Thursday, August 25, 2016
The theater world lost two giants this summer, Zelda Fichandler, co-founder of Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage and a heroic pioneer of the regional theater movement, and James Houghton, found…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 02:50PMMonday, August 22, 2016
SAN DIEGO — The Old Globe’s staging of “Love’s Labor’s Lost” proves that it is possible to fall in love with a production at first sight. John Lee Beatty’s scenic design transf…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:11PMWednesday, August 17, 2016
Summer Shakespeare. These words can strike fear in the heart of a reluctant theatergoer. Yes, the plays are supposed to be good for you. But semiprofessional productions in which the artisti…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:33AMWednesday, August 10, 2016
SAN DIEGO — Steve Martin, the beloved comic whose career has branched out in unforeseen directions (bluegrass composer, art collector and curator, playwright) is often described as a moder…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:21PMLA JOLLA — Forget about all the TV pundits and op-ed columnists droning on about America’s problems. Playwright Ayad Akhtar is the diagnostician the nation needs to interpret its falteri…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:21PMSunday, August 7, 2016
No point in mincing words: Tennessee Williams is the greatest playwright America has ever produced. Yet more and more his reputation seems preserved in amber rather than renewed through reve…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 02:50PMWednesday, August 3, 2016
Barbra Streisand didn’t give us a foretaste of her Rose in “Gypsy,” the classic musical about a formidable stage mother and her showbiz-bound daughters that she has been trying like Si…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:58PMSunday, July 31, 2016
“A Chorus Line” is an ideal musical for the Hollywood Bowl, and this weekend’s presentation faithfully staged by Baayork Lee didn’t disappoint. The show’s presentational style wor…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:25PMTuesday, July 19, 2016
SAN DIEGO — Feeling overwhelmed by this summer of tumult, when the news seems to go only from bad to worse? I have just the remedy: an English novelist who wrote delectable comedies of ma…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:13PMMonday, July 18, 2016
“The Last Tiger in Haiti,” a new play by Jeff Augustin that’s receiving its world premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse, begins in a tent shack in Port-au-Prince that is the home for a gr…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:31PMSunday, June 26, 2016
“Beautiful – The Carole King Musical” is that rare Broadway offering – a jukebox musical with a soul. The touring production, which opened Friday at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, r…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:08PMMonday, June 20, 2016
Ayad Akhtar’s “Disgraced” won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2013, but for anyone encountering the work for the first time at the Mark Taper Forum, where the play opened Sunday in a s…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:09PMThursday, June 16, 2016
The setting for “Big Sky,” a new comedy by Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros that opened Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse, is a Ritz-Carlton condo in a deluxe vacation community in Aspen, Co…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:11PMMonday, June 13, 2016
“Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s landmark musical about Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, had its coronation Sunday at the 70th Tony Awards. As expected, the show won for best musica…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:38AMFriday, June 10, 2016
The suspense over the Tony Awards is usually about which show will win for best musical, the prize with the most lucrative consequences. But this year we all know that “Hamilton,” nomina…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:37PMThe most memorable acting of the year was a group affair.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:46AMThursday, June 9, 2016
On Sunday, the Tony Awards will recognize artists who did exceptional work in the 2015-16 Broadway season. As always, there’s a rich bounty of nominated talent to choose from, but the m…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:04AMWednesday, June 8, 2016
A precious First Folio of Shakespeare plays, one of several on tour from the Folger Shakespeare Library, has arrived at the San Diego Central Library, where it will remain for the next month…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:32AMThursday, May 26, 2016
Harold Bloom subtitled his magnum opus on Shakespeare "The Invention of the Human" in recognition of the Bard's unprecedented ability to imagine the lives of others. The question I've bee…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:52PMWednesday, May 18, 2016
Eugene O’Neill’s “The Hairy Ape,” written in 1921, still has the tang of an experiment by a relatively young writer testing the frontiers of what the drama can do. Mixing brutal expr…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 02:51PMMonday, May 16, 2016
Antonio Salieri, relegated by posterity to the shadows as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s journeyman contemporary, will always have Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” to augment his notoriety, if n…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:43PMTuesday, May 3, 2016
For those who have been tracking the thrilling career of the Belgian-born, Amsterdam-based director Ivo van Hove, the last place you'd expect to find him working is Broadway. But the Flemish…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 11:12PMLast year, the Tony Awards could have adopted the hashtag #TonysSoBritish. This year, the nominees announced Tuesday morning look like the anti-Oscars, so diverse is the roster. There may no…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 11:12PMThe historical significance of "Hamilton"'s trove of Tony nominations
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:15PMAlan Mandell, the evergreen 88-year-old actor, confessed that he might be ready to bid farewell to the stage when I interviewed him last year on the occasion of his performance in the Mark T…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 02:13PMThursday, April 28, 2016
A Broadway history lesson is being delivered these days at the Music Box Theatre, and never has anything this educational been so sensationally staged. All credit to Professor George C. Wol…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:54PMWednesday, April 27, 2016
— Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night," considered by some to be the greatest American drama, is a marathon of family squabbling. Grueling in the wrong hands, the play's relent…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:38PMMonday, April 25, 2016
OK, theater buffs, get ready to be stumped. From what musical did "I'm Just Wild About Harry" spring? If you answered "Shuffle Along," you either have an encyclopedic memory (and way too man…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:37AMSunday, April 24, 2016
What is that indefinable quality that makes an actor a star? Jessie Mueller, who won a Tony in 2014 for her performance in "Beautiful: The Carole King Musical," helped me once again answer t…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:51PMFriday, April 22, 2016
In "Sweeney Todd," Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler proved that laughter in a musical could make the adrenaline pump harder. Funny, it turned out, didn't have to be the nemesis of fear. A t…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:45AMTuesday, April 19, 2016
Homer's "The Odyssey" looms large in Suzan-Lori Parks' "Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3)," her entrancingly intimate, anachronistically frolicsome Civil War drama that opened…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:30PM 
