Regional

GO TO TOWN I am convinced that me colleague Marc Wheeler nailed the many reasons in his review of Hadestown why you must see this national tour. One of the most original musicals to come out in years, Hadestown still sells out on Broadway even as a National Tour is on the road. Indeed, some…

IDIOT IS AS IDIOT DOES Inspired by a 2004 rock album by the American pop-punk rock band Green Day, American Idiot has received its share of positive reviews since its premiere in Berkeley, California in 2009 and subsequent runs on Broadway, on tour, at colleges, and regional and community theaters. When I saw the tour…

OUR CELEBRATION This year marks the 125th anniversary of  Thornton Wilder’s birth. As part of the  Wilder125  celebration, about 150 productions of the esteemed writer’s  plays  are being staged worldwide, including  a revival of  The Skin of Our Teeth  on Broadway. This week, I had the privilege of seeing what’s arguably  Wilder’s most famous work  –  Our Town  –  at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California.  It was…

THIS TIGER IS KING Tiger Style! at South Coast Rep is refreshing for many reasons. First, it’s really funny. Playwright Mike Lew crafts his script like a super-smart teenager, mixing insights about the Asian community with cutting humor, f-bombs, “dude,” “bro” and some other words one would only find on Urban Dictionary. It’s a style…

YOUR HEART WILL BE BLESSED Maria, an Austrian novice nun in the late 1930s, has difficulty in dealing with the rigid lifestyle of her monastery in Salzburg. Her loving Mother Abbess sends her off to be a nanny to seven children of widower and celebrated navy captain Georg von Trapp, a tough military man. Through…

DEADWOOD OR GIN? Fine actors of stage, television, and film, JoBeth Williams and Joe Spano unite their decades of work and talent to kick off a national tour of The Gin Game at the Rubicon Theatre Company in Ventura. Yet even with such names filling the stage in this intimate two-hander, D. L. Coburn’s tragicomedy…

FINALLY: NEXT TO PERFECT The first three times I saw Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s Next to Normal, it never truly floored me. There are many ingredients that validate the 2009 musical’s popularity: it is to be commended for a bold and daring new way of communicating the kind of subject matter that you would…

LIFE MAY SUCK, BUT THE PLAY SURE DOESN’T For those familiar with Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, it might seem an odd choice to modernize. But Aaron Posner’s tight script, combined with Cygnet’s strong cast, is a breath of fresh air, as it takes Chekhov’s story solidly into the stress of our post-2020 world — and…

THE PHYSICS OF ATTRACTION If this totally non-physicist reviewer understands what he is reading — the Uncertainty Principle  launched by renowned physicist Werner Heisenberg, roughly states that the more precise the position of a particle is given, the less precisely can one say what its momentum is. If that has your head already spinning, no worries;…