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Chicago Theater Review: SPEAKING IN TONGUES (Interrobang Theatre Project at Theater Wit)
STORIES IN A SPIN CYCLE If ever the cliché “the plot thickens” justifies itself, it’s in this relentlessly inventive 1996 work by Australian playwright Andrew Bovell; anacondas after their bi-annual meal should thicken like this self-generating drama. Bovell’s well-named Speaking in Tongues employs four actors – flawlessly coordinated in Jeffry Stanton’s intricate staging for Interrobang…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: PARADISE – A DIVINE BLUEGRASS MUSICAL COMEDY (Ruskin)
ON THE WAY TO PARADISE [EDITOR’S NOTE: Since this 2013 review, Paradise has been re-tooled. Please see our new review of the 2018 production.] There is a telling item buried among the bric-a-brac of Stephanie Kerley Schwartz’s detailed country set of an economically depressed, coal-mining, hillbilly burg named Paradise: A tin sign shows a forest…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS (Theatre Asylum)
THE THEATER TAKES ON CORPORATE AMERICA’S EVILS After a flurry of controversy in 2012, Mike Daisey’s provocative activism-cum-monologue work, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, is playing at Theatre Asylum. This factual account is testimony of the tragic human exploitation that occurs at the Foxconn factory in Shengzhen, China, the world’s biggest manufacturer of Apple…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: EARLY PLAYS (The Wooster Group at REDCAT)
WAY TOO EARLY PLAYS Imagine you’d never heard of the Wooster Group, and that you knew nothing of the avant-garde theater’s storied history, or its origins in the downtown scene of 1970s New York that revitalized the American stage, or its famous founders including Spalding Gray and Willem Dafoe. And suppose you didn’t know who…
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Chicago Theater Review: 25 SAINTS (Pine Box at Greenhouse Theater Center)
25 SAINTS A 75-minute exercise in dead-end disaster tautly directed by Susan E. Bowen, this new work by Pine Box Theater ensemble member Joshua Rollins tightly fits the theater company’s action-oriented theatricality. It also delivers a pitiless look at the “forgotten world of Appalachia,” specifically a misery known as West Virginia. Corruption seems to grow…
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Chicago Theater Review: CRIME SCENE: A CHICAGO ANTHOLOGY (Collaboraction)
THEATER FOR SOCIAL CHANGE With fifty-two murders to date in 2013 as I write this review – over a murder a day – the death toll in Chicago seems as ubiquitous as it is tragic. Collaboraction Theatre Company strives to raise awareness, puncture apathy, and perhaps even instigate change in their new work Crime Scene:…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: SKETCHES FROM THE NATIONAL LAMPOON (Hayworth Theatre)
YOU CAN SKIP THESE SKETCHY SKETCHES Those of us who are of a certain age reverently remember the National Lampoon as being one of the great humor magazines of the 1970s and early 1980s. Yes, the film Animal House essentially brought the Lampoon “brand” into the mainstream, but prior to that, the ribald humor and…
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Chicago Theater Review: COMPLETENESS (Theater Wit)
PARADOXICAL DUALITIES It’s brainy almost beyond endurance and savvy in its approach/avoidance strategies of gaming love. Happily, Itamar Moses’ Completeness at Theater Wit is also engrossingly directed by Jeremy Wechsler as it chronicles a complicated, captivating relationship between two scientific searchers, Elliott and Molly. Easily and perversely, they can reason themselves out of what they…
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Los Angeles/Regional Theater Review: ALADDIN’S LUCK (Lewis Family Playhouse)
ALL YOUR WISHES ARE GRANTED The production values of MainStreet Theatre Company’s 70-minute performance of Aladdin’s Luck at the Lewis Family Playhouse in Rancho Cucamonga were among the best I’ve seen in mid-size regional theaters in both Europe and America. The very reasonably priced tickets ($16 full-prized adult, with various opportunities for discounts) couldn’t have…
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Chicago Theater Review: A SOLDIER’S PLAY (Raven Theatre)
TWO BATTLES IN ONE WAR As sturdily written and swiftly moving as it was in 1982, Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play remains an enduring testament to the homefront battles that African-American soldiers fought during World War II, within their ranks as well as with white comrades in arms. It’s the kind of upfront, downhome American…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: CHRISTMAS IN HANOI (East West Players)
