Regional

CAMPY LAUGHS FROM BROAD CHARACTERS Playwright Zsa Zsa Gershick is best known for her GLAAD and NAACP award-winning play Bluebonnet Court, a drama with humorous moments.   With her latest world-premiere at Moxie Theatre, Coming Attractions, she flips the intention, giving us instead a wit-filled comedy with touching moments. Though all-but-one of the characters are fiction,…

THE PAINT JOB ON THIS PROMISING MUSICAL NEEDS DARKER COLORS NPR’s This American Life is where I first heard about the 1997 film Hands on a Hard Body, which documented a 1995 dealership-sponsored contest in Texas. The rules were simple: whoever could keep their hand on a brand-new pickup truck the longest got the keys;…

POINTS FOR THE RICH MIX IN BROWNIE Five women consider themselves to be friends because their daughters are in the same Girl Scouts troupe.   The bond they share should have been enough to plan and co-lead a weekend camping excursion for the troupe, but challenges along the way reveal different personalities that were belied by…

WHAT DEFINES PRIDE? How much of our identity is defined by the era in which we live? How does the constraint or freedom of a particular time mold who we are? Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride, which opens this week at San Diego’s Diversionary Theatre, examines the lives of gay men in two separate stories…

A CHARMING MUSICAL WITHOUT A VIEW Theatre lore maintains that creating a successful new musical for the stage is more difficult and trying than creating peace in the Middle East. Noticing the deficiencies is easy; fixing the flaws can lead to a nervous breakdown. Jeffrey Stock and Marc Acito teeter between enjoyably simplistic and disconcertingly…

THE TORTILLA CURTAIN RISES TO BIG APPLAUSE A frequently-used device in plot is to create two or more distinctively different characters and see how they function once they are thrown together (Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Odd Couple), but in Tortilla Curtain, the difference is the effect they have had on each other as…

FIREBIRD SWOOPS INTO SEGERSTROM In honor of Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center for the Arts’ 25th Anniversary Season, American Ballet Theatre will present the world premiere of Alexei Ratmansky’s production of Firebird, the classic 1910 Igor Stravinsky ballet, originally choreographed by Michel Fokine at the Ballets Russes in Paris. This event is not to be missed…

ODD CASTING CHOICE NEARLY SINKS SHOW There is a perplexing and ultimately infuriating casting choice in the Old Globe’s production of Anna Christie that nearly sinks Eugene O’Neill’s 1921 tale of two sea-faring men and the woman who comes between them. Nearly. There is enough fully-realized acting and truly breathtaking stagecraft (including a scene change…

A PARADE IS COMING TO TOWN In the NY Times, Christopher Isherwood stated that while the authors of Parade deserve credit for their fidelity to history and their ambition to probe a painful chapter in the American past, the true story of Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched in Georgia in 1915 for…

3-D THEATRICALS MAKES QUITE A SOUND The 70MM, Panavision aerial shot of Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer and entourage trekking over the border into Switzerland in The Sound of Music (1965) may be impressive, but it pales in comparison to the final moments of 3-D Theatrical’s revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1959 audience pleaser. On a…

THEY’RE BA-A-A-A-A-CK Here’s the story: we are at  the 1958 Springfield High School senior prom, and the entertainment isn’t coming because  the leader of The Crooning Crab Cakes got busted for smoking around the girls’ lockers. Fortunately,  there is  a replacement four-girl group named The Marvelous Wonderettes who belt and rock sophisticated harmonies as they humorously grapple with adolescent…