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Theater Review: GHOST LIGHT (New Theatre at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival)
GHOST LIGHT LEAVES US IN THE DARK Assassin Dan White ensured Harvey Milk’s legacy when he shot the openly gay San Francisco politician. The gay community continues to hold Milk as a martyr to their cause, and the artistic world has kept Milk’s spirit alive in book (The Mayor of Castro Street), documentary (The Times…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: SEASCAPE (Theatre West)
AMPHIBIANS MORE EVOLVED THAN HUMANS Theatre West’s production of Edward Albee’s Seascape is a study in contrasts. Things either work, and work beautifully, or are muddled and miss the mark, creating an enjoyable but not completely satisfying evening. Nancy and Charlie are on the verge of retirement. Their kids are grown and independent, and it…
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Regional Theater Review: LOVE’S LABOR’S LOST (Elizabethan Stage at Oregon Shakespeare Festival)
LOVE’S LABOR’S LOST, FOUND, LOST, LOST, AND FOUND [England, 1593] I’m not so sure that this William Shakespeare has a future as a playwright. Oh, the man can write, but his newest play, Love’s Labor’s Lost (LLL) is a near disaster of storytelling. Surely, he had a bona fide hit with last year’s The Taming of…
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Theater Review: TO CARRY THE CHILD (Collaborative Artists Ensemble at the Raven Playhouse)
TOUCHING MOMENTS DO NOT SUSTAIN FAMILY DRAMA In Collaborative Artists Ensemble’s production of Jon Courie’s new play, To Carry the Child, the oldest daughter, Ashley (Meg Wallace), her life in shreds, is facing a serious disease and finds her lover, Diane (Justine Woodford) running from the crisis. She returns to her family home in Caraprice…
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Off Broadway Theater Review: CRANE STORY (The Cherry Lane Theatre)
ARCANE CRANE Jen Silverman’s Crane Story borrows storytelling stage conventions from both east and west. A raised empty platform acts as the main acting area surrounded by wooden paneling. There are drums, puppets, small musical instruments, and an ensemble of seven performers who act as characters, puppeteers, musicians, and stage crew. Such eastern stage traditions…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: CABARET (Reprise)
THE HAPPIEST CORPSE I’VE EVER SEEN How many reasons do you need to rush out and get tickets for the Reprise revival of Cabaret? Let me offer a few. First of all, this is 2011, and a better time to see Cabaret could not be imagined. That may be Berlin at the dawn of Nazism…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: TROJAN WOMEN (AFTER EURIPIDES) (Getty Villa)
HIGH CULTURE UNDER A MALIBU SKY Anne Bogart is not one to shy away from her own directorial eccentricities. As the American Theater’s Queen of Deconstruction, she has had a formidable career looking with fresh eyes at old texts, investigating them and re-inventing them and, at her best, encouraging audiences to look at the plays…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: WHAT’S WRONG WITH ANGRY? (Celebration Theatre)
WHAT’S WRONG? IT’S ALL RIGHT In thousands of YouTube videos, out-and-proud adults tell marginalized queer youth that life will get better. Yet the “It Gets Better” campaign advocates for a rather troublesome passivity. Hopes are pinned on an ambiguous future, and the question of exactly how things will get better remains unanswered. In a stunning…
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Movie Review: DRIVE directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
THE OBJECT OF CRITICS’ AFFECTION It boils down to this: Drive is a decent film, but I find the critical adoration being heaped upon it as bordering on reactionary. It’s fun to watch a team play in its throwback uniforms one game each year, and yes, Drive’s combination of sun-tinged neo-noir, eye-contact chemistry, gear grinding…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE ELABORATE ENTRANCE OF CHAD DEITY (Geffen Playhouse)
WHEN YOU USE MACE, USE WITH DISCRETION Playwright Kristoffer Diaz has an ear for unleashing the poetic possibilities in “street-smarts” vernacular; and director Edward Torres has an eye for how to turn a simple idea into an explosively theatrical metaphor; and, together, they have made of Diaz’s hip-hop comedy The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: WHAT THE MOON SAW, OR “I ONLY APPEAR TO BE DEAD–” (Son of Semele)
A NEARLY MAGICAL EVENING News reporters ask one passerby after another, “Where were you when the Moon fell?” Yet the Moon has not fallen. She perches on a white chiffon-covered platform, plunking out a minor-key refrain on her accordion and singing a plaintive tune that begs those below to recognize her. The shining Moon is…
