Areas We Cover
Categories
Theater
-
Theater Review: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (The Old Globe’s Lowell Davies Festival Theatre)
AND NOW, WITH FURTHER ADO… Not only is it one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, but Much Ado About Nothing contains a favorite character: Dogberry. This bumbling constable arrives much later in the play than the famous sparring couple Beatrice and Benedick, and adds an enormous amount of comic energy to a play that is already awash…
-
Theater Review: PARADISE – A DIVINE BLUEGRASS MUSICAL COMEDY (Ruskin Group Theatre)
THE ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF A FOR-PROFIT PROPHET There are many pleasures on display in the newest incarnation of the bluegrass musical Paradise, which has been in development for over five years. Now at Ruskin Group Theatre, this is the third version I’ve seen in the show’s journey, and the most fully staged. The story is…
-
Theater Review: NIGHTMARES AND NIGHTCAPS: THE STORIES OF JOHN COLLIER (Black Button Eyes Productions at The Athenaeum Theatre)
A WAY TO GHOUL OFF THIS SUMMER It’s not easy for a frightfest to work (or play) just as well as a laff-fest, let alone to be both: A delightful exercise in creepy-crawly quirkiness, Nightmares and Nightcaps: The Stories of John Collier pays hilarious homage to a British-born master of the macabre. Collier (1901-1980), a long-time New Yorker contributor…
-
Theater Review: A MAN OF NO IMPORTANCE (Coronado Playhouse in San Diego)
A STORY OF IMPORTANCE Unlike manipulative Broadway machines such as Priscilla and Kinky Boots, which shove issues down our throats, the societal consequences for a homosexual in A Man of No Importance resonate more because the story follows a closeted man who compensates for his restrictive 1964 Dublin atmosphere by taking pride in other areas of his life — namely…
-
Theater Review: END OF THE RAINBOW (Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach)
THE LEGEND THAT GOT AWAY No, this show isn’t how fans want to remember Judy Garland at the bittersweet end. End of the Rainbow, Peter Quilter’s sardonic salute to a star on the skids, is a sometimes-sadistic portrait of an imploding diva. A festering production at Laguna Playhouse, Quilter’s retro take on “Little Girl Blue”…
-
Theater Review: HAIRSPRAY (San Diego Musical Theatre at Horton Grand Theatre)
EVEN WHEN YOU’RE HAIR CAN’T HOLD UP, THIS MUSICAL CAN To say you like Hairspray really doesn’t cut it. Do you mean the 1988 John Waters film starring Devine and newcomer Ricki Lake? Or maybe you mean the 2003 Tony winner for “Best Musical,” which also yielded Harvey Fierstein a Tony for his role as…
-
Theater Review: BAREFOOT IN THE PARK (The Old Globe in San Diego)
THE GLOBE MAKES IT LOOK LIKE A WALK IN THE PARK Barefoot in the Park, Neil Simon’s second Broadway hit after Come Blow Your Horn, played a staggering 1,530 performances in its initial run, winning a Tony Award for director Mike Nichols. It’s somewhat inconceivable that a play this frothy, containing less pathos than Simon’s…
-
Theater Review: WAITRESS (National Tour)
SWEET AS PIE, FLAKY AS CRUST, OR BOTH? If the heat in the kitchen is getting you down, you may want to head on over to Hollywood, where the Broadway hit Waitress arrived last night for a limited four-week at the Pantages Theatre August 3-26, 2018, and then continuing on tour after that through the…
-
Theater Review: ANNIE (Hollywood Bowl)
SHE’S BA-A-A-ACK For those who think the sun won’t come up until 2020, here comes another Annie, that 1977 optimistic spitfire of a musical — based on the Harold Gray comic strip Little Orphan Annie — which insists that simply thinking about a brighter tomorrow will perk you right up. Although a national tour just wrapped…
-
Theater Review: A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM (North Coast Rep in San Diego)
A FUNNY THING’S HAPPENING AT NORTH COAST REP Only in Ancient Rome! Pseudolus, the wise-cracking slave (Omri Schein), can earn his freedom if he can somehow get the pretty, bubble-headed virgin (Noelle Marion) staying next door to become the beloved of his twenty-something master, Hero (Chris M. Kauffmann). Alas, she is promised to uber-masculine Army…
-
Theater Review: UNDER MILK WOOD (Open Fist Theatre Company at Atwater Village Theatre)
