THE BAT: A SWING AND A MISS Nowadays, more times than not, new plays are a wham-bam, down-and-dirty, in-and-out in 80 minutes “theater-lite” affair. Not that I’m complaining (I relish any chance to get to bed early), because even with their diminished running time, they are usually vapid, pointless exercises that delve no further than…

POETRY OUT OF MOTION I was quite keen to see Amy Freed’s The Psychic Life of Savages; curious about its fictional take on Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, the dead, messy poet heroines of my angst-ridden teenaged years. I would read Plath’s ripe paean to father fixation and suicide, Lady Lazarus, over and over’”bathing in…

WHO NEEDS HORSES? FARM BOY GALLOPS ALL ON ITS OWN War Horse is the theatrical juggernaut that took London by storm, crossed the pond, swept the Tony Awards and hit the road, recently completing a run at the Ahmanson Theatre. The majesty of the fantastical staging’”especially the life-sized horses created by the Handspring Puppet Company’”provided…

A GOGOL BORDELLO In adapting Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 comedy The Government Inspector (also known, in direct translation, as The Inspector General) for a modern idiom, Oded Gross has taken a work of enduring satire and made of it an instantly dated parody of 2011.   The original stands outside nation, era, or political alignment as an…

BEST BE ON YOUR AVANT-GARDE Understanding the origins of REDCAT, the downtown center for innovative visual, performing, and media arts, will assist the uninitiated in preparation for the avant-garde 9th Annual New Original Works Festival, now playing through August 11, 2012. And if you don’t like some of what you see at the festival, knowing…

SMART FOOLERY A young-audience offshoot of the Troubadour Theater Company, the Funky Punks seem dedicated to kiboshing the notion that a clown’s function is to scare children.   At the hour of comic tumbling, dance, acrobatics and puppetry I attended, the only child who cried was merely afraid of being dragged onstage.   In fact, except for…

DIS HERE’S A DIFF’RENT KIND OF HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL There is something very sweet going on in Eric Dodson’s and Alan Ross Fleishman’s new musical A Ring in Brooklyn. The unusual pleasure of the unamplified human voice’”the performers use no microphones’”is coupled with the creators’ obvious affection for their characters, elevating a rather simple premise…

IRREVERENT IN TRANSLATION In the same way that many really awful movies are actually good in the sense of being funny to laugh at (rather than laugh with), so the screenplays chosen by the Magnum Opus Players for stage use are so terrible that they make good comic theatre. And just to be absolutely clear,…

A VERY COLD WAR BETWEEN THE SEXES I was a huge fan of Peter Lefcourt’s 1999-2001 Showtime series Beggars & Choosers. It was something of a bomb financially but a great favorite of those who work in the entertainment industry, who delighted in its dark yet fizzy take on the business of television — the…