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Los Angeles Theater Review: SUKIE AND SUE: THEIR STORY (Blank Theatre in Hollywood)
THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT A demon-possessed, bleeding-eyed, pyro-maniacal Raggedy Ann doll with pre-cum on her face is the vortex around which Michael John LaChiusa’s new comedy Sukie and Sue: Their Story swirls: it’s a flight of fancy that feels wickedly appealing, and he just about pulls it off. This new work, produced by…
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Theater Review: TIGERS BE STILL (Theater Wit)
MAKE A FELINE FOR THEATER WIT At the beginning of Tigers Be Still at Theater Wit, 24-year old Sherry takes a microphone and announces to the audience, karaoke style, “This is the story of how I stopped being a total disaster and got my life on track and did not let overwhelming feelings of anxiousness…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE DUCHESS OF MALFI (Strawdog Theatre Company in Chicago)
TOO MANY THEATER INGREDIENTS SPOIL THE BROTH If there were a Joseph Jefferson Award simply for risk-taking in the theatre, Brandon Bruce would most assuredly win for his direction of John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi. Mr. Bruce has assembled a savvy design team and has employed numerous theatrical styles to tell the…
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Tour Review: TOTEM (Cirque du Soleil)
CIRQUE’S PERKS What’s a circus without lions, tigers, and elephants? In the case of Cirque du Soleil’s Totem, their eleventh major production in 26 years, it’s a marked improvement, proving that animals acts are strictly for the birds when it comes to grand circus entertainment. Press materials tell us that “Totem traces the fascinating journey…
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Chicago Theater Review: PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (Lifeline Theatre in Chicago)
A PRODUCTION TO TAKE PRIDE IN All of Jane Austen’s novels are built on the same premise. A woman meets and marries an eligible man after a series of usually comic difficulties. But Austen extracts a remarkable amount of drama, comedy, and human interest from her domestic tales through her witty, ironic prose and her…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: A NEW BRAIN (Musical Theatre Guild at the Alex Theatre in Glendale)
ONE FROGGY EVENING Once again, Musical Theatre Guild (MTG), a company of professional performers who present concert-staged readings, has produced a stellar offering of a rarely-seen musical – William Finn’s A New Brain – that elucidated why it is rarely produced. More important, MTG also revealed how a musical’s spotty construction can be overcome with…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE PIANIST OF WILLESDEN LANE (Geffen Playhouse in Westwood)
GRIEG, INTERRUPTED The Pianist of Willesden Lane features world-class piano playing, a moving story, a performer who has mastered the art of the former but not of the latter, and a director who can’t tell the difference. About ten years ago, pianist Mona Golabek wrote with Lee Cohen a children’s book about Golabek’s mother, Lisa…
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Chicago Theater Review: IN A FOREST, DARK AND DEEP (Profiles Main Stage Theatre in Chicago)
THE ACTING IS DARK AND DEEP BUT THE SCRIPT GETS LOST IN THE FOREST In a Forest, Dark and Deep may not be top drawer Neil LaBute, but it does provide a showcase for two of the area’s best performers to rant and rave at each other with considerable gusto for 90 uninterrupted minutes. The…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD (Royal Theatre aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach)
THE TRIUMPH OF IRONY When Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (R&G) premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1966, the critics hated it. While a poor production may have been partially to blame, the ensuing decades have certainly vindicated him. Stoppard’s talent for reworking Shakespeare earned him a 1999 Oscar for Shakespeare in Love….
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Broadway Theater Review: DON’T DRESS FOR DINNER (American Airlines Theatre)
DON’T EVEN BOTHER Broadway producers often hope lightning will strike twice as they mount shows very similar to past successes. We have recently seen the creative team of Hairspray unsuccessfully try to replicate that triumph with the flop Cry Baby. The folks who brought you a competent Lombardi are now serving us a mediocre Magic/Bird. …
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Broadway Theater Review: LEAP OF FAITH (St. James Theater)
LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP Americans love popular stories of miracles and redemption. And really, who doesn’t? Few things are more gratifying than God taking time out of His schedule to break all the rules of Nature, which He created, just to do you a favor. How uplifting is a tale of a corrupted soul that…
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Broadway Theater Review: PETER AND THE STARCATCHER (Brooks Atkinson Theatre)
THEATER OF THE ADVENTUROUS I hadn’t realized how deeply entrenched in my unconsciousness the Peter Pan legend was; that is, until I found myself, in the last minutes of the rousing and miraculously innovative Peter and the Starcatcher, gently weeping. Not that the show in any way jerked tears out of me – make no…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: CONCEALING JUDY HOLLIDAY (Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice)
REVEALING JUDY HOLLIDAY If you really never cared about Judy Holliday, because you only know her from grating performances in unsophisticated 50’s movies, you’re not alone. (Turns out she may have hated them more than I.) And I was warned that Concealing Judy Holliday is built upon the somewhat familiar premise of a deathbed fever…
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Regional Theater Review: BROWNIE POINTS (Lamb’s Players in San Diego)
POINTS FOR THE RICH MIX IN BROWNIE Five women consider themselves to be friends because their daughters are in the same Girl Scouts troupe. The bond they share should have been enough to plan and co-lead a weekend camping excursion for the troupe, but challenges along the way reveal different personalities that were belied by…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE MARCH (Steppenwolf)
THE LONG MARCH E. L. Doctorow’s The March was a fine Civil War novel and likely would make an excellent motion picture, but as a play it has problems. The ambitious adaptation at the Steppenwolf Theatre certainly gives the book a brave try, but at 2 hours and 50 minutes the production turns out to…
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Chicago Theater Review: PIRATES OF PENZANCE (Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire)
A PRODUCTION THAT IS THE VERY MODEL The comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan can be an acquired taste for modern audiences. The plots are inane and the satire, so cutting in Victorian days, means little to today’s spectators. Still, the music is superb and the lyrics delicious, though it takes a sharp ear to…
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Chicago Theater Review: SIXTY MILES TO SILVER LAKE (Flat Iron Arts Building in Chicago)
SIXTY MILES TO NOWHERE The setting for Dan LeFranc’s Sixty Miles to Silver Lake is the front seat of a car. Ky (Sean Bolger) has picked up his son Denny (Ethan Dubin) from a soccer game, as he does every weekend, to drive sixty miles on the Golden State Freeway to Silver Lake, near downtown…
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Off Broadway Theater Review: NINTH AND JOANIE (Labyrinth Theater Company)
BEYOND REALISM The living room and foyer of the modest house on 9th Street in the South Philadelphia of 1986, created by David Meyer, is as dank and dreary as social realism will allow. And when the door to the kitchen opens, we may not see the kitchen sink, but we can readily imagine exactly…
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Regional/Los Angeles Theater Review: CLOUDLANDS (South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa)
EXPOSITION, THE MUSICAL SPOILER ALERT in this first paragraph! There are attempts at surprising plot twists in Octavio Solis’ and Adam Gwon’s new musical drama Cloudlands, but this new piece, commissioned by South Coast Repertory, takes itself so seriously, struggling, grasping for some sort of esoteric significance that it never rises above its soap-operatic plot….
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Broadway Theater Review: GHOST THE MUSICAL (Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York City)
THEATRE GHOST In uncertain times such as these, audiences crave familiarity and nostalgia. Broadway, which once turned plays into movies, is now glutted with adaptations of popular films because it’s easier to sell a show as a known quantity based on a “title.” While producers play on our nostalgia, they usually diminish the source material,…
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