Los Angeles

SCOTTISH TRAGEDY AS DARK RIDE Those of you who love amusement parks will know that a “dark ride†is an indoor attraction where riders in guided vehicles travel through specially lit scenes that typically contain sound, special effects, animation, and music – from non-thematic Boardwalk Love Canals to truncated storytelling, such as “Snow White’s Scary…

ELEVATOR Â IS A GREAT RIDE, BUT IT NEEDS A LITTLE LIFT [EDITOR’S NOTE: This review is of the original production; a much more savvy revival is at the Coast Playhouse. See info below the review.] Elevator, a promising new play at The Hudson Guild about seven people who get trapped in an elevator, takes a while…

IT’S WORTH THE WALK You want to watch a movie, so you go to the video store to rent one, only the selection is so vast that you just close your eyes and pick. Take a friend with you and suddenly the choices become limited because they have already seen what you want to see….

A WONDROUS BUT TARNISHED OLD BOOK While sitting through The Good Book Of Pedantry And Wonder, I had the feeling, both reassuring and discomforting, that this was not a new play, but rather the fragments of a play discovered in an attic somewhere in England, dusted off, and somehow stitched together, with a nod to…

A REVIEWER AND HIS FRIEND SOON TO BE PARTED — Friend: Wasn’t that fabulous? I mean, what can you say? Didn’t you just love it to bits? Reviewer: What are you talking about? Friend: Hello. Where are you? The show we just saw. Â  “[title of show].” Â  Didn’t you think it was just fabulous? Reviewer: No….

PROMISING DOG BARKS, BUT IT NEEDS TO BITE In the current production of Topdog/Underdog, now playing at the Lillian Theatre, it’s difficult to cull a deeper meaning within Suzan-Lori Park’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Two black con artist brothers, Lincoln (Link) and Booth, share a squalid boarding house room in New York. Booth is determined…

ENTERTAINING MUSICAL ABOUT AGING NEEDS MATURING This is a difficult review to write: On one hand,  40 is the New 15  is a pleasant musical about forty year-olds who take a look at the choices they made in high school, going back and forth in time from 1983 to 2008. The characters are likeable, the acting is…

ALL MY PRAISE All My Sons, now showing in a red-hot production at the Raven Playhouse, is Arthur Miller’s seminal 1946 work about a seemingly functional all-American family with secrets that threaten to crack its very foundation. The time may be WWII, but the themes are shockingly contemporary: profiteering, lack of integrity, deceit, and judgment….

MAKE SURE YOU’VE BEEN PROPERLY  NOURISHED BEFORE GOING “I’ve been watching what I eat,” Wally says, as he stuffs a Twinkie in his mouth. “I’ve been watching what I see,” I think, as I swallow this highly caloric, nutrition-free, cream-filled sponge cake of a theater outing. Writer/director Roger Bean’s Life Could Be a Dream belongs to…