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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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Theater Review: SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (The Soraya in Northridge and The La Mirada Theatre)
LET THE GOOD TIMES POUR When people say a musical is old-fashioned they usually mean it in a negative way, which is silly. There are bad, good, and brilliant musicals, and Singin’ in the Rain is brilliant. The stage version of Singin’ in the Rain was adapted from the 1952 MGM movie written by Betty Comden…
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Theater Review: FALSETTOS (National Tour)
NOT ONE FALSE NOTE The musical masterpiece Falsettos follows Marvin, an appealing, brainy, anxious, obsessive, wealthy Jewish gay man who struggles to create a tight-knit family out of his eclectic array of core relationships: an ex-wife, new boyfriend, adolescent son, psychiatrist, and “neighbors who are lesbians from next door.” Amidst a series of monumental life changes…
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Theater Review: EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED (Ensemble Theatre Company in Santa Barbara)
SOME, NOT ALL, IS ILLUMINATED Sadly, not everything is illuminated in British playwright Simon Block’s fascinating but problematic adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s best-selling novel about a young American writer who hires a Ukrainian translator to take him to the town where a woman named Augustine saved his grandfather’s life in WWII. Or so Jonathan…
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Theater Review: SOUTHERNMOST (Playwrights’ Arena)
VOLCANOES WITHIN AND WITHOUT When you walk into the theater for playwright Mary Lyon Kamitaki’s Southernmost, Justin Huen’s scenic design transports you immediately into another world: An indoor-outdoor ramshackle house in Naalehu, on the coast of a largely unpopulated area on the Big Island of Hawaii. It is the southernmost inhabited space in the United…
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Theater Review: MY LIFE ON A DIET (Renée Taylor at The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
TAYLOR MADE If timing is everything with comedy Renée Taylor in My Life on a Diet is proof positive. This revival of her one-woman show, based on her 1986 memoir of the same title, is a master class in getting laughs. She takes sentences that wouldn’t necessarily be funny on the page and makes them…
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Theater Review: JERSEY BOYS (2018-19 National Tour)
THE BOYFRIENDS ARE BACK Back by popular demand but for only one week at the Auditorium Theatre, the mega-jukebox musical Jersey Boys continues to stir up a perfect storm of industrial-strength nostalgia. Replete with doo-wop harmonies, pile-driving rock anthems and blue-collar verismo, the trademarks of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, this well-packaged blast from the past…
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Theater Review: THE MEATBALL CHRONICLES (Hudson Guild Theatre in Hollywood)
HERE’S THE BEEF What happens when you’re brought up to feel invisible? Where do you go for solace? Where do you go to find your identity? For actress Debrianna Mansini it was in cooking; this was her joy, her salvation, her escape and most importantly it was the only way she was able to communicate…
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Theater Review: AFTERGLOW (Pride Films and Plays)
DOES LOVE NEED A LEASH? “The heart wants what the heart wants.” Emily Dickinson’s seemingly simple saying (akin to Gertrude Stein’s “A rose is a rose is a rose”) in fact packs a lot of wary resignation into a vote of confidence. So does the 2017 off-Broadway hit Afterglow, 80 minutes of theatrical “comfort food” that…
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Theater Review: CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (National Tour)
THE CANDY MAN CAN’T The stage musical adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — Roald Dahl’s beloved children-of-all-ages’ story — has spun into town just, it seems, to make your teeth ache. Directed by Jack O’Brien, this already extended national tour arrives to a city near you even though it flopped on Broadway (27…
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Theater Review: CHAPS (Lamb’s Players in San Diego)
CHAPSCHTICK It’s 1944. The war is raging across the English Channel and the Germans could invade at any moment. Britain needs levity to get through these tough days. Miles (Charles Evans, Jr.) is the station manager for a BBC program and he’s got the solution. BBC has announced that a famous, beloved American country band…
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