Monday, January 13, 2014
Zoe Kazan's play, starring Aya Cash and Michael Weston at South Coast Repertory, wrestles honestly with the fiction of happy endings, but the dramatic stakes are small. "Trudy and Max in Lov…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:05PMFriday, December 27, 2013
Annette Bening performs Ruth Draper monologues, Ayad Akhtar premieres his next play and Taraji P. Henson stars in 'Above the Fold'The Times asked its reporters and critics to highlight figur…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 12:30PMFriday, December 20, 2013
Notes on the Year: The performance year was a marriage of well-played canonical classics and intriguing work by provocative playwrights, even if from afar.Much that was old was new again in …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:30AMIn the Southland and elsewhere, these onstage performances stood out.In this time when news is disseminated ever more quickly, we asked our critics to list the best of culture in 2013 in twe…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:30AMWednesday, December 18, 2013
Critic's Notebook: Missing in a panel hosted by the Pasadena Playhouse is how to broaden the theater world's artistic diversity.In 21st century America, there is one subject even more diffic…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:00AMSaturday, December 14, 2013
Critic's Notebook: 'Twelfth Night' and 'Richard III' with English actor Mark Rylance at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre face off against 'Macbeth' with Ethan Hawke at Lincoln Center.NEW YORK &md…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 02:00PMTuesday, December 10, 2013
Brian Dennehy's performance at the Mark Taper Forum is forceful and heartfelt, but the Sebastian Barry play that nods to Irish history lacks momentum. Whatever form Irish novelist and playwr…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00AMSaturday, December 7, 2013
Handcrafted magic in the cheeky prequel to Peter Pan employs simplicity and audience imagination to cast its spell.These days it seems as though every time I turn around there's another inst…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:00AMFriday, December 6, 2013
LOS ANGELES — Ever since Stephen Sondheim reached the four-score mark three years ago, the spotlight has shifted from his work to the legend himself. There have been birthday galas, mu…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:39PMDespite a cumbersome setup, the romantic comedy 'Parfumerie' playing in fancy Beverly Hills digs makes a festive holiday treat for adults.Scrooge still holds a monopoly on holiday theater, b…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:30AMSunday, December 1, 2013
One-woman show 'I'll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers' turns out to be just the right fit for the Divine Miss M.NEW YORK — Tea time at Sardi's, and in rushed Bette Midler too busy…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 01:00PMFriday, November 22, 2013
Playwright Young Jean Lee shares the bleak facts of life in her delightful hipster cabaret.Death and denial were made for each other, but for those facing tragedy, the raw truth can be a ton…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:00AMTuesday, November 19, 2013
The musical 'Side Show' flopped on Broadway in 1997 but won an enduring audience. Bill Condon enters the scene to relaunch the musical. Not all problems are solved, but there's power aplenty…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:30AMThursday, November 14, 2013
Anne Barton, one of the 20th century’s foremost Shakespeare scholars, died Monday in Cambridge, England. She was 80 years old. The announcement was made by Cambridge University, wher…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 03:10PMTuesday, November 12, 2013
The blunt '12 Angry Men' at Pasadena Playhouse confronts racial relations by remaking Reginald Rose's jury into six black and six white men.Direct from the age of black-and-white television,…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:30AMSaturday, November 9, 2013
Critic's Notebook: The hot-ticket Broadway revival of 'The Glass Menagerie,' Tennessee Williams' breakthrough play, underscores the poetry-tinged beauty of his writing. More productions like…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 01:00PMWednesday, November 6, 2013
The Latino Theater Company drama at the Los Angeles Theater Center is tantalizing but feels like a work in progress.Marcus Gardley taps into some fascinating, and for many little known, hist…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00AMTuesday, November 5, 2013
'The Black Suits,' a new musical co-created by Joe Iconis, offers a no-stakes, Partridge Family/After School Special sort of tale about a fledgling band. Still, Iconis is a talent in the mak…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00AMTuesday, October 29, 2013
Set in one room, the South Coast Rep production goes further than many works in presenting meaningful character interaction.Amy Herzog's "4000 Miles" is a small drama that's confined to one …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:00AMMonday, October 28, 2013
Audra McDonald, in an L.A. Opera-presented concert at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, digs deep into musical theater songs old and new, combining purity of emotion with purity of sound.Audra …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:30AMSunday, October 27, 2013
Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz and Rafe Spall wrangle for the emotional upper hand in Harold Pinter's 'Betrayal,' directed by Mike Nichols. The guys get the focus; Weisz's character is odd man o…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:20PMTuesday, October 22, 2013
Muddled beginning, smudgy staging and distracting songs in this musical ultimately add up to a tender honesty.NEW YORK — "Fun Home," the musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel's extraord…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:00PMThursday, October 17, 2013
Alison Pill radiates Old Hollywood and theatrical style in an adaptation of 'Wait Until Dark' that only partly dusted off an outdated work.The suspense is laboriously built up in the Geffen …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:40PMMonday, October 14, 2013
A family of con artists are as ruthless with one another as they are with their marks in Carla Ching's clever but labored drama at South Coast Repertory.In the program for "Fast Company," a …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:50PMWednesday, October 9, 2013
The characters are more involving than the plot in Samuel D. Hunter's play at the Old Globe about unresolved relationships.SAN DIEGO — Characters in drama don't have to be likable, as …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:05PMStanley Kauffmann, who died Wednesday at 97, will be remembered for his intellectually rigorous, neatly manicured film reviews -- the meditative yin to Pauline Kael’s ecstatic yang.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 03:15PMTuesday, October 8, 2013
The fusion of Jeff Buckley songs with 'Romeo and Juliet' is sometimes hypnotic at the Old Globe, but more often it jangles.Shakespeare and contemporary popular music might seem strange bedfe…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:30AMThursday, October 3, 2013
'The Sunshine Boys,' with former 'Taxi' stars Danny DeVito and Judd Hirsch at the Ahmanson Theatre, feels dated and a step slow.The knock against Neil Simon in the early days was that he car…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:20PMTuesday, October 1, 2013
Critic's notebook: The festival has created a significant cultural event and allowed us to appreciate the scope of an unorthodox theater town.Nearly all of the shows in Radar L.A. have packe…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:30PMFriday, September 27, 2013
An erotic 1933 story from Japan is beguilingly rendered in a joint production by Complicite and Japan's Setagaya Public Theatre.Rarely has the dance of shadows, the interplay of light and da…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:55PMWednesday, September 25, 2013
The truths told by, respectively, Luis Alfaro ('St. Jude'), Roger Guenveur Smith ('Rodney King') and Trieu Tran ('Uncle Ho to Uncle Sam') at Kirk Douglas Theatre have a personal quality that…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:00AM 
