IT COULD HAVE BEEN WONDERFUL East West Players’ cross-cultural take on the Stephen Sondheim/Harold Wheeler musical A Little Night Music highlights one of the most shimmering and romantic scores in American Musical Theatre, but the capricious performances and inconsistent directorial choices obstruct the radiance necessary to tell the tale about erotic liaisons in turn-of-the-century Sweden….

BETTER BE ON YOUR AVANT-GARDE Have you ever eaten at a new restaurant and summed it up thusly?: “I have no idea what I just ate! It was a little tough to chew and digest, but the presentation was thrilling and I loved the flavors. For what you get, the fare was reasonably priced, too….

INTIMATE OPERA Bringing opera to a wider audience is the noble goal of many a musical entrepreneur, but few succeed as well as Josh Shaw and Stephen Karr, founders of the Pacific Opera Project (POP). The company has been around less than a year, in which time it has already found its own home at…

A CAPTIVATING GENDER-BENDING STORY In Michael Premsrirat’s thoroughly engaging The Girl Most Likely To, an unnamed teenage Boy (a winning Tobit Raphael) is, and always has been, in the wrong body. Donning women’s clothes is so natural to him, that he puts on a wig, slips on a skimpy outfit (which shows off his comely…

RIGHT UP HALF-BAKED ALLEY Keith Stevenson’s writing in Out There on Fried Meat Ridge Rd. unsteadily walks a line between high and low comedy, veering more often toward sit-comism.   More skit than play, this quasi-story tells of a redneck saint who uses doe urine for cologne (Mr Stevenson) and the bottom-feeders he attempts to redeem…

DEAFTRAP Writer Stephen Sachs and the Fountain Theatre have come up with what would appear to be a fresh approach to Rostand’s classic play, Cyrano de Bergerac. In this modern-day version, Cyrano is no longer the joyful poet, soldier, and owner of a humongous proboscis, but a frustrated poet who happens to be deaf. He…

TAUGHT BY MASTERS William Faulkner might or might not have quipped that Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies he’d ever met.   Faulkner definitely did call James both priggish and among the best of novelists, and even if the old-lady line proves spurious, it sounds enough like both of them that one wishes…