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Theater Review: BEAUTIFUL — THE CAROL KING MUSICAL (Transcendence Theatre Company at Field of Dreams in Sonoma)
TRANSCENDENCE DOES BEAUTIFUL BEAUTIFULLY Sonoma County’s home-grown musical revue troupe Transcendence Theatre Company has launched a wonderful production of Douglas McGrath’s theatrical biography Beautiful – the Carole King Musical. Britta Rae, David R. Gordon, Anne Terze-Schwarz, Billy Cohen The amazingly popular show has enjoyed many productions nationwide. TTC’s production has an inexplicably short ten-day run,…
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Theater Review: AMÉLIE (Kokandy Productions at The Chopin)
FROM TWEE TO TRÈS MAGNIFIQUE It’s fascinating how some stories lend themselves better to one medium than the other. In 2001, the French romantic comedy, Amélie was an unexpected worldwide hit and briefly made an international star of its beguiling lead, Audrey Tatou. I’d watched it on release (in the theatre, natch) and thought it…
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Theater Review: THE COMEDY OF ERRORS (The Old Globe’s Lowell Davies Festival Theatre)
TWINS, TWISTS, AND A TENDER TOUCH The Old Globe Theatre closes out its summer Shakespeare Festival at the outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Theatre in Balboa Park with a zippy 90-minute one-act production of the Bard’s early farce The Comedy of Errors. Grounded in the farcical confusions and mistaken identities that have made this play such…
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Theater Review: PARADE (National Tour, CIBC Theatre Chicago)
DON’T LET THIS PARADE PASS YOU BY In 1913, in Atlanta, Georgia, the body of Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old factory laborer, was found in the basement of a pencil factory. On the flimsiest of cases, a Brooklyn transplant, Leo Frank was arrested and charged with the crime. His ensuing trial, conviction, commutation, and grisly lynching…
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Theater Review: ONE UP: THE MUSICAL (Actors Company)
ONE UP PLAYS TO WIN– WITH A CHEAT CODE FOR CHARM One Up: The Musical, which premiered at this year’s Hollywood Fringe and returns for encore performances, is a charming, if uneven, 80s-inspired tuner about an underdog game developer trying to make her mark. Set in 1987, the book by creator Mary Bonney and Weslie Lechner takes…
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Theater Review: IT’S A BIRD… IT’S A PLANE… IT’S SUPERMAN! (Foster Cat Productions at The Broadwater)
WHY CAN’T A SUPERHERO CATCH A BREAK? (OR A BROADWAY RUN) Foster Cat Productions is taking a gleeful leap off the tall building that is It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman!, the 1966 Broadway musical that dared to blend comic book heroism with musical theatre razzmatazz. The result? A full-out, knowingly ridiculous, intriguingly…
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Theater Review: AWAKENING THE SHOW (Wynn Las Vegas)
CRYSTAL PALACE: AWAKENING PERFECTS THE IMPERSONAL ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ It opens with darkness. Then light fractures across a sixty-foot glass stage that shouldn’t exist but does, spinning and splitting into impossible geometries while Anthony Hopkins‘ taped voice rolls through the theater like distant thunder. Awakening The Show arrives…
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Theater Review: MAGNOLIA BALLET (Shotgun Players, Berkeley)
SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT UNDER A WEEPING MAGNOLIA: SHOTGUN’S HAUNTINGLY BEAUTIFUL STUNNER Now playing with an extended run in Berkeley, Shotgun Players’ Magnolia Ballet by Terry Best is the best thing I’ve seen all summer. A Southern gothic tale infused with poetry, music, and dance, this rich, genre-blending story speaks urgently to our divided political climate—offering a…
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Theater Review: OUT THERE (Broadwater)
Let there be no mistaking it, Mark Vigeant is so funny that if he was performing on an amphitheater set up in front of Mount Rushmore, after the first five minutes milk would be shooting out of Lincoln’s nose, Washington would be laughing so hard his cumbersome dentures would go flying out of his mouth,…
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Theater Review: SOME LIKE IT HOT (National Tour, Hollywood)
EVERYONE WILL LIKE IT HOT It wouldn’t be a valid review to simply write, “I loved it!” a hundred times and ship it off to my editor. However, if you’re looking for a bottom line or a simple recommendation, that’s exactly what this review will come down to. Leandra Ellis-Gaston and the company Evoking the…
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Theater Review: THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE (Hudson Backstage)
SEXLESS IN THE CITY Have you ever been with a guy who won’t shut up and just enjoy the blow job? That’s what it’s like to sit through Ashley Griffin’s new two-person play, The Opposite of Love, which premiered last year off-Broadway, and is now having its first West Coast performances at the Hudson Backstage…
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Theater Review: BILLIE JEAN (Chicago Shakespeare Theatre)
GAME. SET. NOT QUITE MATCH. Tennis great and feminist icon Billie Jean King gets the biography treatment in Billie Jean by Lauren Gunderson. Opening the new season of Chicago Shakespeare, this crowd-pleasing world premiere follows Billie Jean from her childhood in the 1950s through to the US Open in 2006 when the USTA National Tennis…
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Theater Review: THE MEETING TREE (Company One Theatre)
REPAIR AND REPARATIONS Company One’s world premiere of The Meeting Tree powerfully evokes the debate and the struggle over reparations and restitution through the lives of six women, some Black, some white, all of them related through their connection to one white man who lived in Alabama before the abolition of slavery. Director Summer L….
