Theater

MAGIC STAGING; SAFE CASTING A Midsummer Night’s Dream at South Coast Rep may lack innovative subtext, but director Mark Rucker has assembled a team of co-creators who inject such a flurry of imagination and creativity into the Bard’s most accessible comedy that you may find yourself floating out of the theatre like a fairy in…

ADULT CHILDREN’S THEATRE If Hyperbole: Origins were to be reviewed as a play, I would tell you that I had no idea what the playwright was trying to say; since no writer is credited, we’ll just assume that the Rogue Artists Ensemble is merely musing over the origins of things, such as music, fire, sin…

IT’S NOT NICE TO FOOL WITH MOTHER NATURE Tacky commercials for Global Cytodynamics play on large video screens as we enter Theatre of NOTE, advertising improved lifestyles through genetic alteration, including that of learning, memory, pleasure and belief systems. Projection designer Steven Calcote and the always extraordinary sound designer Cricket Myers brilliantly take us into…

IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT THE TITLE OF THE SHOW MEANS BY THE END OF THE SHOW, THEN SOMETHING AIN’T RIGHT. Intríngulis is Carlo Albán’s true-life solo show about his family’s move from Ecuador to the U.S. and his life growing up as an illegal alien, even while starring in Sesame Street as a kid….

HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD In the fascinating (and often funny) Tales From Hollywood, playwright Christopher Hampton pays homage to the true-life émigrés from Nazi Germany who took up residence in Los Angeles to write for the movies. Many of them sacrificed their literary legacy to be paid $100 a week, forced to turn out dreck for the…

LIFE GOES ON, DOESN’T IT? The cemetery is the home of the nameless and it is strewn with pebbles and bits of garbage that serve as headstones. The keeper of the cemetery lives next to it in a shed that is equipped with not even the barest essentials. In this world of death, one does…

THE FONTS THAT CHANGE THE WORLD It takes a lot of brass to write a futurist play about a not-so-distant time when print is dead and it is necessary to learn to write again. It takes even more brass to start the play with a thirty-five minute lecture on the history of typography and the…

TOLSTOY NEVER MADE ME 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,…

HOW DO YOU SPELL RELIEF? William S. Burroughs said, “Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.†Well, what a relief it is to see the venerable Pasadena Playhouse open for business again after a financial housecleaning. There are indeed angels in our midst that came to the rescue after the Playhouse closed on February 7 and…

WHERE GRIEF GOES TO DIE There is a Turkish expression: “He that conceals his grief finds no remedy for it.” A train driver named Roelf (Morlan Higgins) is doing everything he can to remedy his all-consuming trauma caused by the death of a black woman and her baby, whose faces he saw immediately before they…

MEET THE CROWS Neighbors is a mess, but it is the most vibrant and ground-breaking mess you are likely to encounter in any theater in Los Angeles at the moment and I apologize for being delinquent in getting this review out because it has come to my attention that Neighbors is offering all sorts of…

RUINED AND SAVED If history is really an argument without end, then Lynn Nottage, among contemporary American playwrights, is our most compassionate historian. Although I prefer Intimate Apparel for the elegance of its writing and for the freshness of its approach to discovered facts, it is easy to understand why Ruined is her breakout play….

WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO OUR CLASSICS? You can fragmentize a familiar Shakespeare play like Macbeth, if you have a clear concept of what you want to do with it and then give it a witty and inventive production, as was proven recently when Psittacus Productions presented A Tale Told By An Idiot, but if…

PREPARE TO ROLL YOUR MOISTENED EYES If you are into political rallies that are jam-packed with guilt-inducing inspiration, then bundle up your harmonica, washtub bass, guitar, picket signs, seat cushions, and picnic; call forth a sense of injustice, and march to the hippie hills of Topanga. No, you’re not on your way to a fundraiser…

TEENAGERS YOU ACTUALLY WANT TO SPEND TIME WITH It’s a wonder when a playwright can capture the vernacular of three misfit teens, but to intersperse an uncanny insight into the angst of these determining years is a feat of magic. In Speech and Debate at the Secret Rose Theatre, playwright Stephen Karam has not only…