Areas We Cover
Categories
-
Los Angeles Theater Preview: THE LITTLE MERMAID (La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts)
THE LITTLE MERMAID THAT COULD It is surprising that the stage adaptation of The Little Mermaid took until 2008 to hit Broadway. The 1989 film on which it’s based marked the beginning of a major comeback for the Walt Disney company as a purveyor of animated movie musicals. The movie studio responsible for Bambi and Dumbo had gone…
-
Chicago Theater Review: THE NORTH POOL (Interrobang Theatre Project at The Athenaeum Theatre)
INTERROGATING AN AUDIENCE It’s the afterschool special from hell: The North Pool is that rare you-can-hear-a-pin-drop play. In a mere 80 minutes, playwright Rajiv Joseph shrewdly and sharply changes the terms and tones in a purportedly ordinary conference between a vice principal and a graduating senior. James Yost’s engrossing, entangling staging, a Midwest premiere from…
-
Tour Preview: OUT OF THIS WORLD (Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus)
THE COSMIC CIRCUS COMES TO TOWN Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s traveling circus remains something to run away to see, if not join. For even diehard fans there are always new delights, and the current incarnation, Out Of This World, is taking audiences where no circus has gone before, upping the circus ante by conjuring up even…
-
Film Review: NORMAN LEAR: JUST ANOTHER VERSION OF YOU (directed by Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady)
LEAR: KING OF THE 1970s SITCOM “Maybe [people] continued to agree with Archie Bunker – as I said earlier, you can’t change people’s minds, but you can get them to think.” – Norman Lear When you think of words to describe 1960s television, one word that won’t come to mind is “edgy”. It’s almost hard…
-
Los Angeles Music Review: 2016 PIATIGORSKY INTERNATIONAL CELLO FESTIVAL (University of Southern California, Los Angeles Philharmonic)
A CAVALRY OF CELLISTS I have covered rock, classical, and musical festivals, so it’s surprising that one of the most satisfying, exciting, and inspirational events I have ever experienced just closed up shop last Sunday after ten days of celebrating the cello. Exhaustive but never enervating, this meticulously planned day-and-night gathering included workshops, master classes, and…
-
CD Review: THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (Studio Cast Recording)
WHAT HUMP? While Disney has encroached Broadway with film-to-musical adaptations, not one has come out which bettered its source. While the stage version at the La Jolla and Paper Mill Playhouses both improves and makes less of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), the Studio Cast Recording of the Paper Mill cast is quite a knockout. It…
-
Los Angeles Theater Review: ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (Musical Theatre West in Long Beach)
SCREWBALL MUSICAL HEAVEN When it opened on Broadway in 1978, On the Twentieth Century achieved the impossible. Cy Coleman’s clever score’”a beautiful pastiche of turn-of-the-century operetta and silent film scores with some added jazz and musical comedy bounce’”collided on the tracks with Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s delectably chewy lyrics and screwball script, resulting in…
-
Chicago Theater Review: TUG OF WAR: FOREIGN FIRE (Chicago Shakespeare Theater)
BINGEWATCHING THE BARD “Tug of war”–a child’s game that mutates into an adult’s nightmare; it’s an apt title for Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s marathon of Bard history plays. Tug of War: Foreign Fire revisits the lowlights from the Hundred Years War between England and France. We see’”and feel–strife from both sides and at all levels, a harrowing chronicle…
-
Film Review: BLACK GIRL (directed by Ousmane Sembí¨ne)
BACK TO BLACK Naïve and primitive in style, Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 feature debut Black Girl is a political statement regarding some of the aftereffects of French colonialism on Senegal. The simple, if not simplistic, story concerns a young African woman, Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), who is invited to France by a white family to take…
-
Film Review: ALMOST HOLY (directed by Steve Hoover)
ALMOST TRUSTWORTHY The collapse of the Soviet Union led to, among other things, an epidemic of child homelessness in its former republics. Whether orphaned, escaping impossible domestic situations or poorly run government institutions, on the streets these children become junkies, prostitutes, criminals. They are used and abused, raped, beaten and murdered. Officials’â€assuming they are not…
-
Chicago Theater Review: THE BOYS UPSTAIRS (Pride Films and Plays at Mary’s Attic)
