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Los Angeles Theater Review: WAIT UNTIL DARK (Geffen Playhouse in Westwood)
AN EASY PILL TO SWALLOW Thrillers are always a tough act to pull off in the theater which is why they are so rarely produced. When the show is a revival (or reworking as it is here) and it has been turned into a widely seen motion picture the ability to involve, surprise and shock…
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Los Angeles Music Review: THE LAST DAYS OF SOCRATES (Los Angeles Philharmonic at Disney Hall)
A DIFFERENT TYPE OF SOCRATIC PROBLEM Perhaps one of the reasons Socrates has become a god-like figure in the world of philosophy is that we know very little about the actual man who existed during the dawn of writing. He kept no diaries and wrote no treatises, yet philosophies attributed to the classical Greek thinker’”Socratic…
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Los Angeles Theater and Tour Review: TOTEM (San Pedro, Irvine and Santa Monica)
CIRQUE’S PERKS What’s a circus without lions, tigers, and elephants? In the case of Cirque du Soleil’s Totem, their eleventh major production in 26 years, it’s a marked improvement, proving that animal acts are strictly for the birds when it comes to grand circus entertainment. Press materials tell us that “Totem traces the fascinating journey…
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Off-Off-Broadway Theater Review: THE COLLECTIVE: 10 PLAY FESTIVAL, PROGRAM A: THE ODDS (McGinn/Cazale Theatre)
THE FOOD HERE IS MIXED…AND SUCH SMALL PORTIONS One thing you’ve got to love about this festival of ten minute plays: When they’re done correctly, these vignettes are like plates of tapas, each fully formed and complete, but in miniature. The only question is whether they’re tapas plates from that wonderful Spanish restaurant in the…
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San Diego Theater Review and Commentary: OUR TOWN, PLATONOV and the WithOutWalls Festival (La Jolla Playhouse)
SITE-SPECIFIC IS NOT SO SPECIFIC La Jolla Playhouse supported the trend of site-specific and immersive theater by presenting a four-day program of over 20 different performances in and around the Playhouse. The WoW (WithOutWalls) 2013 festival was a beehive of activity which sadly played only one weekend. It was an arena for nurturing and showcasing…
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San Diego Theater Review: TRAVESTIES (Cygnet)
STOPPARD AND GO Tom Stoppard’s brilliant Travesties (1974) is literate and fiercely crafted, tackling ideas of love, wit, politics, art, theater, literature, intellectualism and whatever else flows its way through Stoppard’s cosmic inquisitiveness. The plot, if you can call it that, is complex and nonlinear. World War I veteran Henry Carr reminisces with failing memory…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE GODDESS (The Artistic Home)
THE STANDARD FOR STORYTELLING It’s a coup just to get the theatrical rights to this juicy work, the late, great Paddy Chayevsky’s Oscar-nominated 1956 screenplay. But it’s sensational to pull it off to perfection. Cinematic as its source, John Mossman’s adaptation and staging of The Goddess is a gem of make-believe, an engrossing cautionary tale…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: CIVILIZATION (ALL YOU CAN EAT) (Son of Semele)
BIG HOGS AND HOT POCKETS We buy products because they consume us. Ultimately our products replace us, because if you are what you eat, it follows that what you eat also is you. And at that point, does the food chain even need you anymore? Supernumerary to your own plans, it’s easy to end up…
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San Diego Theater Review: WIT (Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado)
WIT DOESN’T HOLD BACK Years back, Oldsmobile released a new line of sporty, sleek cars with the tagline “This is NOT your father’s Oldsmobile.” For those who associate Lamb’s Players with lighter fare such as Godspell, Guys and Dolls and Christmas specials, the powerhouse production of Wit which opened this week proves that this is NOT…
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San Diego Theater Review: THE LAST GOODBYE (Old Globe)
NO HALLELUJAH FOR THE LAST GOODBYE No one can deny why Jeff Buckley has achieved cult status. The coffeehouse-rock singer brought an aching, wrenching, ethereal and vulnerable quality to both his original songs and his covers of other composers’ work (his version of “Hallelujah” is widely regarded as the definitive interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s masterpiece)….
