 production, carried the…