COMICAL, HISTORICAL, WHIMSICAL, “POP”ICAL If you like Shakespeare: go.   If you hate Shakespeare: go.   If you love or loathe Peter Cetera: go.   If you dislike ecstatic, adorable, hard-working mega-talents willing to entertain you by all of a thousand means at their disposal: go anyway; this show might just find your pulse. Two Gentlemen of Chicago…

THE QUESTION IS: CAN YOU SEE TOMMY? Everything is murky about the DOMA Theatre Company’s new production of The Who’s Tommy at the Met Theatre’”the performances, the sound design, the staging, the choreography, and especially the lighting. Often actors are hardly visible when they sing, and the lighting design seemingly hasn’t been created with any…

BUT ONLY BY A THREAD During Connected, the 2011 dance piece from Australian company Chunky Move at the Luckman Theater in Los Angeles last week, a strip-club cat-call was heard from the audience when the performers removed portions of their costumes. With apologies to artistic director and choreographer Gideon Obarzanek for some hinterland denizens, the…

WHAT IS AN AFRICAN AMERICAN? While many plays purport to examine race issues, few tackle them head on. Ensemble Studio Theatre’s production of The Many Mistresses of Martin Luther King, by debut playwright Andrew Dolan, certainly does. It may not say anything new about race in America, but it does discuss race issues in a…

COMIC EPHEMERA In Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s 1636 comedy L’Illusion Comique, the modern playwright has abandoned the contextual trappings that make the original at all interesting, in order to write for a contemporary audience.   The result, in Casey Stangl’s fleet staging, very slightly disguises shallow earnestness as light amusement.   It’s fun; it’s supposed…

BLACK AND WHITE AND GOOD ALL OVER A smart play is usually a provocative play, but a provocative play is rarely smart.   Many playwrights competent to stir controversy have neither the chops nor, sadly, the intention to say much of benefit except to their own notoriety; and really talented writers don’t always invest in the…

THE GODOT WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR Samuel Beckett is a great comic playwright. You don’t believe me? Then run, don’t walk, to the Mark Taper Forum and see the blissfully funny and yet profoundly melancholy revival of Waiting For Godot. You will finally see what so many productions fail to get: that Estragon and Vladimir…

SOMEHOW, IT KEEPS ON WORKING For those who have never seen the 1978 musical Working, the Production Company’s current revival may be somewhat of a revelation. The subtitle of Studs Terkel’s brilliant oral history of the same name – adapted for the stage by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso – is People Talk About What…

IMPRISONED BY ART Most literary intellectuals have as much business writing about life behind bars as incarcerated felons have teaching text analysis.   In the last few months, Los Angeles has hosted two plays written by playwrights who have spent time, and set stories, in prisons.   Miguel Pinero did his time as a thief and drug…