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Chicago Theater Review: THE MUSICAL OF THE LIVING DEAD (The Cowardly Scarecrow Theatre Company at Stage 773)
A ZOMBIE MUSICAL THAT NEEDS BRAINS There’s something wrong with a show that demands you be drunk. On opening night the howling fans of this cult phenom, now in its fourth incarnation (if that’s the right word for a flesh-eating farce), managed to outshout even this screamingly unfunny offering. Literally buckets of beer flowed freely…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: DELUSION: MASQUE OF MORTALITY (Bethany Presbyterian Church in Silverlake)
HOLY HORROR It’s that that time of year again when everyone and their brother is looking to scare the crap out of you. To that end, The Original Interactive Horror Theatre Company is back to terrorize their patrons with Delusion: Masque of Mortality. Last year they presented the highly successful Delusion: The Blood Rite at a…
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Film Review and Commentary: FINAL CUT: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN (directed by György Pálfi)
FOUND AND LOST AGAIN Formula movies can make you feel that you’ve already seen them. But György Pálfi’s latest film, which closed the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, is a love story so familiar that you have, in fact, sat through much of it before. Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen is a feature-length collage of clips…
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Los Angeles Music Preview: THE LAST DAYS OF SOCRATES (La Phil at Disney Hall)
LA PHIL FIRST IN PREMIERES Having presented exceptionally successful premieres this year, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is on a roll. From the West Coast premiere of Adam Schoenberg’s Bounce to the U. S. Premiere of Tan Dun’s The Tears of Nature to the posthumous World Premiere of Peter Lieberson’s percussion-rich composition Shing Kham, the LA Phil has proven…
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National Tour Review: ONCE (Oriental Theatre in Chicago)
LOVE IMITATES ART Ironically, the real-life love affair celebrated on film and in the theater by co-creators Glen Hasard, an Irish composer, and Marketa Irglova, a Czech songwriter, fizzled after John Carney’s 2007 film of Once became a success. (Well, it’s not called Once for nothing.) But its Tony-triumphant musical version, now in a soaring…
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Chicago Theater Review: DIRECTIONS FOR RESTORING THE APPARENTLY DEAD (Stage 773)
FRIENDS DISCOVERING BENEFITS Familiarity needn’t breed contempt. An old-fashioned “coming out” drama can reinvent the wheel with charm enough to distract from any cloying sense of déjí vu. A world premiere and winner of Pride Films and Plays’ “2013 Gay Play Contest” (beating out 75 scripts), Martin Casella’s Directions for Restoring the Apparently Dead uses…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE LIGHT BULB (NoHo Arts Center in North Hollywood)
SAY WATT? While it is probably safe to assume that the NoHo Arts Center Ensemble’s “playwright in residence,” Joshua Ravetch, had some bright idea in mind when writing The Light Bulb, I must admit that after sitting through the uninterrupted 90 minutes I was left totally in the dark. Try though I did, I simply…
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Chicago Theater Review: NORTHANGER ABBEY (Remy Bumppo at Greenhouse Theater Center)
ROMANCE MEETS REALITY Written early but published posthumously (1817), Jane Austen’s most comical novel, Northanger Abbey, works equally well as a literary satire and a psychologically probing courtship chronicle. Inventively adapted by Tim Luscombe, who has as much fun as the author in contrasting thought and action, Remy Bumppo’s delightful U.S. premiere faithfully follows the…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE GUARDSMAN (A Noise Within in Pasadena)
BE ON YOUR GUARDSMAN Nationwide, nearly half the couples that get married today end up divorced. The aphorism about the difference between the way relationships are handled by this generation and the so-called greatest generation is “back then when something was broke, we tried to fix it, not buy a new one.” Since the 1911…
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San Diego Theater Review: THE FEW (Old Globe)
TOO FEW Samuel D. Hunter’s slice-of-life one-act, The Few, returns to familiar territory for this up-and-coming playwright. As in his previous plays, Hunter takes us to small-town Idaho; this time, it’s 1999 and we are in the ramshackle trailer office of DZ (Eva Kaminsky), publisher of a small newspaper for truckers. Enter the paper’s founder,…
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