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Los Angeles Theater Review: HOBOKEN TO HOLLYWOOD (Edgemar Center for the Arts)
THE CURE FOR THE BLUES HAS ARRIVED I have not been lucky enough to see legendary singers – such as Keely Smith, Dean Martin, or Ella Fitzgerald – perform standards live. Time and again, I am told by people who saw them what magic occurs when an original personality with a distinctive voice interprets songs…
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THE AUTUMN GARDEN by Lillian Hellman – The Antaeus Company at the Deaf West Theatre – Los Angeles (North Hollywood) Theater Review
WHAT A DIFFERENCE A CAST MAKES Let me tell you a story. A tale of two casts. Once upon a time there was a playwright whose name was Lillian Hellman. You may have heard of her. She had a taste for melodrama, it’s true, but, at her best, she wrote some of the most effective…
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GAZILLION BUBBLE SHOW: THE NEXT GENERATION – New World Stages – Off Broadway Theater Review
I’VE SEEN BUBBLY PERSONALITIES BEFORE, BUT THIS IS ’¦ FUN AS HELL! They float, they glisten, they inspire wonder, and their explosion on your nose leaves a fresh sheen of sweetness behind.  Yep, they’re bubbles, and in Deni Yang’s Gazillion Bubble Show: The Next Generation, he wields them to create the best anger management course…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: THE LANGUAGE ARCHIVE (Roundabout Theatre Company)
THE SALVAGING OF TONGUES In her marvelously inventive play, The Language Archive, Julia Cho weaves together the story of two unhappy couples as a gateway to a whimsical exploration of the mysterious, anguished, tender, exquisite language of love. Â Buoyantly absurdist, with a frothy meandering plotline, the play is ultimately a heartbreakingly eloquent discourse on love…
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DUE DATE directed by Todd Phillips – with Robert Downey Jr., Zach Galifianakis – Movie Review
FOR LOVERS OF ROAD TRIP MOVIES Lately in movies there has been an epidemic of obvious music choices. For example, the Beatles’ “Baby You’re a Rich Man†ends The Social Network. In Due Date, a Motown song about getting back to my baby opens the film as expectant father Robert Downey Jr. prepares for a…
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INSIDE JOB directed by Charles Ferguson – narrated by Matt Damon – Film Review
IT’S 2010. DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR MONEY WENT? As I write this review, the Federal Reserve is embarking on a near trillion-dollar program that it hopes will stimulate the economy. Quantitative Easing amounts to Helicopter Ben Bernanke printing money in order to horse-whip capital off the sidelines and into circulation. You might think this…
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GOOD EGG by Dorothy Fortenberry – Laba Theatre at the 14th Street Y – Off Broadway Theater Review
TO GIVE BIRTH OR NOT TO GIVE BIRTH? When it comes to family trees, there are those that we’d sooner shake out of there than pluck. Â These days, you can make that statement with science! Presented by Red Fern Theatre Company, an organization that partners with a philanthropy with each new production, Dorothy Fortenberry’s Good…
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PHANTOM LUCK by John Steppling – Gunfighter Nation – The Lost Studio – Los Angeles Theater Review
THE GHOSTS OF GAMBLERS PAST AND PRESENT AND NO FUTURE Someone once said that the only poet Los Angeles ever produced was Raymond Chandler. It must have been said before John Steppling came along. Steppling is the one playwright who has located the rot at the core of our city and its environs and who…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: ANNIE (Musical Theatre West in Long Beach)
SHE’S BA-A-A-ACK Annie, the sugar-coated phenomenon that seems to have the life of an Everlasting Gobstopper, is back on the boards, courtesy of Musical Theatre West in Long Beach. The show, about comic strip legend Little Orphan Annie, keeps being remounted for a reason: this feel-good Depression-era musical has remarkably melodious tunes (music by Charles…
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127 HOURS – with James Franco, directed by Danny Boyle – Movie Review
MAN VS. ENVIRONMENT In movies, nothing good ever happens on a mountain. Unless you’re Julie Andrews, and good things happen to you everywhere. There’s Kevin MacDonald’s documentary Touching the Void, about a mountain-climbing expedition shot to hell. And what was that mountain disaster movie that at first advertised its cannibalism but later changed to a…
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Broadway Review: BLOODY BLOODY ANDREW JACKSON (Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre)
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE PRESIDENT Do you want fearless? Â Decadent? Devil-may-care? Â Then look no further than the musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a thrilling collaboration between book writer Alex Timbers and composer and lyricist Michael Friedman. Â In it, Andrew Jackson’s rise to, and maintenance of, the presidency is as sexy and as raw as…
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Theater Review: THE TRAIN DRIVER (Fountain Theater in L.A.)
