Regional

SUPER SQUIRREL Flora &  Ulysses, the best play I’ve seen all year,  begins when  Flora Buckman, a  ten-year-old self-proclaimed  ­“natural-born cynic”, saves the life of a squirrel using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. You see, the squirrel had been sucked into a neighbor’s Ulys ­ses Super-Suction, Multi-Terrain 2000X vacuum cleaner. When the squirrel is revived, it has been blessed with both human thought…

I COULD WATCH 9 TO 5 24/7 In 1980, an unlikely film trio, Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, and Dolly Parton, was the center of  9 to 5,  an amusing feminist romp with lovable characters. Years later, Patricia Resnick took the screen play she co-authored and created the book for the stage version, featuring   new music by Parton,…

A WHALE OF A PRODUCTION Moby Dick, Herman Melville’s 1851 whale of a tale (or tale of a whale), is as unsinkable as its title cetacean. It’s never been more so than in Lookingglass Theatre Company’s sensation staged and adapted by David Catlin. After an extended sell-out run in Chicago, Catlin now brings this thrilling…

BAD JEWS MAKES FOR GOOD THEATRE, BUT OY SUCH AGITA There’s an old joke: “What do you get if you put three Jews in the same room?   Four opinions.” In Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews, the joke is elevated to a new level when the three strikingly different people are two brothers, Liam and Jonah, and…

MOST  OF THE WAY Sick of politics? Miss the days when strongarm politicians got things done with blackmail, threats, and tit-for-tat backroom deals? Well, politics are exciting and inspiring again in Robert Schenkkan’s 2012 All the Way, which opened last weekend at South Coast Rep. The 3-hour docudrama begins on the day of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s…

A SCALED-DOWN GYPSY NONETHELESS GOES  OFF THE SCALE Gypsy, the musical theater biography of striptease performer Gypsy Rose Lee, is really about Gypsy’s mother, Mama Rose, immortalized by Ethel Merman in the original 1959 production. Not just a chronicle of the superstar ecdysiast’s checkered childhood, Gypsy is a celebration of the addictive insanity of show business….

IT’S TIME TO PARTNER UP Pageant of the Masters, now in its 82nd year, is a singularly unique entertainment that has perfected the art of tableaux vivants (“living pictures”). With world-class designers and over 600 volunteers (including actors and a research team), this elegant and classy outfit’”equal parts museum, play, concert, and lecture’”re-creates for seated…

THE MUSICAL WITH LEGS A Chorus Line  remains as fresh as the day it appeared just over  forty years ago, when the standard Broadway musical was already fading away, making room for the jukebox musicals and mostly hollow spectacles we are still forced to endure (Catstricide, anyone?). The miracle of A Chorus Line is that it is…

LAMB’S SERVES UP A TASTY DINNER WITH MARLENE There’s an old parlor game of trying to decide:   If you could attend a dinner party and choose any guests you wanted around the table, whom would you select?   For Eric Hanes, who visited Paris from Sweden in 1938, he might well have picked the people who…

NOT YOUR AVERAGE VIOLINIST; NOT YOUR AVERAGE TANGO Coming up on April 15 and 16, 2016, in Irvine and La Jolla, acclaimed violinist Augustin Hadelich will be joined by dazzling pianist Joyce Yang and dynamic guitarist Pablo Villegas for an evening of Spanish-themed music built around André Previn’s three-part piece Tango Song and Dance, written…

GIVE YOURSELF OVER TO ABSOLUTE PLEASURE Those familiar with the movie version of The Rocky Horror Show may be shocked to find that there is no typo in the title of the stage version: Here, there is no “Picture” before “Show.” Before anyone had thoughts of a movie about the gang from Transsexual Transylvania, there…

A NEW BIRTH FOR LIBERTY Adapted from the short story by Dorothy M. Johnson that also inspired the legendary John Ford 1962 film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a classic tale of love, honor, ambition and revenge set against the backdrop of the American West. While Quentin Tarentino is valiantly keeping the oater…

WHOOSH! “All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare memorably said. “And all the men and women merely players.” In a world premiere at the Old Globe, Anna Ziegler’s new play The Last Match  successfully plays off the Bard’s famous monologue, equating tennis with life, athletic striving with human struggle, and delivering a deft, luminous play. Dueling it…