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Theater Review: HAPPY DAYS (Mark Taper Forum)
HAPPY DAYS IS HERE AGAIN I had never read nor seen Samuel Beckett’s absurdist classic Happy Days, now at the Mark Taper, but was excited at the prospect of seeing the great Dianne Weist in the flesh. Like many people, I’ve loved her ever since Hannah and Her Sisters, one of Woody Allen’s best films,…
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Theater Review: STYLE AND GRACE: IN TRIBUTE TO LENA HORNE AND NANCY WILSON (Black Ensemble Theater in Chicago)
SINGING UP STORMY STUFF With this theater everything good is new again — and never old. The latest homage from Black Ensemble Theater, Style and Grace: In Tribute to Lena Horne and Nancy Wilson honors stellar singers whose consummate talents we lost in 2010 and 2018, respectively. Incarnating “impeccable style and enduring grace,” these divas…
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Theater Review: M. BUTTERFLY (South Coast Rep)
MEH BUTTERFLY M. Butterfly asks the audience to accept a love story in which a French career diplomat takes a Chinese opera diva as his mistress for 20 years, unaware that the diva is actually a man. Truth being stranger than fiction, the story is based on a real life affair that David Henry Hwang…
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Theater Review: MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN (Lookingglass Theatre Company in Chicago)
THE MONSTER WITHIN It was a dark and stormy night. Escaping a tempest by seeking shelter in the Villa Diodati on a summer night in 1814, good friends Mary Shelley (as she would later be called), her future husband and Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the infamous George Gordon Lord Bryon, affable Dr. John Polidori,…
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Theater Review: BLOOMSDAY (Remy Bumppo Theatre Company at Theater Wit)
DÉJí€ VU VS. NEVERMORE A very prolific playwright, Steven Dietz can deliver dense dramatic homage. In his 2013 Mad Beat Hip & Gone, now playing at The Edge Theater Off Broadway, his dialogue dives into a recreation of beatnik Jack Kerouac’s road-trip fantasies. Another very recent work, his 2016 Bloomsday, incarnates and embodies James Joyce, specifically the…
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Theater Review: YOGA PLAY (Moxie Theatre Company in San Diego)
PUTTING CAPITALISM ON THE MAT Which of the following defines yoga to you? A series of gentle exercises meant to relax and invigorate the body; A Hindu spiritual and ascetic discipline using breath control and meditation; An 83 billion-dollar international industry of mats, equipment, clothing, and accessories. All three are true, but for Joan (Jo…
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Theater Review: AT THE TABLE (Road Theatre at Lankershim Arts Center in North Hollywood)
THERE’S A LOT AT THIS TABLE At the Table takes place in Catskills, a resort area in the low mountains in E New York State that I hold dear to my heart since I spent many summers there — as many Jewish New Yorkers did. The setting is the house of Nate (Christian Prentice), who…
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Theater Review: JULIUS WEEZER (The Troubies at El Portal in North Hollywood)
CAESING THE MOMENT What do you get when you mix Shakespeare’s beloved tragedy Julius Caesar with the hard-driving rock band Weezer? Adapter, director and choreographer Matt Walker, who also plays Cassius, arrived at the mash-up known as Julius Weezer, and you should be prepared before attending that you will no doubt wind up laughing your…
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Theater Review: AS YOU LIKE IT (Oregon Shakespeare)
AS YOU LIKE IT, OR DON’T These are strange times we’re living in, and political correctness makes strange bedfellows. For years now, Oregon Shakespeare Festival has been a leader of inclusionary casting — meaning actors who have been looked over in the past will be readily accommodated regardless of physical disabilities, age, race, sex, deafness…
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Theater Review: THE UNDENIABLE SOUND OF RIGHT NOW (Raven Theatre in Chicago)
KEEPING ROCK REAL Letting a good thing go is a hard fate: Change is always constant but it’s never guaranteed to be good. A tough transition in Chicago’s indie rock scene is feelingly chronicled in Laura Eason’s The Undeniable Sound of Right Now, a Chicago premiere at Raven Theatre. The title sounds like a visceral response to an expiration date —…