LIFE GOES ON, DOESN’T IT? The cemetery is the home of the nameless and it is strewn with pebbles and bits of garbage that serve as headstones. The keeper of the cemetery lives next to it in a shed that is equipped with not even the barest essentials. In this world of death, one does…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: VENICE (Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City)
OTHELLO! THE MUSICAL A thousand years ago, when Los Angeles theater was still taking baby steps (1968, to be precise), an Englishman, Jack Good, had the idea of a musical version of Othello – it wasn’t the first time, of course, Verdi’s opera having quite brilliantly executed the same idea quite a few years before…
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Theater Review: FUTURA (Boston Court in Pasadena)
THE FONTS THAT CHANGE THE WORLD It takes a lot of brass to write a futurist play about a not-so-distant time when print is dead and it is necessary to learn to write again. It takes even more brass to start the play with a thirty-five minute lecture on the history of typography and the…
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Theater Review: ANNA IN THE TROPICS (Sierra Madre Playhouse in Los Angeles)
TOLSTOY NEVER MADE ME SO HOT In his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Anna in the Tropics, Nilo Cruz created the role of striking, velvet-voiced, Cuban lothario Juan Julian, a lector who is hired to read books to the workers in a 1929 Tampa cigar factory — it alleviates tedium, inadvertently educates them, and, in this case,…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: HAMLET, PRINCE OF PUDDLES (L’Enfant Terrible at Bootleg Theater)
A PRINCELY PRODUCTION Once in a great while, a play will have me floating off the ground as if I had just been licked by God; a play that makes me feel better for having been alive; it encompasses great writing, acting, direction, and a triumphant technical team. Examples this past year are Cousin Bette…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: PIPPIN (DOMA Theater Company at the Hudson Backstage)
BEST BE SKIPPIN’ PIPPIN I need to stop reading press releases and just go to review a show. A recent  production of Oklahoma! announced a darker, grittier version which intrigued me enough to see it for the umpteenth time. The corn-fed musical turned out to be as dark as Deanna Durbin. Now comes the 1972 musical…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: CRITICAL MASS (The Lion Theatre at Theatre Row)
A CRITIC’S CRITIQUE OF CRITICISM A critic’s words can sting like a wasp or soothe like a balm. When it stings, a bad review can turn the tables on the critic and make him or her the target of hate mail, death wishes, and even physical harm. Â Critic Joanne Sydney Lessner’s farcical Critical Mass takes…
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WHEN GARBO TALKS! by Buddy Kaye and Mort Garson– International City Theatre – Los Angeles (Long Beach) Theater Review
DIDN’T GARBO SAY THAT SHE WANTED TO BE LEFT ALONE? Any great auteur will tell you that the opening number of a show should let the audience know what they’re in for: Jerome Robbins asked the Fiddler team, and they came up with “Tradition.†He asked the Forum team, and Sondheim came up with “Comedy…
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A LIFE IN THE THEATRE by David Mamet – with Patrick Stewart and T.R. Knight – Broadway Theater Review
VINTAGE MAMET LACKS ROBUST FLAVOR Last year, T.R. Knight left a lucrative TV role on the high profile Grey’s Anatomy because he wasn’t fulfilled as an actor. Â The world has been waiting to see if he’ll fall flat on his face ever since. Â David Mamet’s unsatisfying A Life in the Theatre may not be the…
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