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Theater Review: DEATH OF A SALESMAN (Ruskin Theatre Group in Santa Monica)
DEATH LIVES Arthur Miller makes Willie Loman, the tragic figure in his Death of a Salesman, 63 years old. So I was more than a little skeptical as to whether or not Rob Morrow (of Northern Exposure fame) could pull it off. At Ruskin Theatre Group, Morrow, with his boyish good looks, appears much younger…
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Theater Review: GOOD BOYS (Pasadena Playhouse)
A GOOD GOOD BOYS COULD’VE BEEN GREAT Gay playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (contributor to Glee and Big Love) gets a revival of his drama Good Boys and True that premiered at Steppenwolf ten years ago. There is some solid stagecraft in his story about a privileged prep-school teen caught up in a sex scandal, but it’s shocking that while…
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Theater Review: THE PRODUCERS (Celebration Theatre in Los Angeles)
I WANNA SEE THE PRODUCERS Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. The Celebration production of The Producers is as far away from the Borscht Belt as a New York musical comedy — whose central characters are named Bialystock and Bloom — can get. On the other hand, this is the kind…
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Theater Review: GRINDR THE OPERA (AN UNAUTHORIZED PARODY) (Pride Films and Plays)
AN APP-ETITE FOR AMOUR Sooner or later you knew an Internet application would get its own show, especially when it plays Dan Cupid, hooking up randy seekers of one-night stands or permanent pleasure. First produced in the U.K. last year, Grindr The Opera (An Unauthorized Parody) is an alternately cheeky and bittersweet salute to some…
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Theater Review: HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre in Evanston)
THE WINNER BY AN INCH It’s a perverse Pride Month offering that cocks a snoot at authority and respectability: “I’m the new Berlin Wall — try to tear me down!” That defiant dare marks the flaming arrival of Hedwig Schmidt, survivor-heroine of John Cameron Mitchell’s riveting 1998 rock opera, a work that inevitably honors the…
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Theater Review: THE RIVER (BoHo Theatre in Chicago)
A LITERAL STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Only 65 minutes long, British playwright Jez Butterworth’s spell-casting The River manages, as few plays have, to simulate a dream on stage. Heraclitus said that life was like a river because we never step into the same stream twice. Likewise this one-act’s obsessive quest for certainty in love amid the seemingly random…
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Theater Review: PUT YOUR HOUSE IN ORDER (La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego)
HOUSE IS IN ORDER, BUT IS THAT ENOUGH? There is so much that is right about Ike Holter’s clever script of Put Your House in Order. Because of that, it is unfortunate that, in the end, it is just a bit unfulfilling — and challenging to explain why without giving away much of what certainly…
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Theater Review: OEDIPUS EL REY (Magic Theatre in San Francisco)
GREEK TRAGEDY IN THE ‘HOOD Having read Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus El Rey, one can see that is a true original, that it possesses power, anger, frustration, political and social outrage, that Alfaro’s heart bleeds with compassion for his characters, that his writing is rich and often dazzling in its use of language and in its…
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Theater Review: MACBETH (Oregon Shakespeare)
FOUL AND FAIR Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or The Tragedy of Macbeth, is typically dated to the years immediately following the coronation of James I as King of England in 1603. James, who was also King of Scotland, believed himself to be descended from Banquo, the noble friend of Macbeth. While the play is not considered one of Shakespeare’s…
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Theater Review: DANA H (Center Theatre Group at the Kirk Douglas Theatre)
A ROLLER COASTER RIDE TO THE HEART OF DARKNESS I will always love good theater but, even so, every so often there comes along a play that actually restores one’s faith in the possibilities of theater. Dana H by the brilliant Lucas Hnath is just such a play. And Les Waters’ direction couldn’t be more…
