OH WHAT A TANGLED WEB WE WEAVE While Theatre Unleashed’s cast and crew have a gloriously and unashamedly good time bringing The Spidey Project to the West Coast, it’s a shame that their source material isn’t the parody it promised to be in the press release. There are some very funny moments in this silly,…

GROUNDLINGS ZERO The best part about cleaning up my DVR last weekend was catching up on Raising Hope, the hilarious FOX comedy. It’s funny, surprising, naughty, sometimes dirty, and wholly original. In one episode they give Cloris Leachman a beautifully timed joke about how she could only have an orgasm with her late husband when…

AMERICAN NIGHT SUCKS, BUT IT SWALLOWS Juan José, a Mexican cop sick of being on-the-take, has crossed the border in search of citizenship, leaving his pregnant wife behind. Panicking over flash cards while studying for his U.S. citizenship exam, Juan falls asleep and the rest of this 90 minute, intermissionless, astoundingly uneven cavalcade of skits,…

HATE THE MUSICAL, BUT LOVE, LOVE, LOVE THE PRODUCTION Whether you love or hate the musical version of The Color Purple, no one, and I mean no one, can or will deny that this is one of the finest productions ever staged in a small theater in Los Angeles. Director Michael Matthews has taken a…

TWO MORE ONE-PERSON PLAYS AT THE SKYLIGHT Burke Byrnes’s  The Yellow House (Fridays) and Harry Hart-Browne’s  Special Delivery (Saturdays) both possess the virtues and weaknesses of one-person shows. Both have the bracing intelligence of their creators. Both are very well performed. Both are highly personal and yet avoid the narcissism that personal works are often guilty of….

WHY DO WE HAVE WHY WE HAVE A BODY? Every few years a vanity project comes along so appalling that one’s jaw hangs open for its entire running time, saliva connecting the lower lip to the floor in a single unbroken strand.   The planets have to align very particularly for a travesty of this magnitude…

A GROUNDED SEAGULL In Chekhov’s The Seagull, the young, angst-ridden writer Tréplev maintains that “What we need are new forms! We need new forms, and if we can’t have them, then we’re better off with no theater at all.” Yet when Chekhov wrote this line in 1895, he was referring not to the interpretation of…

A NEGLECTED CLASSIC GONE AWRY The story of Antony and Cleopatra shares with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet those two indispensable elements of tragedy: love and death. While Romeo and Juliet is perhaps Shakespeare’s best known play, Antony and Cleopatra is all but neglected. This is all the more surprising considering contemporary interest in its principal…

THRILLING HOPELESSNESS Go up into Gilead, and take balm, O virgin, the daughter of Egypt: in vain shalt thou use many medicines; for thou shalt not be cured. – Jeremiah 42:11. In 1964, Lanford Wilson wrote a play startling in its representation of a gritty present, and even more surprising now for its continued relevance.  …

ACTS OF CONSCIENCE All theater is inherently political, in that a story is only as objective as its teller.   But some plays go straight to the 24 hour news cycle definition of politics, addressing problems of international diplomacy divisive enough that only a stage may politely host them.   Sarah’s War, Valerie Dillman’s play enjoying its…

RISE ABOVE THEATRE MOVEMENT HANDLES THE TRUTH Just three years after Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men (1989) was produced on Broadway, the play’s popularity was eclipsed by the film version with Tom Cruise. Revivals of the play are rare, but based on the vivid production by Rise Above Theatre Movement (RATMO), the courtroom drama…