Monday, May 8, 2017
PURE CONFIDENCE BY A NOSE Featuring a bright, pretty Tom Buderwitz set, Lower Depth Theatre Ensemble’s Pure Confidence is a chance to see something increasingly rare under Equity rules…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:52AMSunday, May 7, 2017
PRINCE ON FIRE Chronicling the lurid and lamentable swashbuckles of a permanent ingenue, Pericles is a Book of Job for the Age of Reason. If the play were self-aware enough to be cynical, wi…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:35AMMonday, April 17, 2017
THE LOVE CONTINUES [Editor’s Note: To celebrate the work being done on intimate stages in Los Angeles, the Center Theatre Group (CTG) is producing Block Party at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:58AMSaturday, April 15, 2017
BRIDGE TO SOMEWHERE I once picked up a hitchhiker a half-mile from a state prison. It was dusk. He wore prison blues and carried a child’s backpack full of knives, cigarette lighters a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:35AMMonday, March 27, 2017
TITS AND SASS My only problem with 20 year old acrobats and showgirls is that they’re not going to date me while I’m in Las Vegas to catch a show. The casinos that hire them aren…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:15AMSaturday, March 25, 2017
GOOD FORM AND OTHERS Most playwrights look like they’d rather kiss an ass than kick it. I like John Pollono because he looks like he came expressly to throw a beating, and so it is fac…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:45PMThursday, March 23, 2017
BOYS AND GIRLS TOGETHER Having complained more than once that postmodern deconstruction often a) picks on literature that can’t fight back and b) discourages dialogue by speaking in a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:02PMMonday, March 20, 2017
DEFENSIVE ACTION Richard Brinsley Sheridan learned the consequence of gesture earlier than most of us. At 21, he fought two duels with the same man over the same woman; having once spared hi…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:03AMSaturday, February 11, 2017
ALTERNATIVE FACTS Eugene O’Neill is one of those gigantically influential artists whom it is often difficult for later generations to enjoy. The innovations he cribbed from Ibsen and C…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:20AMThursday, December 15, 2016
THOROUGHLY THESPIAN Youth theater is mostly musicals, and many musicals are essentially infantilizing entertainments, most appropriate to teaching children how to perform. The kids themselve…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:54PMSunday, December 4, 2016
IMPRO FOR THE HOLIDAYS -dad- Family sucks. Spending time with the people you moved away from is so un-American, so anti-Manifest Destiny, such an embarrassing parochial guilt-trip, that it&#…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:47PMSunday, November 20, 2016
METHANE DEPOSIT A new play opened at the Geffen this week. It is called Icebergs, and it was written by Alena Smith. It was directed by Playhouse artistic director Randall Arney. It is a sho…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:02PMWednesday, November 16, 2016
LOVE STORY Watching 1984 live, in a roomful of high school students, my biggest surprise was how long two minutes lasts. I’m a hateful person now, and as a teenager even more so, but d…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:54PMWednesday, November 9, 2016
AGITPOOP When Urinetown opened up Off-Broadway in 2001, then splashed all over Broadway just after 9/11, the show was hailed as a Brechtian revamp of musical theater. About an overpopulated…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:34PMMonday, November 7, 2016
FAIRY TALE THEATER Debbie Devine and Jay McAdams are a theater couple. They’ve been putting up shows for a long time. If you and your love dream of having your own space and staging yo…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:05PMMonday, October 31, 2016
TWO HOURS HATE While getting fitted for a hundred-thousand dollar suit, a gross presidential-candidate billionaire argues politics with his immigrant tailor. Several monologues inform the bi…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:40PMSaturday, October 22, 2016
INCONVENIENT TRUTH A show as good as Blueberry Toast should be a city-wide phenomenon but it’s going up in Atwater Village, so not a lot of people from the West Side are going to see i…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:38PMSunday, October 9, 2016
EAU DE MANCHESTER Kim Rubinstein’s new Odyssey production treats Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 A Taste of Honey not as a Chippendale museum piece but, smartly, as a serviceable old Sear…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:00PMFriday, September 23, 2016
FELLED Brimmer St. Theatre Co. only puts up a play when it thinks it’s got one worth doing, and always one that it has developed in-house. Some years it doesn’t produce anything …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:49AMMonday, September 12, 2016
SUICIDE ISN’T PAINLESS My dad had a great record collection. At 16, I would drive over after school to smoke cigarettes and listen to Stan Getz. One afternoon I found Pop putting his a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:04PMMonday, June 20, 2016
“IT SHALL GO HARD BUT I WILL BETTER THE INSTRUCTION” Deep into the world premiere of Aaron Posner’s variation on The Merchant of Venice last Saturday, Shylock pointed at me from th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:56AMMonday, May 16, 2016
THE FOGGIEST In a 2007 issue of Washington Post Magazine, Gene Weingarten recounts Joshua Bell’s 45 minutes busking in a D.C. Metro station. One of the world’s most famous violin…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:24AMSaturday, March 26, 2016
FENCES THIS AIN’T We are taught that tolerance is a virtue, that common ground is not only findable but a state of mind. We are taught that our obligation is to our neighbor as much as…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:32PMMonday, March 14, 2016
YOU WANT THE SLEUTH..? The kind of intimate theater I saw Sunday is targeted for elimination by Actors’ Equity Association: Low-tech projects, produced of donated resources without ho…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:33PMSunday, March 13, 2016
QUITE A VIEUX Tennessee Williams deserves the credit he gets for a few outstanding texts, but for my money much of his oeuvre has been falsely enriched, and the late, long Vieux Carré (1977…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:10PMTuesday, February 23, 2016
TOWARD A SAFE THEATER In 2015 Bathsheba Doran’s The Mystery of Love & Sex opened to mixed notices Off Broadway, which seems to be the exact pipeline for shows to get produced at L…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:42PMCHICKEN SOUP FOR THE STAGE Every time I see Leon Russom I wish I had his body. Lean like a dancer, he uses the solidity of his shoulders, the slimness of his hips to create character and emp…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:36AMMonday, November 23, 2015
SHOWS THAT TELL, SHOWS THAT SHOW A list of the most popular investigative themes for artistic works in 2015 would certainly include (1) art itself, particularly within the same medium, and (…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:41AMMonday, November 2, 2015
I DID, TEN MINUTES IN Ike Holter’s play Hit the Wall, a historical “remix” about June 27 and 28, 1969 in New York City, went up first at the Steppenwolf in Chicago in 2012. The next ye…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:44PMSunday, November 1, 2015
A HOMECOMING In last season’s Failure: A Love Story, Joseph V. Calarco played a veterinarian who at one point had to euthanize his good friend, a dog played by Gregory Nabours. The staged …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:57AMThursday, October 15, 2015
CRITIC COVETS HEART It is unfair but true that in watching 24th Street Theatre’s American premiere production of Finegan Kruckmeyer’s Man Covets Bird, one automatically compares …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:53AM 
