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Los Angeles Theater Review: 42nd STREET (Carpenter Performing Arts Center)
FLEET FEET, HOLLOW HEART When notes jostled in and out of the written score during the overture of Musical Theatre West’s 42nd Street, it portended a production that doesn’t have all the ingredients in place for a fully satisfying experience. The opening, that has the curtain raise just a bit to let us meet a…
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Off Broadway Theater Review: WILD WITH HAPPY (The Public Theater)
FORGET YOUR TROUBLES. COME ON, GET HAPPY. When the lights go up on Wild With Happy, we see Colman Domingo, in cool shades and wearing his best Paris-Is-Burning attitude, speak his opening line; and it is so hilarious one can’t help but wonder if he can ever top it. But what follows assures us that…
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Off Broadway Theater Review: NEUTRAL HERO (The Kitchen)
MAXWELL COUNTRY: WHERE HEROES ROAM There is only one Richard Maxwell and, in his extraordinarily textured Neutral Hero, he has gone back to his roots. For those of us who have longed for the early days of his short but tantalizing pieces – with their seemingly non-professional actors, whose affectless recitations, never driven by emotions,…
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Chicago Theater Review: CHICAGO’S WEIRD, GRANDMA (The Neo-Futurarium)
MONKEY BUSINESS Barrel of Monkeys has spent more than 10 years teaching writing workshops at Chicago schools, but they are best known for turning the creative writing from elementary school kids into songs, sketches, and dance numbers which are performed at their weekly show, That’s Weird, Grandma. Now they’re letting an impressive list of local…
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Documentary Film Review: TERRA BLIGHT (directed by Isaac Brown)
SHARP ECO-ETHIC SMACKDOWN From start to finish Isaac Brown’s Terra Blight is a fantastic, formidable exposé of the intensifying environmental damage caused by the technological revolution of the late 20th century. Effectively juxtaposing American excess with the poverty of the third world developing countries’”in whose backyards our electronic waste is unceremoniously dumped’”the film makes a…
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Documentary Film Review: A LIAR’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY: THE UNTRUE STORY OF MONTY PYTHON’S GRAHAM CHAPMAN IN 3D (directed by Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson, and Ben Timlett)
LIFE OF GRAHAM IS NOT A DOCUMENTARY; NOR IS IT A GOOD FILM The appropriately but un-succinctly titled A Liar’s Autobiography: The Untrue story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman in 3D (or any D for that matter) is dead on arrival. Its inventive approach to employ seventeen distinctive animation styles sounds promising but soon grows…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (Zombie Joe’s Underground)
LESS ADO IS STILL MUCH ADO Shakespeare’s plays tend to be longer than those of contemporary playwrights, typically running 120-150 minutes. This leads many theatre directors to wonder about the feasibility of performing Shakespeare, since contemporary theatre audiences seem to have increasingly short attention spans – perhaps 70-90 minutes. A typical solution is that of…
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Off-Off-Broadway Theater Review: ICH, KÜRBISGEIST (The Chocolate Factory)
NOT SURE WHAT IT IS BUT I LIKE IT Staged in the basement of The Chocolate Factory, with exposed pipes, beams and support columns, the drawbacks of Sibyl Kempson’s wonderfully inventive new show Ich, Kí¼rbisgeist are, ironically, also its charms. Or is it vice versa? The invented language the characters speak – English with Scandinavian…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE RIVALS (The Actors’ Gang)
THE SHTICK MAY DETRACT FROM THE PLAY, BUT JUST TRY TO RIVAL THE ACTORS’ GANG The Rivals (1775), Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s wonderful Comedy of Manners, is a play about pretension; everyone in the work is pretending to be better in station or morality than they actually are’”from a military officer who mimics being a sexy…
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Stage and Cinema Interview: ERIC ROSS (Theremin Virtuoso)
ERIC ROSS BRINGS HIS UNIQUE TALENTS TO L.A. WITH ULTIMEDIA THEREMIN AT REDCAT You may not know the Theremin by name but if you have ever seen a horror film or listened to the Beach Boys Good Vibrations you have undoubtedly been wowed by its unusual and often eerie and other-worldly sound. It is without…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: BUILD (Geffen Playhouse)
AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF SILICON VALLEY Build hasn’t started yet, but the minute you walk into the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater at the Geffen Playhouse you feel drawn into another world by Sibyl Wickersheimer’s beautifully conceived and executed set. You’re in the middle of what looks like a mid-century Cliff May Rancho gone…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE MADNESS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE: A LOVE STORY (First Folio in Oak Brook)
THE MADNESS OF SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER Back in 2010, First Folio presented David Rice’s site-specific theater piece, The Madness of Edgar Allan Poe: A Love Story. If any show should be heaped with awards for concept of a production – this is it. But in this year’s restaging, director Michael Goldberg proves he knows how to…
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Theater Review: 44 PLAYS FOR 44 PRESIDENTS (The Neo-Futurarium in Chicago)
PRESIDENTIAL AFFAIR OR LAME DUCK? Every four years, the American people come together to debate important issues, engage in democratic dialogue, and realize they agree on absolutely nothing. All they can agree on is the importance of who will be the next President. The Chief Executives, powerful and sometimes power-hungry men, are the subject of…
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Chicago Dance Review: GIORDANO DANCE CHICAGO (Harris Theater)
KINETIC COOL IN MILLENNIUM PARK As evidenced at last night’s opening, Giordano Dance Chicago’s Fall Engagement’”a two-night gig at the Harris Theater’”is a major installment in the company’s very welcome 50th anniversary season. The most exciting part of the program is the world premiere of company member Autumn Eckman’s G-Force. Almost living up to its…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: HOUSE FOR SALE (The Duke on 42nd Street)
HOUSE NOT AT HOME IN THE THEATER My theatergoing companion left the Duke on 42nd Street last night with tears welling in her eyes. She spent much of the subway ride home taking deep breaths to recover from Transport Group’s House for Sale, adapted from Jonathan Franzen’s personal essay about selling his childhood house after his mother’s…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: I OUGHT TO BE IN PICTURES (Falcon Theatre)
I OUGHT TO BE IN PICTURES OUGHT TO BE BETTER You would be hard-pressed to find anyone proclaiming I Ought To Be In Pictures to be Neil Simon’s finest hour, but even with its shortcomings it deserves much better treatment that it is currently receiving at the Falcon Theatre in Burbank. Unlike his mid-60’s smashes…
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Film Review: CLOUD ATLAS (directed by Tom Twyker, Lana Wachowski, and Andy Wachowski)
MAP OF THE AGES Cloud Atlas, the latest effort from the Wachowskis, wraps a half-dozen stories, settings, and groups of characters into one film. But it doesn’t matter how many stories they do, their song remains the same. The Matrix helmers have hit the same point for a while now: Liberty is the freedom from…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE RECKLESS, RUTHLESS, BRUTAL CHARGE OF IT, OR THE TRAIN PLAY (Oracle Theatre)
A RUSH TO DOOM As the breathless title suggests, there’s nothing placid or contained about Liz Duffy Adams’ hyper-poetic hybrid of interior monologues and frantic dialogue. The metaphorical/microcosmic setting is a speeding American train whose eight highly driven passengers represent Western culture literally hurtling to some unsought doom. A Midwest premiere, Adams’ “comi-threnody” gives Will…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: FAITH: PART ONE OF A MEXICAN TRILOGY (Los Angeles Theatre Center)
A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY Faith by Evelina Fernandez, directed by Jose Luis Valenzuela, is a sensitive portrayal of a Mexican-American family in the 1940’s. Good performances and a smart use of music ultimately succeed in transforming a spotty episodic tale into a meaningful drama. Two melodramatic vignettes in Mexico seem to serve as a prequel, planting…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: A SUMMER DAY (Rattlestick Playwrights)
A BAD DAY FOR A GREAT PLAY It’s a problem when the most effective elements of a dramatic show are the sound and visual effects, but such is the case with Cherry Lane Theater’s production of Jon Fosse’s outstanding play A Summer Day, which had the misfortune of being admired and subsequently translated and helmed…
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