Samuel Garza Bernstein

THE TRUE AMERICAN DREAM: KILL A PRESIDENT The cast is terrific in the Coeurage Theatre Company’s revival of Assassins at the Actors Circle Theatre’”and it is their commitment to the material that highlights both the strengths and weaknesses in this rarely performed Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical. The strengths include sharp characters and fabulous songs; the…

POETRY OUT OF MOTION I was quite keen to see Amy Freed’s The Psychic Life of Savages; curious about its fictional take on Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, the dead, messy poet heroines of my angst-ridden teenaged years. I would read Plath’s ripe paean to father fixation and suicide, Lady Lazarus, over and over’”bathing in…

DIS HERE’S A DIFF’RENT KIND OF HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL There is something very sweet going on in Eric Dodson’s and Alan Ross Fleishman’s new musical A Ring in Brooklyn. The unusual pleasure of the unamplified human voice’”the performers use no microphones’”is coupled with the creators’ obvious affection for their characters, elevating a rather simple premise…

A VERY COLD WAR BETWEEN THE SEXES I was a huge fan of Peter Lefcourt’s 1999-2001 Showtime series Beggars & Choosers. It was something of a bomb financially but a great favorite of those who work in the entertainment industry, who delighted in its dark yet fizzy take on the business of television — the…

THE GIFT OF SPEECH There is no possibility of love or happiness in Enda Walsh’s play The New Electric Ballroom, produced by Rogue Machine, winner of 2010 and 2011 Ovation and L.A. Drama Critics Circle awards. Walsh won a Tony for the book of Once just days before this show opened, and he is widely…

THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT A demon-possessed, bleeding-eyed, pyro-maniacal Raggedy Ann doll with pre-cum on her face is the vortex around which Michael John LaChiusa’s new comedy Sukie and Sue: Their Story swirls: it’s a flight of fancy that feels wickedly appealing, and he just about pulls it off. This new work, produced by…

COME FOR THE MUSIC, STAY FOR THE CADILLAC The music is everything in Miss Saigon’”not the plot, which is strangely muddled at times, and not the lyrics, which are sometimes awkward. What sticks in your mind and what made the show such an enduring hit (currently the eleventh longest running show in Broadway history) is…

DAMES AT SEA: NOTES ON CAMP When Dames at Sea opened in 1966 at the Caffe Cino, a small coffee house and performance space in New York City’s Greenwich Village that was at the heart of the early off-off Broadway movement, the show was a trifle’”a campy lark into the backstage musicals of early talkies,…

FEEDBACK: THE BIG TEASE Everything that works and doesn’t work about Jane Miller’s new play Feedback turns on one thing: Nudity. In terms of talking the talk, the whole exercise is about getting naked’”literally at first, then emotionally. Yet when it comes time to walk the walk, bra and panties stay firmly in place. And…

THE QUESTION IS: CAN YOU SEE TOMMY? Everything is murky about the DOMA Theatre Company’s new production of The Who’s Tommy at the Met Theatre’”the performances, the sound design, the staging, the choreography, and especially the lighting. Often actors are hardly visible when they sing, and the lighting design seemingly hasn’t been created with any…

GROUNDLINGS ZERO The best part about cleaning up my DVR last weekend was catching up on Raising Hope, the hilarious FOX comedy. It’s funny, surprising, naughty, sometimes dirty, and wholly original. In one episode they give Cloris Leachman a beautifully timed joke about how she could only have an orgasm with her late husband when…

ORIGINAL SIN In their fevered exploration of the seven deadly sins, Figure 8 playwright/co-director Phinneas Kiyomura and co-director Jerry Kernion seem hell bent on making sin seem as original as possible. Visually, their approach results in moments of genuine power. Emotionally, it has its limits. Kiyomura rather enigmatically calls Figure 8 a collection of eight…

SUPER STRUCTURE The Cost of the Erection: The title of Jon Marans’ new play sounds like one of those gay shows where comely actors get naked to pump up the box office. There is some veiled nudity here’”integral to the plot’”but this isn’t a Naked Boys Singing knockoff. While the title may be two-edged, clever,…