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Theater Review: FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (Tour)
AS RELEVANT AND CELEBRATORY AS EVER, FIDDLER GETS A POWERFUL REVIVAL It takes a musical to make a village: At nearly three hours, this very replete revival, which plays the Segerstrom Center in Costa Mesa through May 17, takes its time — but not ours. Fiddler on the Roof, the beloved 1964 musical, richly rewards…
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Theater Review: MAD BEAT HIP & GONE (Promethean Theatre Ensemble)
TAKE TO THE ROAD Walt Whitman may have patented the “song of the open road,” but the Beat Generation gave it their own course correction and made it into a map. These writers of the Eisenhower Era, most notably Jack Kerouac in On the Road, turned bittersweet wanderlust into their own manifest destiny. In a time before…
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Theater Review: TOO HEAVY FOR YOUR POCKET (TimeLine Theatre)
ANOTHER DREAM DEFERRED The price of progress is no abstraction, not during the fully-freighted 160 minutes of Jiréh Breon Holder’s civil rights drama Too Heavy for Your Pocket. A TimeLine Theatre time capsule thrillingly staged by Ron OJ Parson, this blast from the past goes beyond yesterday’s infamous clash of activists against fire hoses to…
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Theater Review: THE CHILDREN (Steppenwolf)
THE PARENTS CRUSADE The setting is the story in The Children, Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Chicago premiere. Set designer Chelsea M. Warren depicts a cluttered seaside cottage off the east coast of England. It’s seen from across a cliff, as if an exhibit in a human zoo. This remote shelter is located just outside an “exclusion zone,” the site…
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Theater Review: BRIGHT STAR (Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theater in Claremont)
OH MY STAR! Bright Star is a heartwarming musical written by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell inspired by their 2013 bluegrass album Love Has Come for You. The show had a Broadway run in the spring of 2016 with direction by Walter Bobbie, choreography by Josh Rhodes and a set design by Eugene Lee. Now,…
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Theater Review: HAMLET (Chicago Shakespeare)
THE PARALYZED PRINCE Century after century, thespian tyro after marquee headliner, something remains rotten in the state of Denmark. A defining challenge for thousands of careers, Hamlet persists as both a title and a test, Shakespeare’s longest if not deepest tragedy. At nearly three hours, Barbara Gaines’ magisterial modern-dress revival is a valuable and workmanlike continuation…
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Theater Review: TIME NO LINE (John Kelly)
TEMPUS FUGIT There are great performance artists and, rarer still, there are great artists who perform. John Kelly is both. His Time No Line is a quietly breathtaking meditation on his life and art culled from the journals he kept from 1976 to the present day. He can be mathematically precise poring over details in…
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Theater Review: THE JUNGLE (Curran Theatre in San Francisco)
IT’S A JUNGLE IN HERE From 2015 to 2016, The Jungle was a makeshift camp in a landfill site in Calais, France, the port city where the Channel Tunnel to the UK begins. Inhabited by refugees from nations normally unfriendly to one another — Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iraq, Iran, and others — they put…
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Theater Review: TWO DAYS IN COURT: Benet’s THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER and Gilbert and Sullivan’s TRIAL BY JURY (City Lit)
TWIN TRAVESTIES (OF JUSTICE) ARE DOUBLE THE FUN Order in the court! Closing its season with dueling gavels, City Lit Theater offers Two Days in Court in only 90 minutes. Merrily combining Gilbert and Sullivan’s first hit, the “dramatic cantata” Trial by Jury, with Stephen Vincent Benet’s historical romp The Devil and Daniel Webster, it’s a charming…
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Theater Review: JAY JOHNSON: THE TWO AND ONLY (Tour)
THE VOICE BEHIND THE VOICES Ventre Loqui: To speak from the belly. This is the etymology of the word ventriloquism, an art as old as : well, it depends who you ask. For some, there is no older art, as it was the trick of the devil to make the snake appear to speak to…
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