Tuesday, October 18, 2022
AN EPIC JOURNEY TO HEAVEN AND HELL It is 1899 in Vienna, Christmas Eve to be exact, and two families, elegant and refined, are gathered together in what might be called joyous solemnity to c…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 01:34AMWednesday, June 15, 2022
ONE OF THE MOST INVENTIVE NEW PLAYS OF THE DECADE I’ve been singing the praises of Lucas Hnath‘s Dana H. ever since I first saw it three years ago in Los Angeles. Time has not altered my…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 03:19AMFriday, April 29, 2022
WILL WE COME THROUGH THIS TOGETHER? Dave Malloy, the genius (and I don’t use that word loosely) who wrote the music, lyrics, book and vocal arrangements for his chamber musical Octet, whic…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 07:47PMTuesday, January 18, 2022
CULTURAL ICON FRAN LEBOWITZ RETURNS TO BERKELEY REP Berkeley Repertory Theatre is proud to announce a special presentation of Fran Lebowitz in Conversation. Following her bingeworthy hit Ne…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 08:14PMMonday, January 10, 2022
DEAR SAN FRANCISCO: A HIGH-FLYING LOVE STORYWELCOMES NEW COMPANY MEMBERS New year, new company members! Starting today, Dear San Francisco: A High-Flying Love Story—the intimate and immer…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 03:50PMWednesday, December 8, 2021
CHRISTMAS AT PEM-BAH-LEY Let me start off by saying that I belong to that camp that would like to see a moratorium on all things Jane Austen and an edict to return to her novels would be the…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 01:25PMFriday, November 26, 2021
A SOLITUDE OF ICICLES Where to begin. Wintertime, which brings live theater back to Berkeley Rep, was written by Charles Mee, who has a devoted following among the theatrical cognoscenti, du…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 03:48PMSaturday, November 13, 2021
MY FAILED LADY Let’s make one thing clear. When a national touring company of a Broadway success comes to your city, proclaiming it is a duplicate of the original production, what is meant…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:11PMFriday, November 12, 2021
A LITTLE LITE MUSIC Any theater company that decides to produce the entire body of work created by a single artist, like, say, aiming to produce every play Shakespeare ever wrote, deserves a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:39AMWednesday, October 27, 2021
Indra’s Net Conceived, Directed, and Composed by Meredith Monk Meredith Monk’s newest interdisciplinary, evening-length music theater piece is an experiential performance work affirming …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:04PMWednesday, October 20, 2021
THE RETURN OF THE SHOTGUN PLAYERS It is always a pleasure to come across a playwright with a love for (and a gift for) language and, better, an appreciation for the comic possibilities of wo…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:57PMSaturday, March 7, 2020
A HOME RUN What do you think of when you think of home? Is it the place where you were born? Is it where you are living now? Is it where you followed your growth by measuring yourself agains…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 04:59PMSaturday, February 29, 2020
GLORY GLORY GLORIA I don’t know if Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has ever worked in a Manhattan publishing house but he sure knows his way about the workplace. In Gloria, he paints an extraordina…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:48PMWednesday, February 19, 2020
REBIRTH Which walls are worse? Those that keep people out or those that keep people in? Playwright Rogelio Martinez seemed to have this question in mind when he wrote Born in East Berlin, wh…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:57PMSaturday, February 15, 2020
GREAT F. SCOTT! If you love literature, have fond memories of being read to or of reading to others, and feel, as so many do, that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is in the Pantheon…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:07AMTuesday, November 19, 2019
JUMP FOR JITNEY It is an incontestable fact that every play August Wilson wrote justifies being looked at again and again. It has been fascinating to see how the moral, political and emotion…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:21AMSaturday, July 13, 2019
A PASSIONATE PASSION Stephen Sondheim’s Passion is less a work of art than it is an art piece and the Custom Made Theatre Co., in its lovely and elegant chamber version, treats it as such.…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:59PMFriday, July 12, 2019
GO TELL MAMA: CABARET‘S A HIT Cabaret was and remains one of the boldest and most innovative experiments in the history of musical theater, a ravishing work that has neither lost its power…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:18PMWednesday, July 10, 2019
EVEN WHEN HAIRSPRAY CAN’T HOLD UP… THE EXPERIENCE CAN There are some shows that are beyond criticism or, rather, shows that render criticism totally unnecessary, and the Bay Area Musical…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:18PMSaturday, June 29, 2019
I WANNA SEE THE PRODUCERS Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. The Celebration production of The Producers is as far away from the Borscht Belt as a New York musical comedy — who…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:00PMWednesday, June 12, 2019
GREEK TRAGEDY IN THE ‘HOOD Having read Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus El Rey, one can see that is a true original, that it possesses power, anger, frustration, political and social outrage, that …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:26AMA ROLLER COASTER RIDE TO THE HEART OF DARKNESS I will always love good theater but, even so, every so often there comes along a play that actually restores one’s faith in the possibilities…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:38AMSunday, June 9, 2019
ACTOR DOUGLAS NOLAN: TOTALLY HUMAN AND TOTALLY ABSURD If you’ve ever seen a production of Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano that had you in stitches from practically the very first momen…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:18PMSaturday, June 8, 2019
I ALWAYS LIKE TO BE KISSED WHEN I’M BEING… Inspired lunacy? Or strained silliness? Irreverent? Or just plain vulgar? A broad range of Latin musical genres? Or music that’s just plain d…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:36PMThursday, June 6, 2019
WHAT AN ABSURD WORLD The first scene in the A.C.T. revival of Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist masterpiece Rhinoceros, directed by Frank Galati with razor-sharp clarity and breakneck swiftness a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:02PMTuesday, April 30, 2019
TOOT-TOOT-TOOTSIE, HELLO! I’m here to sing the praises of all those musical comedy freaks who have been jonesing for a contemporary musical that will bring back, in some new form, the gold…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:49AMSO WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE? As Shakespeare said, “Good wine needs no bush.” Thus, there is no need to add to what New Yorkers have already discovered, that no matter how many productions of…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:49AMSaturday, April 27, 2019
SEND IN THE CLOWNS A bloody war is ended. The bodies pile up. Who will clean up the mess? What to do? What to do? Oh, yes. Send in the clowns. On this note, Taylor Mac, the certified genius …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:42PMTEMPUS FUGIT There are great performance artists and, rarer still, there are great artists who perform. John Kelly is both. His Time No Line is a quietly breathtaking meditation on his life …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:19AMTuesday, March 19, 2019
A SMALL STEP There is a stillness in B.D. Wong that is the embodiment of grace. In his exquisitely calibrated portrayal of Wen Chang, a Chinese party loyalist, Wong walks a delicate line bet…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:21PMThursday, March 14, 2019
MAYOR DREAMS COME TRUE SOME OTHER TIME The 42nd Street Moon production of Fiorello is just fine, if you allow for the looseness of staging, the clumsy choreography, and the overall sensation…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:07PM 
