Regional

THE HONESTY OF HYPOCRISY The Motherfucker with the Hat by Stephen Adly Guirgis is a crackling, compelling play that finds genuine comic pathos not only in its characters’ struggles with addiction, violence, poverty, sexual compulsion, and sexual identity,  but in their various, mostly unfulfilled, attempts to distinguish between the people they are and the people they…

WASTED TIME In Marisa Wegrzyn’s Hickorydickory, all humans are born with a mortal clock encoded with the date and time of their death.   This mortal clock takes the form of an actual pocket watch.   For most people, it goes unnoticed because it is hidden behind their heart.   But for the “unfortunate few” the watch is…

A FEW PROTESTS… Todd Salovey’s revue of mostly American songs of protest is buoyed by a fiercely energetic, multi-talented quartet of singers and musicians: Dave Crossland, Jim Mooney, Vaughn Armstrong, and the redoubtable Lisa Payton.   When Payton hits the money notes it’s enough to pop your sternum from its rib cage.   But the narrative, the…

HOW TO LAUGH AND CRY AND BE UNMOVED AT THE SAME TIME Playwright Bill Cain, after discovering his mother, Mary, had six months to live, moved into the family home in Syracuse, New York. Like any good writer, Cain kept a diary during that trying time. His notes became the basis for How to Write…

ADAPTATION NEEDS TO MAKE EVERY DAY COUNT Jules Verne channeled 19th century technological progress into wondrous stories that fueled the world’s imagination.   He took us to the center of the earth, to the bottom of the sea, to the moon and, in perhaps his most popular adventure, around the world in 80 days.   Even in…

TICKLED PINK OK. I admit it: I’m a bad grandma. With three granddaughters between the ages of four and seven, I’ve never read a single Pinkalicious book. I felt unprepared, then, to join a theater audience comprised mostly of preteen girls, dressed to the nines and all aglitter in pink dresses and sparkly crowns for…

A PLAY THAT GROPES FOR AN EXIT William Missouri Downs’ The Exit Interview is a jumble of a play whose myriad directions are made more difficult to track by  its opening pronouncement:   Two exuberant cheerleaders (JoAnne Glover and Lisel Gorell-Getz), uniformed and pom-pommed, lead the audience in a spirited:   “Give me an “O”!   Give me an…

THIS ODD INTERPRETATION, AS WITH ORPHEUS HIMSELF,  FAILS TO LEAD US TO THE LAND OF THE LIVING Pulitzer prize finalist Sarah Ruhl is a playwright known for creating poetic, non-linear contemporary worlds in which people and situations transform on a dime, and joyful moments sometimes dissolve into deep melancholy’”or vice versa. In Eurydice, Ruhl repurposes the…

WORTH ITS WEIGHT IN GOLDFISH As a rising star in San Diego’s theater scene, Cygnet put a lot of eggs in one basket in producing Mistakes Were Made. Fortunately, they invested in the right basket with Phil Johnson, whose ability to go broadly comedic and then reel it back in sells this show for all…

BYRNE THIS Grammy ®, Oscar ® and Golden Globe winner and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honoree David Byrne along with St. Vincent make their Segerstrom Center debuts in An Evening with David Byrne & St. Vincent on October 12 at 8 p.m. in the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. Their concert follows the release…

NEW MUSICAL TOO LUKEWARM TO PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO IT Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing “exclusion zones” which effectively allowed for the forced evacuation of persons of Japanese ancestry in California, Washington and Oregon. Two-thirds of the 120,000 internees were American citizens, and since it was indiscernible as…

LIFE IN THE KITCHEN Suicide is no laughing matter.   No laughing matter, that is, until someone tries to commit it repeatedly in a room full of oblivious friends.   Then it’s hilarious. Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular is about three couples, who each in turn throw disastrous Christmas Eve dinner parties at their homes; under David…

AMERICANA NOT DEAD YET! Composer Jerome Kern said, “Irving Berlin has no place in American music. Irving Berlin is American Music.” This understanding is precisely what Ray Roderick and Michael Berkeley had when they conceived the all-Irving Berlin (fifty-five songs worth) revue I Love a Piano. The song and dance valentine for both Berlin and…