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Los Angeles / Chicago Theater Review: CINEASTAS (Grupo Marea at REDCAT in L.A. & MCA in Chicago)
SHOW BIZ KIDS Cineastas at least doubles the self-reflexion of your average REDCAT show. In this new Argentinian play, written and directed by Mariano Pensotti, you watch no fewer than four writer/directors make existential movies, putting themselves into their art and their art into themselves. Hell, that’s more mirrors than a Fellini dolly shot. Maybe…
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Chicago Theater Review: A NICE INDIAN BOY (Rasaka Theatre Company at Victory Gardens Theater)
GAGA FOR GANESHA Now in residence at Victory Gardens Theater, the newly minted Rasaka Theatre Company is in hot pursuit of more diversity on Chicago stages. Their mission: to share the tales of South Asian-Americans, adding helpful variations on the music of humanity. Anna C. Bahow’s earnest Midwest premiere of Madhuri Shekar’s romantic drama dabbles…
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Theater Review: SONS OF THE PROPHET (The Blank Theatre in Hollywood)
ALL IS REALLY WELL In playwright Stephen Karam’s touching and funny drama, characters are frequently spotted quoting the great Lebanese poet-philosopher Khalil Gabran. “All is well,” they say, often in the midst of the most odious adversity. Of course, all is not well at all: Indeed, all is rather, as the Yiddish expression goes, full…
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Chicago Dance Review: UNIQUE VOICES (The Joffrey Ballet at Auditorium Theatre)
VERY FINE FRENZIES Winter can be wonderful in Chicago’”well, if you’re safe inside the Auditorium Theatre for the ten performances of Unique Voices. The Joffrey Ballet’s three-work showcase of dynamically contrasted works by three inimitable choreographers is more than just a feat for feet. So outwardly diverse yet internally consistent are these very individual works,…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE NIGHT ALIVE (Geffen Playhouse)
LOVE THAT GOES BUMP IN THE NIGHT Conor McPherson’s plays are so rooted in the characters that plot is really revelation. With unforced warmth, he captures loneliness in the act of self-effacement, and love as the best way to prove we’re really here. Geffen Playhouse’s offering The Night Alive is no nocturne’”much in the vein of McPherson’s…
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Chicago Opera Review: TANNHí„USER (Lyric Opera)
IN TERMS OF SIMILARLY SHODDY DIRECTION, TANNHí„USER TIES TOSCA From the highpoint of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Lyric Opera’s 60th anniversary season has been on a slow downward arc. That inexorable decline reaches new depths of mediocrity in Tannhåuser–despite Wagner’s sublime music and timeless theme. Indeed, that music features gorgeous harp accompaniments, martial brass scorings, magnificent choruses, and…
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Book Review: SHORTS AND BRIEFS: A COLLECTION OF SHORT PLAYS AND BRIEF PRINCIPLES OF PLAYWRITING (by Gregory Fletcher)
LET ME BE BRIEFS The title of Gregory Fletcher’s Shorts and Briefs doesn’t refer to an underwear drawer but rather to a collection of nine short plays along with sixteen brief chapters that share advice, tips, and principles on playwriting. Although the book’s primary focus is on playwriting, there’s plenty of good advice that applies to…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE ADDAMS FAMILY (Mercury Theater Chicago)
IT’S ALL FOR THE WORST…IN A GOOD WAY With his typical topsy-turvy perversity, Charles Francis Addams might have been happy had the 2009 musical inspired by his sardonic New Yorker cartoons ended up as a “work in regress.” But happily for us, the opposite has occurred to this show about a ghoulish misfit clan haunting a Queen Anne brownstone in…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: THE LION (Lynn Redgrave Theater at Culture Project)
THE MANE EVENT Watching writer/performer Benjamin Scheuer’s one-man show The Lion, directed by Sean Daniels, the element I am most taken with is Mr. Scheuer’s radiant charisma. His earnestness, his sincerity, his spiritual and emotional investment, are penetrating as he tells his story, mostly through songs, accompanying himself on different guitars’”six in all’”which await on…
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Chicago Theater Review: REDLINED: A CHICAGO LYRIC (Chicago Slam Works at Stage 773)
ELEVATING THE SUBWAY There’s a very specific springboard for Redlined: A Chicago Lyric, 75 minutes of slam protest poetry: It’s the elevated transit line that runs through the Windy City’s North and South Sides. The latest evocation from Chicago Slam Works (“igniting poetry through performance”) is J.W. Basilo’s taut staging of a free-form literary collage…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE PITCHFORK DISNEY (Coeurage Theatre Company)
