Samuel Garza Bernstein

LOVING YOUR OPPRESSOR The audience is delighted when a character in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s beautifully written play The Pride tells another, “Stop sucking the dick of your oppressor!” It’s a moment of explosive clarity, in a work that never stops asking questions. Is it possible a gay man in closeted London of 1958 might live…

SIX KINDS OF WONDERFUL I’ve loved Obba Babatundé since I first saw him thirty-five years ago in Dreamgirls. Even amidst the legendary star turns of his female co-stars, he made a remarkable impression, with his ineffable presence, and warm, smoky voice. He’s had many successes in the years since, and the 25th Anniversary production of…

WOMEN WITH HEARTS OF IRON Before going to see Rogue Machine Theatre’s latest production, Lost Girls, I turned to my companion and asked, “Why is everything that Rogue does so good?” Then a horrible sinking feeling hit. I bet I just jinxed it. It’s a very Jewish idea’”that in praising something out loud, you incite…

MID-LIFE MYSTERIES  AND MISUNDERSTANDINGS A long-married couple says good-bye to the final guests who leave their house after a party. They are known for their parties; for their happy marriage; for their easy charm with one another. Except that tonight, the husband asks his wife for a divorce, shocking himself as well as her. Then, with…

THE  BARE TRUTH There’s a kind of desperate seriousness about the “rock” musical Bare ’” more pop than rock ’” first produced in 2000, now back with updated music and a telegenic and talented cast. The original production preceded Spring Awakening and Glee, but it feels like it cashes in on both genres of teen musical:…

THE NEVERLAND AFTER DARK This ain’t Mary Martin’s Peter Pan. Or Walt Disney’s. Or Stephen Spielberg’s. With Peter Pan: The Boy Who Hated Mothers, playwright Michael Lluberes has his own take on the familiar story, at once faithful in spirit to Barrie’s original tale yet also interested in exploring Victorian attitudes about both children and…

BEWITCHED, BEGUILED AND THRILLED Mark Saltzman is one smart cookie. He approaches his new bio-musical of the legendary Lorenz Hart with a passionate curiosity about the great man’s life and career: intellectual curiosity about what was and imaginative curiosity for what might have been. Rodgers’ collaboration with Hart may be somewhat dwarfed in the public’s…

THE MISCHEVIOUS INDEMNITY OF NOIR You can bring a blanc sensibility to noir, but noir finds a way of seeping in’”its luxurious, sweet poison stealing focus when you’re not looking. In Billy & Ray, playwright Mike Bencivenga and director Garry Marshall set out to tell the undeniably funny story of how Billy Wilder and Raymond…

WHEN ‘TOMORROW’ ISN’T ANOTHER DAY Anyone who cares about acting or classical theater or Shakespeare (particularly Macbeth) must see Donald Freed’s new play Tomorrow. It has moments of spot-on, sublime specificity that make you gasp out loud. Without fuss, without preening, it explores the art of acting as a means of exploring the art of…

A JOLLY OSMOND HOLIDAY To fans and detractors alike, Donny and Marie represent a cultural and show business ethos so strong, and so specific, that their actual talents sometimes get lost in the shuffle. Fifty years of Osmond entertainment creates a mythology of nostalgia, squared’”in both senses of the word’”their family friendly performance style isn’t…

WHAT THEATRE 40 NEEDS IS A GUIDE TO AN EXCRUCIATINGLY CORRECT PRODUCTION Miss Manners, the alter-ego of writer Judith Martin, is my heroine. Her “Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior” is witty, practical, and is about a lot more than table settings’”though she certainly instructs in dining service í  la russe, which entails fourteen courses and…

AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF SILICON VALLEY Build hasn’t started yet, but the minute you walk into the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater at the Geffen Playhouse you feel drawn into another world by Sibyl Wickersheimer’s beautifully conceived and executed set. You’re in the middle of what looks like a mid-century Cliff May Rancho gone…

HIS OWN PRIVATE BOISE We’re in Boise, Idaho, in the break room of an arts and craft chain store called Hobby Lobby. Two men appear on closed circuit television doing a sort of home shopping channel patter about their wares. (They also break the fourth wall and do the announcement about turning off cell phones…

JUSTIN IS JUST IN THE MIDDLE The best thing about Justin Love, Celebration Theatre’s 30th season opening production, is the fun of watching the stylish performance of Grant Jordan, who gives his twink role a seriously meta spin that makes you laugh out loud. Like most of the characters in the show, he lusts after…

THE ‘TROUBLES’ WITH FAITH Choosing to write about the Irish Troubles comes with baggage’”many people have come before you, and many will come after. Like the Holocaust, it can conjure a deep vein of feeling, but the idea of slogging through it again can also seem like a chore to audiences. It takes skill, flair,…

MAID IN HOLLYWOOD The history of people of color on the screen is complicated, to say the least. The great Hattie McDaniel was hurt and bewildered by criticism from some in her own community who felt she should turn down maid and mammy roles. “Why should I complain about making $700 a week playing a…

GODS AND MONSTERS Oedipus gets all the attention, what with his Freudian mixture of patricide and mommy love, but an arguably much more influential character in the Greek pantheon is the deeply confused Orestes. He didn’t fuck his mother Clytemnestra; he killed her’”and his act of (perhaps) justifiable homicide is woven into countless stories by…

THREE DEGREES OF SEPARATION A woman asks for a martini in a highball glass and accuses her husband of peeing in the sink: again. He doesn’t cop to it, but doesn’t deny it. The couple seems long married, used to one another, and not particularly happy’”probably in their 60s or early 70s. She’s nursing a…