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Theater Review: LOOT (Odyssey Theatre Ensemble)
LOOT CONDUCT At a time when drawing room comedies ruled West End theatre, and even the shock of the raw emotions depicted in Osborne’s Look Back in Anger had faded, a complacent London audience enjoyed such safe, heartwarming fare as Hello, Dolly!, and the water-thin comedy There’s a Girl in my Soup. Then in 1966…
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Theater Review: THE BALD SOPRANO (Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco)
ACTOR DOUGLAS NOLAN: TOTALLY HUMAN AND TOTALLY ABSURD If you’ve ever seen a production of Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano that had you in stitches from practically the very first moment right through the absolutely nutty ending just before it begins — horrors! — all over again, it doesn’t take more than five minutes into…
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Theater Review: CAMBODIAN ROCK BAND (Oregon Shakespeare Festival)
BAND ON THE RUN It’s impossible to grasp a monster evil like genocide as a whole, to weigh it as so many calculable, tangible acts of human failure that yield a vast vileness and a terrible waste. To hold it hard, it has to be broken down into the choices and values of flawed or…
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Theater Review: SUCKER PUNCH (Coeurage Theatre at Tiger Boxing Gym in West Hollywood)
A PUNCH IN THE GUT Raw as realism requires, good plays about boxing are more than just Rocky slugfests. Like Clifford Odets’ seminal Golden Boy, they transform an atavistic popular distraction into a metaphor for sweet success, the reward of pluck and nerve — or, as the title of Sucker Punch implies, a parable on selling your…
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Theater Review: MS. BLAKK FOR PRESIDENT (Steppenwolf)
THE ULTIMATE DRAG RACE It’s both louder than life and strident with substance. The perfect play for Pride Month and a deafening blast from the past, Ms. Blakk for President, an uproarious and rambunctious rouser, gives a magnificent cause future reference. Created by ensemble members Tina Landau and Tarell Alvin McCraney for Steppenwolf, this 100-minute jubilee…
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Theater Review: RHINOCEROS (A.C.T. in San Francisco)
WHAT AN ABSURD WORLD The first scene in the A.C.T. revival of Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist masterpiece Rhinoceros, directed by Frank Galati with razor-sharp clarity and breakneck swiftness as a comic duel between two life-long friends, the fuzzy minded alcoholic Bérenger and the elegant know-it-all Jean, deliciously played by the casually woeful David Breitbarth and the…
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Theater Review: DESIRE IN A TINIER HOUSE (Pride Films and Plays at the Pride Arts Center)
POINTLESS PERPLEXITY Sometimes what you see is much less than what you get. Case in point: Pride Films and Plays is closing its season with a daunting new work written by Ryan Oliveira and directed by Topher Leon. Desire in a Tinier House (its title as mystifying as most of its plot) is a two-hour, two-act, two-character…
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Theater Review: HARVEY (Laguna Playhouse)
YOU’RE GETTING TO BE A RABBIT WITH ME Whatever happened to all the imaginary friends we had as kids? Did they all end up in some limbo where they started making friends with each other, or, like Peter Pan, did they transfer their affections to a new generation of make-believers? Anyway, they’re no longer there…
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Theater Review: ANNA IN THE TROPICS (Open Fist Theatre Company in Los Angeles)
HAS TOLSTOY EVER BEEN SO HOT? In his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Anna in the Tropics, Nilo Cruz created the role of striking, velvet-voiced, Cuban Lothario Juan Julian, a lector who is hired to read books to the workers in a 1929 Tampa cigar factory — it alleviates tedium, inadvertently educates them, and, in this case, causes…
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Theater Review: BRONCO BILLY – THE MUSICAL (World Premiere at Skylight Theatre)
BILLY BOY OH BOY Meet Billy, an ex-con sharpshooter who is living his American Dream in 1979. This optimistic showman, romantic, and visionary has encouraged a fraternity of castaways — a Native American and his wife, a car thief, an ex-nurse, an erstwhile bank teller — to join him as entertainers in a troupe about…
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