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Theater Review: THE TEMPEST (Midsommer Flight)
TEMPEST BELONGS OUTDOORS The words can get windblown or contend with sirens and such. But, just as food tastes different (better?) when eaten outdoors, so does the Bard. Embracing all, Shakespeare needs no roof and the sky’s no limit. Now in their eighth season of offering free performances in four Chicago parks through August, this…
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Theater Review: HEAD OVER HEELS (Kokandy Productions in Chicago)
GO-GO SEE THIS SHOW-SHOW It’s a marriage made in musical heaven: A ton of fun erupts from combining seemingly antithetical elements — a 16th-century fairy-tale/poem cycle by Sir Phillip Sidney and jukebox hits from the 1980s’ female rock band The Go-Go’s. As created by Jeff Whitty and adapted by James Magruder, the riotous result is…
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Dance Review: MAYERLING (The Royal Ballet)
THE ROYAL BALLET TAKES ON ROYAL INTRIGUE Considering we couldn’t tell most characters from each other at last night’s opening of Royal Opera Ballet’s Mayerling, a good time was had by all. With Kenneth McMillan’s inventive and daring 1978 choreography, Koen Kessels’ live orchestra’s thrilling rendition of Liszt’s exquisite music (arranged and orchestrated by John…
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Theater Review: MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES (Geffen Playhouse in Westwood)
NO SHIT, SHERLOCK As with Good Boys playing across town, Mysterious Circumstances doesn’t quite give us an ending the material deserves, but hoo-boy what a ride this is. Directed by Matt Shakman with a magical meta-theatrical flourish that makes life worth living, our fever dream is based on the still-unsolved true-life death of a Sir…
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Theater Review: DEATH OF A SALESMAN (Ruskin Theatre Group in Santa Monica)
DEATH LIVES Arthur Miller makes Willie Loman, the tragic figure in his Death of a Salesman, 63 years old. So I was more than a little skeptical as to whether or not Rob Morrow (of Northern Exposure fame) could pull it off. At Ruskin Theatre Group, Morrow, with his boyish good looks, appears much younger…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: DAMES AT SEA (Sierra Madre Playhouse)
THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A DAMES When Dames at Sea opened in 1966 at the Caffe Cino, a small coffee house and performance space in New York City’s Greenwich Village that was at the heart of the early off-off Broadway movement, the show was a trifle — a campy lark into the backstage musicals of…
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Theater Review: GOOD BOYS (Pasadena Playhouse)
A GOOD GOOD BOYS COULD’VE BEEN GREAT Gay playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (contributor to Glee and Big Love) gets a revival of his drama Good Boys and True that premiered at Steppenwolf ten years ago. There is some solid stagecraft in his story about a privileged prep-school teen caught up in a sex scandal, but it’s shocking that while…
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Theater Review: THE PRODUCERS (Celebration Theatre in Los Angeles)
I WANNA SEE THE PRODUCERS Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. The Celebration production of The Producers is as far away from the Borscht Belt as a New York musical comedy — whose central characters are named Bialystock and Bloom — can get. On the other hand, this is the kind…
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Theater Preview: HEDDA GABLER (Los Angeles Theatre Works at UCLA)
A JEALOUS WIFE WITH BAD GUN CONTROL You can’t keep a bad/mad woman down. Not to be confused with A Doll’s House, where Henrik Ibsen offers an almost feminist defense of a vastly underestimated wife, his poisonous 1891 domestic drama Hedda Gabler depicts a very different “helpmate.” Here a bored and bitter housewife transforms her contempt for her…
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Theater Review: GRINDR THE OPERA (AN UNAUTHORIZED PARODY) (Pride Films and Plays)
AN APP-ETITE FOR AMOUR Sooner or later you knew an Internet application would get its own show, especially when it plays Dan Cupid, hooking up randy seekers of one-night stands or permanent pleasure. First produced in the U.K. last year, Grindr The Opera (An Unauthorized Parody) is an alternately cheeky and bittersweet salute to some…
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DVD Review: MARY HIGGINS CLARK COLLECTION (MHz Releasing)
