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Off-Broadway Theater Review: MY PERFECT MIND (59E59 Theaters)
THEIR PERFECT MINDS Written by director Kathryn Hunter and performers Paul Hunter and Edward Petherbridge, My Perfect Mind begins with Dr. Witznagel (Mr. Hunter) coming out onto Michel Vale’s slanted-floor set in white lab coat, an absurd curly wig, and speaking with a cartoony German accent, and telling us about “EPS:Edward Petherbridge Syndrome.” He informs…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE BIRDS (Griffin Theatre Company at Theater Wit)
OUR FEATHERED FIENDS This is not Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, a 1963 horror fest about being pecked to death and delighting in Tippi Hedrin and Suzanne Pleshette’s contagious distress. It’s also not Hell in a Handbag’s recently revived The Birds: For all its ingenious thrills that campy creation was hobbled by a kill-joy Camille Paglia…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE AMERICA PLAY (Oracle)
HISTORY IN A HOLE The America Play was inspired when author Suzan Lori-Parks observed a professional African-American Lincoln impersonator hard at work pleasing a crowd. This strange early work by the dynamic playwright (of Topdog/Underdog fame) is itself a curiosity. (It even features a cabinet of curiosities packed with detritus from American history.) In Oracle…
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Chicago Theater Review: ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS A F*GG*T (About Face Theatre)
CLOSET EMANCIPATOR For what it’s worth, the other “F-word” is now a play’s title, presumably rivaling the “N-word” for shock effect. Well, anything called Abraham Lincoln Was A F*gg*t is not meant to soothe the status quo: The questing character in Bixby Elliot’s provocation, a transgressive Chicago premiere from About Face Theatre, is a 17-year-old…
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Los Angeles Opera Review: DOG DAYS (LA Opera Off Grand at REDCAT)
WHAT A DOG The term “Dog Days” refers to the hottest period of the year, the sultry part of summer when Sirius, the Dog Star, rises in unison with the sun. It’s a time marked by sluggishness. Opera is going through its own dog days in which the majority of new works I’ve seen are…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: GLITCHES IN REALITY (Hollywood Fringe Festival)
HITCHES IN EXECUTION In his latest one-hour act, Simon Coronel divides the world into three categories: people who want to know how a magic trick is done, people who don’t want to know, and people who don’t care. I’m in category two: I want the suspension of my disbelief to be total and continuous. I…
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Chicago Dance Review: HUBBARD STREET DANCE CHICAGO (Season 37 Summer Series at the Harris)
PRIVATE DANCERS It’s a stunning vote of artistic confidence. The repertory of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s Summer Series, their latest dancefest at the Harris Theatre, consists of three works by Spanish choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo–including his 14th world premiere for the ensemble. The two-hour presentation focuses fiercely on Cerrudo’s tensile strengths–quirky gestures that come from the…
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Off-Off-Broadway Theater Review: AFGHANISTAN, ZIMBABWE, AMERICA, KUWAIT (The Gym at Judson)
GREAT DEPICTION OF WAR, BUT WHAT FOR? Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, America, Kuwait, written and directed by Daniel Talbott, begins in near darkness with a Serbian Woman (Jelena Stupljanin) in a desert delivering a monologue in Serbian that we can guess has to do with her having been gang-raped and tortured; later we learn this was at…
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Los Angeles Film & Music Preview: LACO @ THE MOVIES CELEBRATES WALT DISNEY ANIMATION STUDIOS (The Theatre at Ace Hotel)
I WOULDN’T MOUSE IT FOR THE WORLD Saturday June 13 is one of those magic days for entertainment choices in Los Angeles. Along with theater, dance, opera, the L.A. Film Festival and the Hollywood Fringe Festival, classic film is represented across town in classic movie palaces. Chaplin’s masterpiece City Lights is showing at the beautiful…
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National Tour Theater Review: MATILDA THE MUSICAL (Ahmanson Theatre)
MEH TILDA Somewhere beneath this incredibly well-crafted tour is a wickedly delightful show. But when more than half of the presentation is indecipherable, (actually more than half), it is impossible to recommend. At the opening of Matilda The Musical‘s North American tour here in Los Angeles, there were two characters I heard better than others, but in…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE FANTASTICKS (Light Opera Works in Evanston)
