Regional

LITTLE THEATER SCORES A BIG HIT There’s nothing quite like taking a child to his very first theater outing. And when that child is a baseball fan, and the play is the family-friendly Honus and Me: A Baseball Card Adventure, well’”it’s pretty much a home run. The curtainless stage in the intimate Lewis Family Playhouse…

THERE’S TALENT SOMEWHERE IN THIS FAMILY With West Side Story lighting up Broadway only blocks from their home, the Candelarias are inspired that Chita Rivera has cracked open the doors of opportunity for Latino performers like siblings Alejandro, Francisco, and Rebecca.   As Tony and Maria sing, “There’s a place for us:somewhere.” The Old Globe’s Somewhere…

GREAT DAME Were the masterpiece from the golden age of Broadway Guys and Dolls an actual guy or doll, he or she could score Social Security next year; but make no mistake, this 1950 hoofer is no worse for the wear, thanks to Frank Loesser’s timeless score and Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows’ cheeky book…

NOT YOUR MOTHER’S DARCY AND ELIZABETH South Coast Repertory’s Pride and Prejudice, written for the stage by Joseph Hanreddy and J.R. Sullivan from Jane Austen’s masterpiece, brings out a side of this classic story that this reviewer has never seen (but always wanted to). It seems that a Mr. Bingley (Brian Hostenske) lets a manor…

LOVE’S LABOR’S LOST, FOUND,  LOST, LOST, AND FOUND [England, 1593] I’m not so sure that this William Shakespeare has a future as a playwright. Oh, the man can write, but his newest play, Love’s Labor’s Lost (LLL) is a near disaster of storytelling. Surely, he had a bona fide hit with last year’s The Taming of…

UNLIKEABLE CHARACTERS STILL LEAVE A RESONATING MESSAGE In Milk Like Sugar, Kirsten Greenidge’s sharply-written world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse, three African-American, inner-city high school girls, Annie, Margie, and Talisha (aka T), have formed a tight posse in order to survive the harsh realities of tenement life. With absent brothers and uneducated mothers (one of…

GREAT CAESAR’S GHOST As directors continue to re-invent theatre, especially the classics, there is a bent to color-blind and gender-bending casting. The mixed-color cast on hand exemplifies just how powerful this mechanism can be: the story of a small group of people who take government into their own hands via assassination becomes a universal examination…

AMBIGUITY WITH PURPOSE If you read the spiritual/psychotherapeutic tome A Course In Miracles, it states that miracles occur as a result of a shift in perception; that meaning lies not in the actual events in our lives, but rather in our interpretation of these events. Willful, the site-specific theatrical event at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, takes…

A MISSED OPPORTUNITY We learn very little about the history of the African Company (the world’s first known African-American theater company) and even less about Richard III in The African Company Presents Richard III. The very title sounds thrilling as we expect that an actual company of modern African actors will be guest artists at…

AN UGLY DUCKLING OF A MUSICAL In Stephen Schwartz’ musical My Fairytale, now receiving its American premiere at PCPA in Solvang, well-known storyteller Hans Christian Anderson has an idea for an opera which will star singing sensation Jenny Lind. His pitch about a Chinese Emperor is quickly ditched by the Royal Theatre Management, but Lind…

THE ONLY THING THAT MAY NEED A CHANGE IS THE TITLE We hear that that the only thing constant is change, yet we struggle against change, we fight against change, and some are even willing to succumb to the unyielding stress of determined apathy rather than change. We live in a world that must change…

BY GEORGE, I THINK THEY’VE GOT IT; THE SCRIPT, HOWEVER’¦ A friend of mine is an Alan Ayckbourn fanatic, owning dozens of the prolific playwright’s scripts, yet he can count on one hand the productions he has seen to date. For him, American productions are never as good as the scripts. Therfore, he says, he’d…

HOT AUGUST PLAY NEEDS EVEN MORE HEAT It was impossible not to have any expectations prior to The Old Globe’s production of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize and Tony Â© Award-winning three-act black comedy, August: Osage County. When a surreal amount of hype is bestowed on a new work, especially one where critics praise the playwright as…