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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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Theater Review: READY STEADY YETI GO (Rogue Machine Theatre at Electric Lodge in Venice)
GRAFFITI THAT ASKS PERMISSION Carly Uhlenbeek (Jasmine St. Clair), an African American suburban seventh grade girl, seeks answers in playwright David Jacobi’s Ready Steady Yeti Go, a Rogue Machine production that is part of the National New Play Network’s rolling world premiere program. She assembles her friends to reenact the events of a recent hate…
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Theater Review: FALSETTOS (National Tour in Chicago)
WHAT MORE CAN THEY SING? By its riveting end Falsettos, a fusion of March of the Falsettos (1981) and Falsettoland (1990), has jolted us with its heartbreak and won us with its wit. This very grown-up musical by composer/lyricist William Finn and bookwriter James Lapine still delivers a daring plot: Marvin leaves wife Trina and son Jason for…
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Theater Review: A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles)
PLENTY TO DESIRE When I was thirteen I discovered Tennessee Williams when I picked up his play A Streetcar Named Desire at the New York Public Library. I don’t know if I fully understood it at that age, but there was one line that not only stayed with me my whole life, but is the…
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Theater Review: SHOOTING STAR — A REVEALING NEW MUSICAL (Hudson Mainstage in Hollywood)
SHOOTING STAR AIMS, SHOOTS … AND BORES Shooting Star, billed as “A Revealing New Musical” — and getting its World Premiere at the Hudson Theatres in Los Angeles under the direction of Michael Bello — offers us a glimpse of one man’s journey through the world of gay porn. Written by Florian Klein (a.k.a. adult…
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Theater Review: SIX (The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare)
SIX CHICKS REMIX TO NIX PRICKS Singing well is the best revenge, especially if you married the spouse from hell. So runs the cunning concept behind Six. This raucous pop concert joyously restores to very loud life the six ex-wives of Henry VIII. The rampaging result, recalling the hip-hop irreverence of the Q Brothers’Othello: The Remix and Christmas…
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