COPE WITH HOPE A tale for all ages, this perennially popular musical by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt (creators of I Do! I Do!) got a major make-over in 1990: The 30th anniversary tour with Robert Goulet featured director Rudy Hogenmiller as The Mute in an enlarged version not seen since ’til now. No more…
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Chicago Theater Review: A MARVIN HAMLISCH SONGBOOK (Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre)
SIX SINGULAR SENSATIONS No text or context, no name-dropping or dates delivered, no editorials about the art–the songs just sing for themselves. The revue’s title–A Marvin Hamlisch Songbook–says all and enough. Conceived by director Courtney Crouse and musical arranger Aaron Benham, Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre’s latest treasure triumph at No Exit Café is a beautifully…
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Los Angeles Dance Preview: RODIN (Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion)
SCULPTED TO PERFECTION Boris Eifman’s kinetic Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg is quickly becoming known for full-length ballets, quite often with a plot and literary source. What you will see is frenzied dancing, electric mood swings, pulsating lighting on swirling sets, and complete commitment to the emotional peak of every scene. The huge, young troupe’”currently…
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Chicago Theater Review: STOP. RESET. (Goodman)
WINDOWS ZERO This could have been a conversation. Employing flashy strips of LED lights, twelve video monitors, and digitalized backdrops, Goodman artistic associate Regina Taylor’s stop. reset. asks an interesting if not original question: What have books become? Is the act of reading hand-held, unconnected tomes selfish and anti-social? Does this show of independence cut…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE HOMECOMING (Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice)
HAROLD THE CONQUERING HERO Harold Pinter wasn’t an Ivory Tower practitioner who won a Nobel for writing twenty-nine shocking plays about morality and five or six books of rather precious poetry. He was a professional writer who also typed up (get my salts!) almost thirty movies, including some of the gold standard screenplays for literacy…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE SECRET GARDEN (Court)
NO FLOWERS IN A TOO-SECRET GARDEN It’s right that Court Theatre completes its 60th season with this redemptive tale–and it comes just as summer finally delivers its much-appreciated promissory note of life renewed. The Secret Garden depicts a seemingly endless winter that engulfs Archibald Craven, a Yorkshire widower who loses his wife and may soon…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE UNEXPECTED MAN (Two Roads Theater in Studio City)
THE UNEXPECTED CUE Yasmina Reza is the most internationally popular playwright France has produced in a long time; certainly since Jean Genet, possibly since Molière. Her 1994 play Art, in which three friends debate the value of a white canvas, ran for eight years in London; when’s the last time Tartuffe did that? 2007’s adults-are-just-big-children…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: URBAN DEATH (Zombie Joe’s Underground in North Hollywood)
THEATER OF WHAT THE FUCK As an impresario and creative force, the man who calls himself Zombie Joe is the envy of the North Hollywood arts scene. Largely on the remarkable popularity of Urban Death, its signature show now in the tenth incarnation since 2005, Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group operates year-round out of an…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: UN-RULE-LEE (Elephant Theatre Lab in Hollywood)
RULIER THAN THOU I came to this show in a bad mood and left in a better one, which is as much praise as I can heap on a one-woman show about identity issues. There’s no theatrical fauna I want more sincerely to see on the endangered list, and none that looks less likely to…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: THE SOUND AND THE FURY (Elevator Repair Service at The Public Theater)
HOW SWEET THIS SOUND The standout theater company Elevator Repair Service (ERS), much acclaimed for their six-hour-plus show Gatz, among others, brings the first part of William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury to the Public Theater, performing it in its entirety, with spectacular results. The section of the novel in question consists wholly…
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