A RIDE YOU WON’T FIND IN ANAHEIM Any neighborhood with the elevated name of Silver Lake should have freshwater dolphins and interesting old hotels and a disfigured serial killer who stalks the shrubbery on the anniversary of his parasailing accident. Instead recently on a steep pavement I witnessed this conversation between an attractive pedestrian and…
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Chicago Theater Review: LA CAGE AUX FOLLES (The Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire)
TITS AND ASSHOLES Gay activists who deride this delight forget just how radical the musical was in 1983 (the original film even more so in 1973). A third of a century later, it’s still a merry, gender-bending masquerade, a bourgeois equivalent of Kiss of the Spider Woman. For all its sex-smashing glitz and farcical laughs,…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: HELLMAN V. MCCARTHY (Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills)
A FAMOUS LITERARY FEUD MAKES GREAT DRAMA In a 1980 television interview with Dick Cavett, novelist and literary critic Mary McCarthy made an especially biting comment about her longtime adversary and fellow writer, playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman, saying that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Unfortunately, Hellman was watching…
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Los Angeles Music Preview: ALL-SCHUBERT PROGRAM (Le Salon de Musiques at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion)
NOTHING FISHY ABOUT THIS PROGRAM Former music critic and Chicago Symphony Orchestra program annotator Phillip Huscher wrote that Anselm Hí¼ttenbrenner, one of Franz Schubert’s regular drinking partners, loved to tell the story of the night he invited the composer over to share some bottles of Szekszárd, a Hungarian red wine he had received as a…
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Chicago Theater Review: DIVIDING THE ESTATE (Raven Theatre)
WILL OF FOOLS You can’t take it with you’”but that doesn’t mean you go gently into that good night. Dividing the Estate, Raven Theatre’s latest offering, is the late Horton (The Trip to Bountiful) Foote’s last new play on Broadway. A valedictory swan song, this 2008 potboiler sums up the Texas dramatist’s grasp (as in…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE MISSING PAGES OF LEWIS CARROLL (The Theatre @ Boston Court)
UP THE RABBIT HOLE There’s been a good deal of speculation over the last hundred-and-something years regarding the sexuality of Charles Dodgson, an Oxford professor of mathematics more famous for his writings under the pen name Lewis Carroll. Severally, storytellers Dennis Potter and Robert Wilson have investigated the subject; so have many market-minded biographers. That Dodgson…
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Off-Off-Broadway Theater Review: KIND SOULS (Libra Theater Company at Theatre 54)
UNWIELDY BUT SOULFUL Tom Diggs’s allegorical fable Kind Souls attempts to examine how two loving individuals behave when forced to choose between losing their lives and losing their souls. With their country engaged in armed conflict, Tara (Lindsey Kyler) and Oliver (John Clarence Stewart) are unemployed and nearly starving, living in a shack in the…
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Regional Theatre Review: TRISTAN & YSEULT (Kneehigh Theatre Company at South Coast Rep)
THEATRICAL TRICKERY TRUMPS A TRAGIC TALE Cheeky, goofy and sassy, Tristan & Yseult at South Coast Rep affectionately mocks and contemporizes a classic love tragedy and literary legend while respecting English performing arts tradition, from music-hall and panto to Peter Sellers and Ealing Studios. This irrepressible import from Kneehigh, that brassy Cornish theater company which…
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Film Review: BALLET 422 (directed by Jody Lee Lipes)
PASSIVE APPROACH MAKES FOR SUPERFICIAL DOCUMENTARY We are a fly on the wall in Jody Lee Lipes’ documentary Ballet 422, which follows 25-year-old New York City Ballet (NYCB) dancer and emerging choreographer Justin Peck as he stages his first ballet for that company. From first rehearsal to world premiere, there are no talking heads, no…
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Chicago Dance Review: GIORDANO DANCE CHICAGO (Auditorium Theatre)
ROUGH STEPS FOR A TEAM OF TEN It was worth the wait. It’s been way overdue for Giordano Dance Chicago to finally play the Auditorium Theatre, part of the treasure house’s ongoing 125th anniversary season. Yesterday that one-night stand finally happened’”and the aggressive 90 minutes of forensic dancework is well worth a report of record. Very…
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