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Regional Theater Review: MILK LIKE SUGAR (La Jolla Playhouse)
UNLIKEABLE CHARACTERS STILL LEAVE A RESONATING MESSAGE In Milk Like Sugar, Kirsten Greenidge’s sharply-written world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse, three African-American, inner-city high school girls, Annie, Margie, and Talisha (aka T), have formed a tight posse in order to survive the harsh realities of tenement life. With absent brothers and uneducated mothers (one of…
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Regional Theater Review: JULIUS CAESAR (New Theatre at Oregon Shakespeare Festival)
GREAT CAESAR’S GHOST As directors continue to re-invent theatre, especially the classics, there is a bent to color-blind and gender-bending casting. The mixed-color cast on hand exemplifies just how powerful this mechanism can be: the story of a small group of people who take government into their own hands via assassination becomes a universal examination…
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Regional Theater Review: WILLFUL (Oregon Shakespeare Festival)
AMBIGUITY WITH PURPOSE If you read the spiritual/psychotherapeutic tome A Course In Miracles, it states that miracles occur as a result of a shift in perception; that meaning lies not in the actual events in our lives, but rather in our interpretation of these events. Willful, the site-specific theatrical event at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, takes…
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Off Broadway Theater Review: THE COMPLETE & CONDENSED STAGE DIRECTIONS OF EUGENE O’NEILL, VOLUME ONE: EARLY PLAYS/LOST PLAYS (The New York Neo-Futurists at the Kraine Theater)
THE WEIGHT OF HIS ELOQUENCE Theatrical gimmicks are often a lot of fun. The 39 Steps delivered them with panache, and Story Theater taught us never to underestimate the range of the audience’s imagination. Currently, The New York Neo-Futurists are serving up a new theatrical gimmick in their production of The Complete & Condensed Stage…
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Regional Theater Review: THE AFRICAN COMPANY PRESENTS RICHARD III (Oregon Shakespeare Festival)
A MISSED OPPORTUNITY We learn very little about the history of the African Company (the world’s first known African-American theater company) and even less about Richard III in The African Company Presents Richard III. The very title sounds thrilling as we expect that an actual company of modern African actors will be guest artists at…
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LA Theater Review: THE COMEDY OF ERRORS (Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble)
A COMEDY OF EXCELLENCE Cue the epic battle underscoring, full orchestra and chorus. A lanky gaoler lopes onstage, indicates a prisoner’s head, clumsily hoists an ax from the prop box, and – after a few awkward missteps – finally manages to split a watermelon rolling about on the ground. Triumph! Shakespeare’s stage directions for this…
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Theater Review: STRANGER THINGS (The Ghost Road Company in Los Angeles)
A PUZZLE TO RELISH SOLVING As both theatergoer and theater writer, this reviewer is decidedly unenthusiastic about absurdist, avant-garde, or post-modern theatre. It’s not so much the concept or ideas behind these movements as it is the execution. Playwrights and theatre companies get so caught up in approaching the presentation of their story – vignettes,…
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Regional Theater Review: STEEL MAGNOLIAS (Rubicon Theatre Company in Ventura)
DROOPING MAGNOLIAS One of six female denizens at a rural beauty salon in Louisiana states that, from the Southern male’s point of view, “You either shoot it, stuff it or marry it.” Well, that’s exactly what can be said about Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias, the much-too-often-produced comedy/tearjerker lately receiving a diverting but uneven outing at…
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Regional Theater Review: MY FAIRYTALE (PCPA Theaterfest in Santa Maria and Solvang, CA)
AN UGLY DUCKLING OF A MUSICAL In Stephen Schwartz’ musical My Fairytale, now receiving its American premiere at PCPA in Solvang, well-known storyteller Hans Christian Anderson has an idea for an opera which will star singing sensation Jenny Lind. His pitch about a Chinese Emperor is quickly ditched by the Royal Theatre Management, but Lind…
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