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San Diego Theater Review: ALLEGIANCE (Old Globe)
NEW MUSICAL TOO LUKEWARM TO PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO IT Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing “exclusion zones” which effectively allowed for the forced evacuation of persons of Japanese ancestry in California, Washington and Oregon. Two-thirds of the 120,000 internees were American citizens, and since it was indiscernible as…
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Chicago Theater Review: GOOD PEOPLE (Steppenwolf)
GOOD PEOPLE; GREAT PLAY; AMAZING PRODUCTION David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People is a wonderful play receiving a terrific production at the Steppenwolf Theatre and headed by a magnificent performance from Mariann Mayberry. Those are the facts. The rest is commentary. Good People is set in Boston, especially working class south Boston, where the playwright grew up….
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Off-Off-Broadway Theater Review: SOMETHING WILD… (Abingdon Theater)
NOTHING WILD, EXCEPT… Tess Frazer gives a stellar performance as Willie in Tennessee Williams’ This Property is Condemned, a play about an orphaned girl living alone in her family’s dilapidated house, which is one of three Williams one-acts in Something Wild…, presented by Pook’s Hill, with Ken Schatz directing. Ms. Frazer’s piercing portrayal, so tender…
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San Francisco Theater Review: THE REAL AMERICANS (The Marsh San Francisco)
WILL THE REAL AMERICANS PLEASE STAND UP? I was on a road trip in 2007 seeking to explore the plethora of National Parks that we, the American people, own. While heading through Des Moines, I came upon a huge crowd of people gathered outside an unassuming “Barack Obama for President” campaign office. Within a few…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: GOB SQUAD’S KITCHEN (YOU’VE NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD) (REDCAT)
“YOUNG. SEXY. NEW. AND FULL OF LIFE.” Gob Squad’s Kitchen, playing at REDCAT through Sunday, is an exquisite, provocative piece of experimental, experiential theatre. The performance begins when the doors open and the cast invites the audience on a tour of the set. Aided by a zigzagging floor map of arrows and lines, one journeys…
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San Francisco Theater Review: THE NORMAL HEART (A.C.T.)
MORE POLEMIC BARK THAN EMOTIONAL BITE IN THIS NORMAL HEART Some eyes will be misty, some guts will be wrenched, and some souls will be startled after attending Larry Kramer’s seminal play The Normal Heart, the Broadway transfer of which opened this week at A.C.T. However, discerning theatregoers will find something missing from Kramer’s semi-autobiographical…
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Film Review: TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE (directed by Robert Lorenz)
THE AMERICAN PAST TIME Driving to a screening of Trouble with the Curve last week, I was struck by how different my childhood must be from that of today’s children. It was a cool late summer evening. Children should be running through the front yards of the neighborhood. Where were the children playing ball? There…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: UNDER MY SKIN (Pasadena Playhouse)
UNDER MY SHOE If the comedy in Under My Skin were any more broad, it would require a wider stage than the one at the Pasadena Playhouse. If the play were any less funny, it would have to wear a black armband. But it is well-intentioned, and so this blithely degrading show cannot be despised…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE BIG KNIFE (Raven Theatre)
A BIG KNIFE THAT ISN’T VERY SHARP Clifford Odets is justly famed for his agit-prop Depression-era New York-based protest plays (Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, Golden Boy), but The Big Knife, written a decade later, is more personal than polemical. If only to suit the California context of this 150-minute, rarely produced play, Odets…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: YEAR OF THE RABBIT (Atwater Village Theatre in Glendale)
THIS RABBIT IS EARLY FOR ITS DATE Keliher Walsh’s new play, Year of the Rabbit, treats with respect and compassion the lives of three families wracked by war. The gravity of the text and the production illustrate the sober care the author and her director, James Eckhouse, have taken in telling this harrowing story. But…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: THE EXONERATED (Culture Project)