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Theater Review: ICE CREAM BLONDE (Actors Company)
DEAD BLONDES TELL NO TALES — EXCEPT THIS ONE Conspiracy theories have surrounded the death of actress and restaurateur Thelma Todd since 1935, when her lifeless body was discovered in a garage slumped behind the wheel of her parked Lincoln Phaeton convertible. Alexandra Kopko, as the actress’s ghost, presents a bio of Todd’s life to…
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Theater Review: ARTEMIS BOOKS & THE WELL-MEANING MAN (The Village Theater at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble)
AN EXTREMELY FEMINIST PLAY. OR IS IT? Never meet a man, they say. What happens if we have to work with one? Artemis Books & The Well-Meaning Man poses the complex question of how, if at all, men should be allowed into women’s safe spaces—or if it’s unethical to exclude them. The Village Theater’s world…
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Theater Review: BETSY & PATTY FIND OUT (The Broadwater)
WAITING FOR COWDOT Normally, a surfeit of hyphens in any production assures trouble ahead, but Aaron Francis, the writer-director-designer-producer of this subversive, potent indictment of the lethal potential of passivity, has shown himself the exception that either tests or proves that rule. In Betsy & Patty Find Out at the Broadwater Second Stage, seven cows…
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Theater Review: NOISES OFF (The Old Globe)
NOISES OFF, LAUGHS ON English playwright Michael Frayn debuted his farce Noises Off in 1982, and decades of audiences and reviewers have since happily applauded Frayn’s work as perhaps the funniest as well as the most challenging comedy in the canon of English-language theater. The Old Globe has accepted the Noises Off challenge this summer,…
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Theater Review: LOVE’S LABOURS LOST (Lanes Coven Theater Company at Windhover Performing Arts Center in Rockport, MA)
WIN OR LOSE, IT’S ABOUT LOVE Wow! Whoever wrote Love’s Labour’s Lost was a comic genius. The wordplay, the multi-lingual puns, and the send-ups of characters stumbling over their own foolishness are endlessly entertaining—except that many productions of this play by William Shakespeare fall flat. The sometimes obscure (to us) Elizabethan references and word usage…
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Theater Review: MÉNAGE À QUATRE (LA LGBT Center)
MÉNAGE À MEH, OR BOB & CAROL & DEAD & AIRLESS Last Saturday, I caught the world premiere of Ménage à Quatre, a play that seems to promise a farce but instead delivers a muddled mess. Written by Peter Lefcourt and directed by Ryan O’Connor, the show is a guest production at the Davidson/Valentini Theatre…
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Theater Review: THE FANTASTICKS (Ruskin Group Theatre)
THE KIND OF SEPTEMBER YOU’LL WANT TO REMEMBER With the original opening Off-Broadway in 1960 and running an astounding 42 years, The Fantasticks is a veritable classic amongst the repertoire of musical theater. This perennially popular piece by composer Harvey Schmidt and librettist & lyricist Tom Jones is a two-act chamber piece—an eight-character, minimalistic, melancholic, commedia…
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