A  RESTRICTED BUT  RIVETING ROOM Novelist Ira Levin may be best-known for Rosemary’s Baby and Stepford Wives, both made even more popular by their film adaptations, but as a playwright, Levin wrote the fifth longest-running play in Broadway history, Deathtrap (1978), made less popular by its film adaptation. Five years prior to Deathtrap, Veronica’s Room (originally subtitled…

BEHOLD THE BREATHTAKING BEAUTY OF CAVALIA’S ODYSSEO In 2003, Normand Latourelle, one of the co-founders of Cirque du Soleil, was ready to up the entertainment ante when he introduced his equine extravaganza Cavalia to the world. The show was a smash right out of the gate and has been galloping around the globe ever since….

GO GET LOST IN AUSTEN I drove to Jane Austen UnScripted directly from a production of Oklahoma!  as grand and empty as the wind sweepin’ down the plains.   With a quarter of the cast of that Rogers and Hammerstein show, and a tithe of the expense, seven Impro Theatre actor/writers showed more integrity to the spirit…

A COMPLETE WASTE OF WORDS If you hold a doctorate in linguistics then you might (and that’s a very questionable “might”) find some interesting banter in Complete, the alleged comedy written by Andrea Kuchlewska currently making its West Coast premiere at the Matrix Theatre. If, on the other hand, the scientific study of syntax and…

THE CORN IS HIGH INDEED Messrs. Rodgers and Hammerstein reinvented American Musical Theater for the ages when they created Oklahoma! in 1943, incorporating song and dance to tell their story rather than detract from it. The musical avoids creaking with age because Hammerstein’s book shuns overt sentimentality, and the lyrics are chock-full of poetic imagery…

RIPPED TO RAGS IN A BEAUTIFUL WAY John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book award-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath operates as both a harrowing portrait of the American struggle for life, liberty, and happiness, and an impassioned rally cry for the downtrodden; it is a fitting title (suggested by the writer’s wife) considering it…

CYBER SEEDINESS, FBI BUREAUCRACY, AND TABOO MONSTROSITY COME TO VIVID LIFE IN SEXSTING Written in collaboration with Internet crime attorney Susan Raffanti, Doris Baizley’s boundary-blurring examination of entrapment ethics depicts the undercover Internet chat room exchanges of an FBI investigator. Working under reactionary bureaucratic top-down pressure, the agent’s modus operandi is the explicit entrapment of…

WOODY LIGHT One iconic comic writer; eight monologues cut from the screen time of seven of his most memorable female characters; a six-person, all male cast: Those are the ingredients of Roy Cruz’s latest monologue-homage-comedy show, The Women of Woody, presented by Oh My Ribs! last weekend. Cruz’s last project in this vein was the…