AN UNCRITICAL MATING COMEDY Familiar gay fare, The Boys Upstairs, a 2009 rouser by Jason Mitchell, revels in industrial-strength crowd-pleasing. Pride Films and Plays’ two-hour funfest is crammed with catty-more-than-witty banter, salacious-to-graphic sexual situations, bitchy byplay, lifestyle branding, eroticized objectification, italicized zingers, shameless doubles entendres, and a feel-good happy ending. Not that these are bad…
-
Los Angeles Theater Preview: THE CITY OF CONVERSATION (The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
THE CITY COMES ALIVE The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is about to begin a new era under the leadership of its new Artistic Director Paul Crewes. Right out of the gate is a production of novelist, essayist and playwright Anthony Giardina’s The City of Conversation, which premiered at Lincoln Center last year. While…
-
Chicago Theater Review: THE BODY OF AN AMERICAN (Stage Left Theatre at Theater Wit)
A DOCUMENTARY DRAMA DELIVERS Chicago is currently witnessing two productions about photojournalists haunted by their work. TimeLine Theatre’s Chimerica offers a flawed but fascinating 180-minute look at a fateful historical “shot”: the “tank man” from Beijing’s 1989 demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. Delivering a more potent work in much less time, Stage Left Theatre’s 95-minute The…
-
Los Angeles Theater Review: HONKY (Rogue Machine at the Met Theatre)
HONKY IF YOU LIKE RACISM It’s such a weird time in America. From talk shows to a speech from President Obama, it’s clear that the racism remains a topical subject. But we don’t actually talk about it. Can a white person get a simple answer if they ask a black person, “Why can you say ‘nigger’…
-
Chicago Theater Review: DISENCHANTED! (Broadway in Chicago at the Broadway Playhouse)
GIRL-POWER PRINCESSES TAKE ON TROPES, BUT THIS REVUE COULD USE MORE WIT AND MAGIC If you were a mean girl, you might call Disenchanted! a feel-good pity party. More compassionate souls will see this 95-minute 2011 musical, created by former history teacher Dennis T. Giacino, as a pushback protest. In any case it definitely counts…
-
Regional Theater Review: BAKERSFIELD MIST (Olney Theatre Center in Maryland)
THE FOGGIEST In a 2007 issue of Washington Post Magazine, Gene Weingarten recounts Joshua Bell’s 45 minutes busking in a D.C. Metro station. One of the world’s most famous violinists played Bach anonymously at rush hour, ignored by most commuters but appreciated by a few who stopped to enjoy unexpected beauty. Stephen Sachs tosses this anecdote…
-
Chicago Theater Review: CHIMERICA (TimeLine)
A SEARCH FOR DOUBT BOTH TANTALIZES AND ENERVATES Speculation is just as tricky on the stage as on the stock market. Winner of the 2014 Laurence Olivier Award, Chimerica (its title suggesting a distinction without a difference between America and China) is British playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s wildly imaginative depiction of one reporter’s search for a…
-
San Diego Theater Review: DINNER WITH MARLENE (Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado)
LAMB’S SERVES UP A TASTY DINNER WITH MARLENE There’s an old parlor game of trying to decide: If you could attend a dinner party and choose any guests you wanted around the table, whom would you select? For Eric Hanes, who visited Paris from Sweden in 1938, he might well have picked the people who…
-
Chicago Dance Review: CINDERELLA (Joffrey Ballet)
A FAIRY TALE LEAPS INTO LOVE Rossini, Walt Disney, Rodgers and Hammerstein’”they all wanted a piece of Perrault’s fairy tale. Cinderella has become Cendrillon, Cenerentola, and, by Jerry Lewis’ sex change, Cinderfella. In any incarnation the 17th-century source is an irresistible feel-good parable of purity that prospers. It remains the ultimate rags-to-riches story, patient virtue…
-
Theater Review: CHICAGO (National Tour at Cadillac Palace Theatre in Chicago)
CORRUPTION: MORE FUN WHEN CHOREOGRAPHED Now in its twentieth year, this slimmed-down, near-concert version of Kander and Ebb’s cynical and enthralling musical features, as the smoothly lying lawyer Billy Flynn, John O’Hurley (J. Peterman in Seinfeld and a fixture on Dancing with the Stars. (He last appeared in the show in the 2011 tour which…
Search Articles
Please help keep
Stage and Cinema going!
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
Find beautiful trendy gowns for girls' special events.
Need to order an essay? Hire our top writers to complete the most challenging papers at an affordable rate.
For professional writing support, hire essay writers at Edubirdie for high-quality help.
Discover top-rated Australian online casinos with fair games, fast payouts, and generous bonuses for every type of player.
Explore the best paying pokies Australia games with high RTP and clear bonus terms
