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Theater

  • Theater Review: HERE WE GO and THIS IS A CHAIR (Inkblot “C” of Open Fist Theatre’s Rorschach Festival)

    By Tony Frankel | February 20, 2020
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    CARYL ME HOME When the author is famed English playwright Caryl Churchill, theater about death and life’s surmounting surrealism isn’t depressing at all; it’s exhilarating. The author of Cloud Nine, Owners and Top Girls has written many short works as well, and right now two great one-acts are being given a minor production by Open…

  • Theater Review: KILL MOVE PARADISE (TimeLine)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 20, 2020
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    POSTHUMOUS EMANCIPATION The painful premise behind Kill Move Paradise is that there’s no justice on this side of the grave. So author James Ijames goes to the other side. He creates a kind of Elysian Fields for four young black men cut down wrongly and early. It’s up to this 2017 valedictory, inspired by the…

  • Theater Review: BORN IN EAST BERLIN (SF Playhouse)

    By Harvey Perr | February 19, 2020
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    REBIRTH Which walls are worse? Those that keep people out or those that keep people in? Playwright Rogelio Martinez seemed to have this question in mind when he wrote Born in East Berlin, which is being given its world premiere at the Creativity Theater thanks to San Francisco Playhouse’s Sandbox Series, and it is this…

  • Theater Review: IT SHOULDA BEEN YOU (Musical Theatre Guild at the Alex Theatre in Glendale)

    By Barry Creyton | February 18, 2020
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    YOU SHOULDA BEEN THERE Happy ever after is the stuff of fairy tales – yet, happy ever after is how we in the audience left the Alex Theatre on Sunday night. The show was It Shoulda Been You which enjoyed a respectable if modest run on Broadway in 2015. The New York critics, perhaps unused…

  • Theater Review: GRAVEYARD SHIFT (Goodman)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 17, 2020
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    APPROXIMATING AN ATROCITY It’s an evil not to be exorcised. As the excellent HBO documentary My Name Is Sandra Bland showed, a tragedy resonates — Bland was found hanged in a prison cell in Prairie View, Texas, the dump-of-a-city to which she returned for an exciting administrative teaching position. A popular poster of videos (“Good…

  • Theater Review: THE $5 SHAKESPEARE COMPANY (The 6th Act at Theatre 68 in North Hollywood)

    By Marc Wheeler | February 16, 2020
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    LIFE IMITATETH ART In Christopher Guest’s brilliant 1996 mockumentary Waiting For Guffman, the smalltown residents of Blaine, MO, come together to put on a show. But what if instead the residents in the film made the movie themselves? That’s the level of ironic self-unawareness permeating The $5 Shakespeare Company, a woeful work by Matthew Leavitt…

  • Theater Review: THE FATHER (Pasadena Playhouse)

    By Marc Wheeler | February 15, 2020
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    PAPA, CAN YOU HEAR ME? Every once in a while a play reminds us what – and how exciting – theater can be. In The Father (Le Père), French playwright Florian Zeller doesn’t just present a man with dementia, he makes us feel as if we have it, too. Electrifying Southern California with Zeller’s genius…

  • Theater Review: GATZ (Berkeley Rep)

    By Harvey Perr | February 15, 2020
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    GREAT F. SCOTT! If you love literature, have fond memories of being read to or of reading to others, and feel, as so many do, that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is in the Pantheon of Great American Novels, and you also have an appetite for ambitious or unusual theater projects and, in particular,…

  • Theater Review: SUMMER: THE DONNA SUMMER MUSICAL (National Tour)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 14, 2020
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    DISCO’S ONCE AND FUTURE DIVA As the song says, “Dim All The Lights” — or set them to scorching splendor. Anyway, the giant mirror ball is back, scintillating and scattering flecks of light throughout the Nederlander Theater. The ensemble is gallivanting in sequin suits and skirts. The song is “Last Dance,” the final exaltation in…

  • Theater Review: FUN HOME (Chance Theater)

    By Marc Wheeler | February 14, 2020
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    TAKE A CHANCE WITH FUN When a newly “out” lesbian learns her closeted father has taken his life mere months after revealing to him her sexuality, she has a lot to process. Being an artist, she attempts to make sense of her trauma through storytelling – that’s the power of art. More specifically, that’s the…

  • Theater Review: I DECIDED I’M FINE: A ROACH PLAY (The Attic Collective at Studio/Stage in Hollywood)

