Regional

STAGE NOIR In many ways, the stage adaptation of James Cain’s novel, Double Indemnity, is a radical departure from the iconic film from director/writer Billy Wilder. The film’”co-written by Cain’s contemporary and rival Raymond Chandler, who was known to deride Cain’s novels’”contains deliciously noir dialogue that Wilder and Chandler used to get past the censors….

I GET THE PICTURE Pageant of the Masters’ The Big Picture is perhaps the most three-dimensional idea from the fertile mind of director Diane Challis Davy. Continuing the 80-year tradition of celebrating art with a performance of “living pictures”’”tableaux vivants’”this year’s production is a tribute to the history of motion pictures and the ways in…

I DO BUT I DON’T With all the adorability, simplicity, cliché and generic tone of a Hallmark Card, I Do! I Do! opened last weekend at the Laguna Playhouse. Starring Broadway stalwarts Davis Gaines and Vicki Lewis, the 1966 two-character musical by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt (The Fantasticks) has aged surprisingly well, considering it…

ALL THE WORLD’S AN OLD  GLOBE The Old Globe has officially opened the 2013 Shakespeare Festival, now on through September 29. Adrian Noble returns for his fourth and final season as the internationally renowned festival’s Artistic Director, taking the helm on both Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Tom Stoppard’s classic farce, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are…

IN GOOD COMPANY “It’s a revue, but not a revue,” Stephen Sondheim said about Company when he was interviewed at Segerstrom last year. This surprised me because the groundbreaking 1970 musical which opens at Cygnet Theatre this weekend is a concept musical, meaning that the themes of a show (in this case, marriage and commitment)…

PARADISE  LILY My fanaticism with Lily Tomlin started with her 1972 comedy album This is a Recording. I immediately felt a kinship with Ernestine Tomlin, Ma Bell’s switchboard operator and favorite enforcer. She was meddlesome, forceful and sarcastic, and I always looked to her as a beacon of sanity in an incompetent world. Strangely enough, my…

FOGGY BUT FASCINATING Neva by Guillermo Calderón opens like a Beckett play, with a woman sitting alone in the darkness.   Once she is illuminated, she begins to speak with the pace and urgency of a train, hardly stopping for breath, her movements fervent but economical. This woman is Olga Knipper (Sue Cremin), seething with grief…

FANTASTIC, INDEED Fantasticks may be the longest running musical in America, but Amanda Dehnert’s magical production at South Coast Rep should run forever. The backdrop for this timeless wonder is now a defunct seaside amusement park, instead of the normally simple and open stages of countless productions past. A captivating cast recounts a tale of…

HOME IS WHERE THE HEARTACHE IS Moments before the arrival of Hope (a domineering mother-in-law, not the aspiration), newly-married Melody jests with her handsome corporate attorney husband, Craig: “Don’t talk about your mother and then try to kiss me.” Although funny dialogue such as this may seem more sitcom than theatrical in Bekah Brunstetter’s Be…

THE PETITE POLITIQUE Few playwrights have it as good as Beau Willimon at the moment; he’s a critical and commercial success on all three major platforms’”stage, screen, and stream. His play Farragut North was so successful and praiseworthy that George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio both bought the rights to adapt it to film; George Clooney…

EYEING AMNERIS  IN AIDA In this well-loved 150-year-old Guiseppe Verdi classic of Grand Opera, it may be heretical to question the relationship of the principle characters and their so-called “love triangle.” But in the San Diego Opera production it is Amneris, the Pharoah’s love-sick daughter, who seems more the protagonist. After all, it is Amneris’ world…

OH BROTHERS! Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: Talk about a musical with a strange history! It begins with the Ancient Roman legend “The Rape of the Sabine Women” — attributed to Plutarch — followed by Stephen Vincent Benét, who transferred the tale to Tennessee in his short story, “The Sobbin’ Women.” Then comes the 1954…