THEATRICAL ADVOCACY, THE GOOD KIND The Exonerated is theater as activism and proud of it, so it’s difficult to speak about it from a purely artistic perspective as mixing art and politics can be an unwieldy proposition. This show however, with its incontestable agenda and elegant, straightforward execution, is a brilliant exception. Twenty years ago…
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Documentary Film Review: GENIUS WITHIN: THE INNER LIFE OF GLENN GOULD (Directed by Brett Michí¨le Hozer and Peter Raymont)
INFAMOUS, SOLITARY, DIFFERENT From White Pine Pictures comes a dense, detailed portrayal of one of the most profoundly singular musicians of all time: the tremendously gifted, relentlessly driven Glenn Gould. Gould, known as much for his eccentricity as his remarkable musical ability, played his first concert at thirteen. Over the two decades that followed, his…
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Chicago Theater Review: I LOVE LUCY, LIVE ON STAGE (Broadway Playhouse)
THIS ISN’T GREAT THEATER, BUT IT’S TERRIFIC NOSTALGIA The American novelist Peter De Vries once wrote that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Maybe he would have modified his observation after seeing I Love Lucy, Live on Stage at the Broadway Playhouse. The I Love Lucy TV sitcom of the 1950’s clearly held affectionate…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: FORBIDDEN BROADWAY: ALIVE & KICKING! (47th Street Theatre)
FORBIDDEN BETTER THAN BROADWAY Musical theater fans, rejoice! Forbidden Broadway is back – Alive & Kicking! – with a raucous new romp through the current theatrical season. This off-Broadway institution makes a feisty return to the 47th Street Theater, where its caustic parodies will have you cracking up at the mainstream hits – and flops…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: CHEKHOV UNSCRIPTED and TWILIGHT ZONE UNSCRIPTED (Odyssey Theatre)
CHEKHOV’S GUN, SERLING’S CIGARETTE The most authentic and thoughtful staging of Anton Chekhov I’ve experienced in America didn’t use any Chekhov script you’ve read or seen performed or ever will see. This Impro Theatre one-night-only production of Serfs in the Field was improvised over two acts’ relaxed mastery, nimbly directed, sublimely performed, and – I…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THREE VIEWS OF THE SAME OBJECT (Rogue Machine Theatre)
THREE DEGREES OF SEPARATION A woman asks for a martini in a highball glass and accuses her husband of peeing in the sink: again. He doesn’t cop to it, but doesn’t deny it. The couple seems long married, used to one another, and not particularly happy’”probably in their 60s or early 70s. She’s nursing a…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE SPITFIRE GRILL (Boho Theatre)
BLAND MEAT COOKED WELL IN THE SPITFIRE GRILL Boho Theatre’s rendition of James Valcq and Fred Alley’s simple musical The Spitfire Grill demonstrates the redemptive power of acceptance, forgiveness and love. Released from prison, Percy (Laura Savage) seeks a new life in Gilead, Wisconsin, a town fallen on hard times, or as Sheriff Joe (Matt…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: COLLECTED STORIES (Odyssey Theatre)
COLLECTED STORIES: A SNOOZE INDUCING “WRITE” OF PASSAGE As a critic I hope for one of two things: either a production is fantastic or, to be blunt, it sucks. For me at least, a review of a great show or an awful show practically writes itself: it’s the critiques of the so-so ones that take…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR (South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa)
LIFE IN THE KITCHEN Suicide is no laughing matter. No laughing matter, that is, until someone tries to commit it repeatedly in a room full of oblivious friends. Then it’s hilarious. Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular is about three couples, who each in turn throw disastrous Christmas Eve dinner parties at their homes; under David…
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San Francisco Theater Review: THE PLAY ABOUT THE BABY (Custom Made Theatre Co.)
LOTS OF LEVELS TO PLAY WITH If you tend to like plays with concrete storylines, well-defined goals, and a balance of symbolism integrated into reality, you may find The Custom-Made Theatre Co.’s 14th season-opening production of Edward Albee’s The Play About the Baby a cacophony of absurdist abstracts that requires too much guesswork – one which teeters on the tedious and…
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