IT’S CRIMINAL — IN FRENCH The American crime novelist, Mary Higgins Clark (b: 1927), has had extraordinary career-success with her series of crime books. And the French are especially pleased with her body of work, rewarding her with several major awards. The three French-language television films on this collection from MHz are professionally handled with…
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Theater Feature: THE PRODUCERS (Celebration Theatre in Los Angeles)
KEEP IT GAY It’s always springtime for Mel Brooks, who really does write musicals the way they used to. Even before Young Frankenstein, his 2001 triumph The Producers (based on the sidesplitting 1968 film with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) reverts to the anything-for-a-laugh, neo-vaudevillian, politically incorrect musicals of its 1959 setting. Giving a new meaning…
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Theater Review: HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre in Evanston)
THE WINNER BY AN INCH It’s a perverse Pride Month offering that cocks a snoot at authority and respectability: “I’m the new Berlin Wall — try to tear me down!” That defiant dare marks the flaming arrival of Hedwig Schmidt, survivor-heroine of John Cameron Mitchell’s riveting 1998 rock opera, a work that inevitably honors the…
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DVD Review: SPRING TIDE/SPRINGFLODEN (Season One on MHz Releasing)
SPRING TIDE FOR SWEDEN Now available on DVD, this sober-sided cop-show sparkles with invention about how patient detective grunt-work can pay off big time. Written by the famous Swedish husband/wife team of Rolf and Cillia Börglind (Beck, Arne Dahl, Wallender, among many other series), Spring Tide (Springfloden) taken from their novel, The Third Voice (Den…
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Theater Review: THE RIVER (BoHo Theatre in Chicago)
A LITERAL STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Only 65 minutes long, British playwright Jez Butterworth’s spell-casting The River manages, as few plays have, to simulate a dream on stage. Heraclitus said that life was like a river because we never step into the same stream twice. Likewise this one-act’s obsessive quest for certainty in love amid the seemingly random…
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Chicago Theater Review: IF I FORGET (Victory Gardens)
THESE CASCADING CRISES ARE NOT SOON FORGOTTEN Sometimes, given the right writing, a seemingly small struggle can defy and define supposedly close kinfolk — and even stamp a society: The future of a storefront in a changing neighborhood, owned by one family since 1947, triggers a searing and complex conflict in If I Forget. Steven Levenson’s…
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Theater Review: PUT YOUR HOUSE IN ORDER (La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego)
HOUSE IS IN ORDER, BUT IS THAT ENOUGH? There is so much that is right about Ike Holter’s clever script of Put Your House in Order. Because of that, it is unfortunate that, in the end, it is just a bit unfulfilling — and challenging to explain why without giving away much of what certainly…
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Las Vegas Theater Review: SHOTSPEARE’S ROMEO AND JULIET (Planet Hollywood)
THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS Shotspeare is a comedy punch mulled from liquor, a few conservatory-trained actors and Ringling Brothers clowns, and the brutalization of one of the best plays ever written. There’s a Wheel of Soliloquy to determine punishments for actors unlucky enough to give speeches; there’s a case of beer and a bottle of hard stuff…
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Theater Review: OEDIPUS EL REY (Magic Theatre in San Francisco)
GREEK TRAGEDY IN THE ‘HOOD Having read Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus El Rey, one can see that is a true original, that it possesses power, anger, frustration, political and social outrage, that Alfaro’s heart bleeds with compassion for his characters, that his writing is rich and often dazzling in its use of language and in its…
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Theater Review: MACBETH (Oregon Shakespeare)
FOUL AND FAIR Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or The Tragedy of Macbeth, is typically dated to the years immediately following the coronation of James I as King of England in 1603. James, who was also King of Scotland, believed himself to be descended from Banquo, the noble friend of Macbeth. While the play is not considered one of Shakespeare’s…
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