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Los Angeles Theater Review: EURIPEDES’ HELEN (Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades)
CLASSICAL/CONTEMPORARY MASHUP There are few venues in Los Angeles better suited to productions of ancient Greek plays than the Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater at the Getty Villa. Not only does it boast a large outdoor amphitheatre surrounded by galleries full of Greek and Roman antiquities, but it is positioned towards the sea and away…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING (Elephant Stage Theatre)
NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE Author Joan Didion’s powerful piece of writing, the elegiac monologue The Year of Magical Thinking, receives its Los Angeles premiere in this intimate production at the Elephant Theatre. Didion’s play, adapted from her book, describes what can only be called a bona fide annus horribilis, in which her beloved husband…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE WORLD GOES ‘ROUND (Actors Co-op in Hollywood)
A WHOLE NEW WORLD Musical revues are a tricky business. While highly enjoyable and entertaining, even high profile compilations like Side By Side By Sondheim and the Fats Waller song book Ain’t Misbehavin’ amount to little more than glorified cabaret shows. Jukebox musicals—a la Smokey Joe’s Cafe (Leiber and Stoller) and the long running Broadway…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: COSI (Urban Stages in New York City)
IT AIN’T MOZART Louis Nowra’s Cosi tells the story of Lewis (Adam Zivkovic) a recent college graduate with a theatrical background who gets a job in an insane asylum. There, he find himself directing mental patients in a play adapted from Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto to Mozart’s opera, Cosi Fan Tutte, which deals with issues…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: SILENCE! THE MUSICAL (Hayworth Theatre)
SILENCE! THE FRANCHISE Silence! The Musical was one of the big hits of the 2005 New York International Fringe Festival. The parody of Jonathan Demme’s 1991 Oscar-winning horror thriller Silence of the Lambs found a home Off-Broadway last year, created enough buzz for a long run, and is still packing ‘em in. Now, the Los…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE BELLFLOWER SESSIONS (Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks)
THE PLAYWRIGHT MUST HAVE EATEN A PILLOW, BECAUSE THIS PLAY IS DOWN IN THE MOUTH Andy Bloch’s The Bellflower Sessions is a bleak, black comedy about Jack Calvin, a victim of “The Great Recession,” and his unorthodox, vulgar, yet purportedly effective shrink, Dr. Wendy Bellflower. In spite of its timeliness and readily relatable subject matter,…
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Broadway Theater Review: PETER AND THE STARCATCHER (Brooks Atkinson Theatre)
CLAP YOUR HANDS IF YOU BELIEVE A theatrical revolution is taking place at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, where a high-tech Broadway spectacle has been swapped for the homespun magic of a talented troupe of players and the audience’s engaged imaginations. Peter and the Starcatcher, a captivating prequel to Peter Pan, inspires childlike wonder. Suspend belief…
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Theater Review: BLAGOJEVICH, BLAGOJEVICH! (Athenaeum Theatre in Chicago)
NOT REALLY, NOT REALLY! The most pressing question I had walking out of Athenaeum Theatre’s Blagojevich, Blagojevich! was “Was that really necessary?” We’re already familiar with the long, hysterical end of Rod Blagojevich’s career’”a thing so jam-packed with comedy on its own that a show dedicated to making fun of it seems redundant. Still, there…
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Los Angeles Theater Review A BROOKLYN LOVE STORY (Theatre 68 in Hollywood)
A BROOKLYN LOVE STORY – FUHGEDDABOUDIT! Originally produced as Emergency Used Candles for NYC’s Emerging Artists Theatre One Woman Standing Festival and then followed by a run at the famed Cherry Lane Theatre Off-Broadway, the newly titled A Brooklyn Love Story is making its L. A. premiere at Theatre 68. For those of you who…
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LA, NYC, and Tour Theater Review: ANDRÉ & DORINE (Los Angeles Theatre Center)
LIFE AS WE KNOW IT Mask work reduces the craft of acting to the essential elements of pose and gesture. That’s all you get when there are no words or facial expressions. Watching a piece as declarative, accessible, and affecting as Kulunka Teatro’s André & Dorine, one wonders why we allow words to clutter our…
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Chicago Theater Review: ILLEGAL USE OF HANDS (American Blues Theatre)
UNRESOLVED USE OF STORY James Still’s 80-minute play, Illegal Use of Hands, set in an old rural-American home, opens in the middle of a late-October night; an old man is reading in an armchair while rock music blares away, when suddenly there is a banging on the front door and two young men barge in….