    By Marc Wheeler | February 11, 2020
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    PASS THIS ROACH After a convoluted build-up, there’s a late scene in I Decided I’m Fine: A Roach Play that actually works. In it, Ellen (Veronica Tjioie), a trauma-stricken hoarder, exposes her “dirty secret” by welcoming outsiders into her shockingly cluttered home. If one can get past the improbability of such a willing invitation, the…

  • Theater Review: LADY DAY AT EMERSON’S BAR & GRILL (Ebony Rep)

    By Tony Frankel | February 10, 2020
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    AT DAY’S END Thanks to Lanie Robertson’s bedrock-basic script, Wren T. Brown’s dedicated staging, Karole Foreman’s extraordinarily vulnerable performance, and Stephan Terry’s elegant piano playing, Ebony Rep’s 90-minute revival of Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill pays full homage to Billie Holiday’s heroism and heartbreak. Unlike her famous “God Bless the Child,” Lady Day…

  • Theater Review: EMMA (Chicago Shakespeare Theater)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 7, 2020
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    EMMA PLOTS, THIS TIME IN SONG Nobody knew better than Jane Austen how love could get lost in the social maze of Regency England, where social distinctions quickly become psychological barriers. Any successful matrimony required sexual politics and emotional intrigue. There were too many artful simulations of actual affection for the real deal to compete…

  • Theater Review: BUG (Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 6, 2020
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    BUG GETS UNDER YOUR SKIN Nineteen years ago, A Red Orchid Theatre launched the Midwest premiere of  Bug by Pulitzer-winner Tracy Letts. It unleashed a ferocious Michael Shannon and a self-destructing Kate Buddeke in the title roles. Back then I thought the play just an excuse for excess — the shock effects of wacko lovers dissolving…

  • Theater Review: RIVERDANCE (25th Anniversary Tour)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 5, 2020
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    STILL STEPPING This Irish extravaganza is celebrating its 25th  anniversary, a quarter century of Celtic thunder as thousands of feet have pounded countless floorboards. What  Stomp offered to percussive street-dancing and Forever Tango did for Argentina’s national cooch dance, Riverdance breathtakingly delivers to Irish dance and its cultural spin-offs. Wowing rapt crowds in a tour to mark…

  • Theater Review: RED BIKE (Moxie Theatre Company)

    By Milo Shapiro | February 4, 2020
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    WHERE WILL THIS RED BIKE TAKE YOU? Red Bike immediately presents a huge challenge to a director. Caridad Svich’s script contains no stage directions (and little punctuation, even) and reads like a lengthy poetry slam. This creates both a tremendous burden and glorious opportunity for a director to bring her verse-like prose to life. Moxie…

  • Theater Review: THIS SIDE OF CRAZY (Zephyr Theatre)

    By Marc Wheeler | February 3, 2020
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    HYMN-DINGER Sweet lovin’ Jesus, Del Shores is back, and he’s brought a band of gospel singers with him. In This Side of Crazy, writer/director/producer Shores introduces us to a Southern family comprised of the Christian singing trio, The Blaylock Sisters, and their gospel legend momma, Ditty Blaylock. These Christian ladies — well, one’s now an…

  • Theater Review: ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (La Mirada)

    By Tony Frankel | February 3, 2020
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    THERE’S ARSENIC AND LACE; BUT IT DOESN’T FEEL OLD Serial murder, euthanasia, slasher psychopaths, bodies buried in a crawl space, face-lifts for people trying to change their images, the cyanide poisonings of innocent strangers — it’s a click-bait tabloid-rotten world we live in. Not like the good old days, when crime didn’t pay and virtue…

  • Theater Review: DO YOU FEEL ANGER? (A Red Orchid)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 2, 2020
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    I DON’T FEEL YOUR PAIN Lately a chronic lack of empathy–sensitivity to the feelings of others–threatens to become a liability as great as any budget deficit. Compassion has never felt less contagious. So maybe it’s time for Do You Feel Anger? No indignant expose of sociopathic alienation, this 2019 drama by Mara Nelson-Greenberg, now in…

  • Theater Review: UNTIL THE FLOOD (Center Theatre Group at the Kirk Douglas Theatre)

    By Tony Frankel | February 1, 2020
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    AFTER THE FLOOD Until the Flood lasts only 70 minutes. But its concentrated running time delivers a devastating drama. A ton of truth-telling now on tour at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, this 2016 one-act is the creation of actor, poet and oral historian Dael Orlandersmith. She becomes the partisans, witnesses, survivors and, above all, inhabitants…

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