Thursday, November 1, 2018
obituary/appreciation of playwright Maria Irene Fornes
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 12:32AMFriday, October 26, 2018
Political pundits have long been giving drama critics a bad name. Inevitably, in the run-up to an election, some op-ed columnist will make a crack comparing recent political coverage to thea…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 10:59AMTuesday, April 17, 2018
“Little Black Shadows,” a new play by Kemp Powers at South Coast Repertory, is set in the 1850s, when slavery in the South is an obdurate fact yet glimmers of a distant dawn are starting…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 02:37PMMonday, April 16, 2018
Rarely has an exclamation point in a title been earned as thoroughly as the one in the new Broadway revival of “Hello, Dolly!” starring Bette Midler. The show, which opened at the Sam S.…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 09:12AMPath-breaking artists help us to see the world afresh by challenging our habitual patterns of perception. They shock us into new awareness by joining the disparate and sundering the similar.…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 09:00AMFriday, April 13, 2018
Joshua Harmon's funny play, in a glorious new production at the Geffen Playhouse, follows a gay man in his late 20s whose female BFFs get married, one by one, leaving him ever more anxious a…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 03:20PMMonday, April 9, 2018
However you judge Bedlam, this young and adventurous New York company deserves extra points for a program with an unusual degree of difficulty. Imagine four actors taking on all the roles no…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 04:55PMFriday, April 6, 2018
We live in an age where the internet has become an open archive. YouTube warehouses our collective nostalgia. (Oh, the hours I’ve lost watching old music videos and classic tennis matches!…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 08:25PMMonday, April 2, 2018
Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” belongs to a convention of comedy that isn’t coming back anytime soon. The figure of the scolding, abusive wife, a reliable source of hilarity…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 05:30PMMonday, March 26, 2018
The superb new Broadway production of “Angels in America” from London brought back my first encounter with the work at the Walter Kerr Theatre in 1993. I had traveled from New Haven to s…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 07:45PMThursday, March 22, 2018
No one attending “Frozen,” the new Broadway musical that had its official opening on Thursday at the St. James Theatre, is meant to ponder the rise of extreme weather events. Leave it to…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 08:00PMTheater critic Charles McNulty notes promising productions in the coming season, including Joshua Harmon's "Significant Other," Stephen Karam's "The Humans," Amy Herzog's "Belleville" and Le…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 11:00AMWednesday, March 14, 2018
The professors and university mandarins having lunch at an elegant UCLA campus restaurant the other day had no idea that seated inconspicuously among them was a cultural revolutionary. Weari…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 09:00AMThursday, March 1, 2018
Like many Americans, I find it increasingly easy to talk myself out of going to the movies. There’s plenty to watch at home and so little to lure me back onto the roads and into those unfa…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 01:00PMTuesday, February 27, 2018
Boston Court in Pasadena presents a new production of Tennessee Williams' classic, set in contemporary times and propelled by Michael Michetti's pitch-perfect direction.
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 07:05PMMichael Michetti’s revitalizing production of Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center shakes out the cobwebs of an American classic …
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 07:05PMMonday, February 26, 2018
When we last checked in on Elliot at the end of “Water by the Spoonful,” the middle work in Quiara Alegría Hudes’ three-play Elliot cycle, he was in Puerto Rico with his cousin Yaz sc…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 11:00AMTuesday, February 20, 2018
Sometimes you don’t know how much you need Anton Chekhov until you re-encounter him. “Uncle Vanya,” one of the Russian writer’s four dramatic masterpieces, is on view here at the Old…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 08:50PMMonday, February 19, 2018
“The New Colossus,” a performance work created by the Actors’ Gang in collaboration with company artistic director Tim Robbins, is inspired by the stories of ensemble members’ ancest…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 04:50PMFriday, February 9, 2018
Darja, an immigrant from Poland who calls the industrial wastelands of New Jersey home, can regularly be found waiting for a bus near the factory where, until it was shut down, she was emplo…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 02:25PMMonday, February 5, 2018
Quiara Alegria Hudes' Pulitzer-nominated play centers on an Iraq-bound Marine whose story is interwoven with his father's Vietnam past and his grandfather's Korean War history. The result is…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 09:20PMSunday, February 4, 2018
To bah or not to bah — that is not the question of “Doggie Hamlet,” a site-specific performance work by choreographer and director Ann Carlson that involves a flock of sheep, three her…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 07:20PMMonday, January 29, 2018
At the electric reading of William Goldman’s screenplay for “All the President’s Men” at Los Angeles City Hall on Saturday night, Watergate once again had the freshness of current ev…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 03:40PMFriday, January 26, 2018
The irreverent Chicago theater company the Hypocrites brings its adaptation of the Gilbert and Sullivan musical to Pasadena.
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 05:20PMMonday, January 22, 2018
Welcome to the Shakespeare Emporium, your one-stop shopping choice for all your Shakespeare accessories. Tote bags and sweatshirts will advertise your love of the Bard. A Stratford-upon-Avon…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 05:10PMTuesday, January 16, 2018
One of the last performances I saw in 2017 was one of the sliest: Billy Crudup in David Cale’s “Harry Clarke” at New York’s Vineyard Theatre. I caught this off-Broadway solo work at …
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 04:00PMSunday, January 14, 2018
Playwright Bess Wohl, who trained as an actor at the Yale School of Drama, has written a play that asks actors to do more than speak the speech trippingly on the tongue, as Hamlet advised th…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 04:00PMFriday, January 12, 2018
A few years ago, Poor Dog Group, founded in 2008 by a group of young theater artists who met while studying at the California Institute of the Arts, brought in a licensed therapist to hold g…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 03:40PMFriday, December 15, 2017
The power of individual performers redeemed 2017, a theatrical year overrun with flotsam and jetsam but one that at least gave us Bette Midler and Bruce Springsteen in unforgettable form on …
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 09:00AMWednesday, December 6, 2017
Where do new musicals come from? For a while, the answer regularly seemed to be pop-music catalogs and movies guaranteed to put baby boomers in a nostalgic mood. Broadway became the great cu…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 06:20PMFriday, December 1, 2017
At the start of Duncan Macmillan’s “People, Places & Things,” which concludes its triumphant run at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn on Sunday, Emma, an actress with a serious substan…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 04:55PM 