THE PLEASURES OF WEBFOOT COCKLEWOMEN AND MINCED CAT Under Milk Wood is a vivid combination of poetry, drama, and music that was first performed as a radio play in 1954, and it is squarely rooted in language. Set in a seaside town in Wales called Llareggub (“bugger all” backwards), it is described as a place…
-
Theater Review: BLISS (OR EMILY POST IS DEAD!) (Promethean Theatre Ensemble)
CLASSICAL MARTYRS AS NEW JERSEY HOUSEWIVES MYTHS SOMETHING Imagine Medea, Clytemnestra, Antigone, and Cassandra transported to a New Jersey suburb in 1960. There the same cycle of repression and revenge repeats itself. The ancient victims — two anti-heroines with loathsome mates, one religious martyr, and a disrespected prophetess — are now, respectively, two pill-popping, grievance-nursing…
-
Theater Review: DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE (The Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Davidson/Valentini Theatre)
ITCHING TO BE SWITCHING ROLES Burt Grinstead and Anna Stromberg’s take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde switches between comedic farce and serious scenes just as slickly as Jekyll, the affable, handsome physician, becomes Hyde, a maniacal, marauding murderer. Blessedly not as silly and madcap as the stage…
-
Theater Review: SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM (Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles)
EMOTIONAL TURMOIL AND MUSICAL BLISS One of the pleasures of the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble’s production of Side by Side by Sondheim is the experience of hearing voices without amplification. I have never been to a Broadway musical without a sound system and have often wondered what it was like. Did it always take an Ethel…
-
Theater Review: RICK STONE THE BLUES MAN (Black Ensemble Theater)
WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR SONG This time it’s up close and down home. Rick Stone the Blues Man departs from the Black Ensemble Theater’s standard tributes to superstars like Patti LaBelle or Dionne Warwick. Bringing things down to basics, B.E.T.’s new revue salutes their own singers in founder-playwright Jackie Taylor’s most personal musical labor of love. A…
-
Theater Review: BUS STOP (Eclipse Theatre in Chicago)
RIGHT PLAY, WRONG STOP The plays of William Inge, featured this season by Eclipse Theatre Company, offer a bedrock realism that fuels the down-home decency of his small-town characters. But this closeted playwright made one emotion his particular domain — loneliness. In Picnic, Come Back, Little Sheba, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (to close the Eclipse…
-
Theater Review: CRY IT OUT (Echo Theater Company at Atwater Village Theatre in Los Angeles)
WE NEVER STOP CRYING IT OUT The term “cry it out” refers to the practice of letting babies bawl until their fit subsides without parents coddling and mollifying them; assumedly this causes the child to become more self-sufficient later in life. In Molly Smith Metzler’s persuasive west coast premiere, three adult women find themselves in…
-
Theater Review: THE COLOR PURPLE (National Tour)
BLACK AND BLUE After winning a Tony last year for best revival of a musical, Oprah’s once and future movie-turned-musical has finally hit her home town, part of a national tour. As alive as the genre gets and as overwrought as the original Spielberg film, this sprawling saga of life for African-American women in the…
-
Theater Review: EVERYBODY (Brown Paper Box Co. at the Pride Arts Center in Chicago)
SIN AS CRAZINESS You don’t see morality plays like Everyman anymore — and not just because it’s not the 15th century. We shy away from such absolutes as Death and even Good Deeds. Everybody, with its nonspecific title an improvement on the original, modernizes a hugely popular medieval masterwork. The anonymously written Everyman was an allegorical depiction of the titular Christian’s…
-
Theater Review: HEARTBREAK HOTEL (Broadway Playhouse in Chicago)
BEFORE THE CROWN PRINCE BECAME THE KING Legends require reclamation and renewal: Created by Floyd Mutrux, the huge hit Million Dollar Quartet reprised a once-in-four-lifetimes recording session in a Memphis studio that brought together Sun Records’ once and future icons: Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash — and Elvis Presley. We see rock ‘n’ roll history…
Search Articles
Please help keep
Stage and Cinema going!