THE GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PRESENT Race and immigration are popular topics on the LA stage, at least when it comes to more serious theatre. And there is good reason for this. LA is an incredibly multiracial and multicultural city that can be incredibly welcoming to non-white immigrants as well as threatening, persecuting and deadly. Some…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: A FAMILY THING (Echo Theatre Company
BRAWL IN THE FAMILY It’s a funny thing about families. We didn’t choose them, but they form the most important relationships in our lives. It’s the luck of the draw and some of us get dealt the aces and some the deuces. In A Family Thing, Gary Lennon’s brutal black comedy of familial misfortune, the…
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Bay Area Theater Review: THE FOURTH MESSENGER (Ashby Stage in Berkeley)
MAY THE WONDERFUL FOURTH MESSENGER BE A HARBINGER OF GOOD THEATER TO COME Enter a flight of fancy and imagine the scenario if a deity on the scale of a Buddha were a woman living today, where she and her disciples grapple with modern-day challenges. That is the setup of the exceptional new musical The…
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Chicago Dance Review: AMERICAN LEGENDS (Joffrey Ballet at Auditorium Theatre)
SPRINGING INTO SPRING In Chicago, spring can never come early enough. But, alas, it’s February, so it has to be an indoor sport. Leave it to our homegrown dance company, the Joffrey Ballet, to gloriously unleash spring fever in the bleak late winter. A quartet of dazzling works by Twyla Tharp, Jerome Robbins and the Joffrey…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: TRIASSIC PARQ: THE MUSICAL (Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills)
FRINGE-O-SAUR Winner of the Best Musical title at the 2010 FringeNYC, with music by Marshall Pailet and book by Pailet, Bryce Norbitz and Steve Wargo, Triassic Parq: The Musical is a parody which explores the relationship of personal identity to gender, sexuality, and spirituality in the context of a group of female dinosaurs in the…
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Chicago Theater Review: JULIUS CAESAR (Chicago Shakespeare Theater)
YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO LEND THIS PRODUCTION YOUR EARS Brutal and relentless, Julius Caesar chronicles a fateful course of envy and revenge defeating idealism and loyalty: Brutus and Cassius, the principal murderers of the titular dictator, are dogged to death by his avengers Marc Antony and Octavius Caesar. But the republic the assassinators…
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Chicago Theater Review: BENGAL TIGER AT THE BAGHDAD ZOO (Lookingglass)
FEARFUL SYMMETRY In Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, inspired by an actual 2003 event involving occupying soldiers in Iraq, a slain tiger takes center stage and discusses from the perspective of the newly dead that there is a flash of retrospective honesty which instills a global rather than personal viewpoint. The Tiger…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: CHESS (Musical Theatre Guild)
MUSICAL WITH A CHECKERED PAST GETS A CHECKERED PRODUCTION Chess, the musical about two chess tournaments between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War, is the 1979 brain child of lyricist Tim Rice, who teamed up with ABBA composers Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus to create the (still) immensely popular 1984 concept album….
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Off-Off-Broadway Theater Review: THE GOOD PERSON OF SZECHUAN (La MaMa)
THIS IS NOT YOUR TEXTBOOK BRECHT While productions of Brecht’s plays are often weighed down by theatrical theory and didactic political messages, The Foundry Theatre jolts the audience to attention with a fresh and vibrant production of The Good Person of Szechwan. The Foundry Theatre plays free and loose with this translation by John Willett,…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: THIS CLEMENT WORLD (St. Ann’s Warehouse)
AN ARTISTIC PLEA FOR CHANGE In the wake of Hurricane Sandy and the Blizzard Nemo, global climate change is increasingly palpable. As inclement weather infringes on our day-to-day activities, we should consider the human action that has propelled our world into these storms. Cynthia Hopkins’ sweeping multimedia musical work This Clement World is a mixed…
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