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Chicago Theater Review: A CLASS ACT (Porchlight Music Theatre at Theater Wit)
ONE NERDY, COMPULSIVE, AND SINGULAR SENSATION The Porchlight Theatre opens its 18th season at cozy Theatre Wit with a musical about musicals: the uncanny A Class Act, which pays tribute to Edward Kleban, known primarily as the lyricist for A Chorus Line. As it turns out, Kleban, despite his roaring success with the 1977 Tony-winner,…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: NO LOVE (Eclectic Company Theatre in Valley Village)
WITH A LITTLE LOVE, THIS COULD BE GREAT The perfect show is like the happy marriage: you can go decades without seeing one. If the script is good, the lead actor is usually somebody’s cousin, or the director doesn’t understand the material; a great production almost never has a great script. And so on. Eclectic…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: FRACTURED BONES / LET’S GET LOST (The Performing Garage)
TRAPPED IN VIRTUAL LIFE Tune into Findlay//Sandsmark’s fractured bones / let’s get lost for an immersive meditation on the mediatization of contemporary culture. This Norwegian performance art bombards its audience with technological trappings that thrill and terrify, both enhancing and reducing the human bodies on stage. What better location to explore virtual reality than a…
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Documentary Film Review: BEAUTY IS EMBARRASSING (directed by Neil Berkeley)
A GOOD LIFE You could do worse than be Wayne White. Wayne White could certainly do worse: he could be anybody else. A designer and puppeteer on TV shows (most notably Pee-Wee’s Playhouse), a “one-man animation department” on iconic MTV videos, a fair banjo picker, and the guy responsible for those instant kitsch paintings at…
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Los Angeles and New York Film Feature: FRENCH OLD WAVE (American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica and Film Forum in NYC)
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN Even a cinema neophyte is no doubt aware of the term “French New Wave” (La Nouvelle Vague), which describes a period when French filmmakers, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classic Hollywood cinema, created unprecedented documentary-style movies that veered toward existentialism, individualism, and absurdism. This decade, roughly 1959-1969, also saw the…
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Chicago Theater Review: 33 VARIATIONS (TimeLine Theatre Company at Stage 773)
MORE THAN JUST VARIATIONS ON A THEME 33 Variations starts out with a character asking the question, “Why did the great German composer Ludwig van Beethoven write 33 variations on a trivial little waltz by a mediocre amateur composer?” On the surface, the question itself may seem trivial, but playwright Moises Kaufman expands the mystery…
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Film Review: COSMOPOLIS (directed by David Cronenberg)
COSMOPOLIS: FILMING THE UNFILMABLE To properly critique David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, the relationship between film and literature should be addressed in both a general and historical sense. The challenge that cinema placed upon the primacy of literature in the last century has resulted in marketplace rivalry. As with any respectable products, the two began to differentiate:…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: ELEPHANT ROOM (Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City)
MAGIC TRICKS OR TRAGIC MIX? Every once in a while a show comes along that defies classification. Elephant Room, making its West Coast Premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre is one such show. It’s sort of a comedy, it’s sort of a magic show, it’s sort of a bloated SNL skit, it’s sort of an…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: FISHING (The Archway Theatre)
FISHING FOR LAUGHS If you are now or were at some point a wannabe entertainment professional, chances are you’re no stranger to slinging hash in a greasy spoon to make ends meet. Playwright David J. Duman spent his formative years dishing up organic eats to some of San Francisco’s “most particular, demanding, and ridiculous diners.” …
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