Monday, February 17, 2014
A HAPPY FEW, A HAPPY MANY Just about every Shakespeare production runs the risk of getting a packed house of high school students at least one performance in the run. This situation is alw…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:11PMSunday, February 16, 2014
RICH AND BEAUTIFUL I like a play that vacuums the audience in the wake of its rocket so that we tumble after, happy travelers grateful for the bruises. We bounce and roll along, too ecstat…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:01PMFriday, January 31, 2014
If you haven’t seen the Wilshire Boulevard Temple since its retrofitting and refurbishing, do. Originally decorated in 1929 through the generosity of MGM boy wonder Irving Thalberg, th…
SOURCE: Bitter Lemons at 01:44PMFriday, January 17, 2014
A TRIP Your average 4 to 12 year old carries enough infectious optimism and joie de vivre to put even a theater critic in a good mood. But childless people who like children notice things …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:53PMThursday, January 16, 2014
YOU SEE A poet out of time, an ancient soul yet our contemporary, has come to sing to us of quarrel. He comes shabby from the road, dusty and reluctant. It is a killing effort for this g…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:45PMMonday, January 13, 2014
AND HE DOES In the 1980s, Barry McGovern and Gerry Dukes collaborated to cut three novels by Samuel Beckett (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) into a few monologues, divided by lighting cu…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:09AMFirst: it is a bad play. The first minute is bad and it gets worse. Its badness nearly reaches an apex when, during the inevitable hushed climax (which of course happens two feet from my fro…
SOURCE: Bitter Lemons at 02:09AMFriday, January 10, 2014
UNFINISHED BUSINESS Son of Semele’s 4th annual Company Creation Festival presents new works by nascent Los Angeles troupes. The festival’s first offering, Bunk, is what youR…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:08PMSaturday, December 28, 2013
MY FAVORITE NIGHTS Looking back over a year’s playgoing, it’s every bit as easy to be jaded about little broke theaters as it is about big grant-eaters. Little broke theaters a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:17PMMonday, December 16, 2013
WINTER HIGH, WINTER LOW The Troubadour Theater Company opened a self-congratulatory love story Friday night, blowing a kiss to its own repertoire with its tenth annual holiday song-and-dance…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:25PMThursday, December 12, 2013
THE DEW ON THE GORSE In the 1960s, Beckett and Pinter started a vogue of shabby-old-man-reminiscing plays so influential that as late as 1995, Sebastian Barry went ahead and wrote one too. …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:44PMWednesday, December 11, 2013
FROM THE DECK OF THE H.M.S. CYNIC Remember when George Lucas took the awesome, mystical enigma of The Force and shrank it to the antiseptic science of midi-chlorians, essentially just a kind…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:45PMSunday, December 8, 2013
OVER THE DARK HARBOR WATER Walking a cold, mostly deserted Santa Monica Pier on the way to this show, I passed a photographer’s booth blaring the Azealia Banks song about “cunt getti…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:29PMSunday, December 1, 2013
TO BE! (TRAPPED INSIDE YOUR OWN PRODUCTION) The explosion of solo performance pieces in the 1970s and 80s extended the creative lives of fine artists like Lily Tomlin and made stars of socia…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:16PMFriday, November 22, 2013
EXPERIMENT SANS CONTROL GROUP In 2012, Tokyo-based company Faifai decided to bring its 2009 movement-and-language assembly Anton, Neko, Kuri to international audiences. In a move she revea…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:31PMThursday, November 21, 2013
TWEE OF KNOWLEDGE New York downtowner Young Jean Lee’s 2011 rock concert-with-monologues We’re Gonna Die begins very well – at Wednesday’s Los Angeles premiere, a horrify…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:18PMMonday, November 11, 2013
WAITING FOR GODYSSEUS Consider the last four suitors of Odysseus’s grass widow, Queen Penelope of Ithaca. Clad in Speedos, the men have gathered their dwindling numbers for the last …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:35PMTuesday, November 5, 2013
OF KNOTS AND TANGLES Johnna Adams’ 2012 play Gidion’s Knot, now receiving its premiere Los Angeles staging by the Furious Theatre Company, lends itself to spoilers. To know muc…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:58AMSaturday, October 26, 2013
IS THIS A KEGGER I SEE BEFORE ME? The morning after the Thane has killed his king, and one of those epic, omen-riddled Shakespearean storms has ravaged the countryside, Macbeth snaps out my …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:52PMSunday, October 13, 2013
BIG HOGS AND HOT POCKETS We buy products because they consume us. Ultimately our products replace us, because if you are what you eat, it follows that what you eat also is you. And at th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:28AMSaturday, September 28, 2013
HEAVENLY SAINTS PRESERVE US Ten days after opening night, Luis Alfaro still wasn’t off-book for his one-man confessional work-in-progress. This matters because the moment when he lea…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:07AMMonday, September 23, 2013
COUNT THIS SHEEP AND FALL ASLEEP As dull as its premise is exciting, Jaime Robledo’s production of Edward Einhorn’s 2010 play, adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androi…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:56AMThursday, September 19, 2013
YON METHINKS SHE STANDS Over the last year or so, some of my best time in an audience has been spent watching Paige Lindsey White. Twice in collaboration with director Jessica Kubzansky at…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:45AMSunday, September 15, 2013
THE KEY OF IMAGINATION Many an actor, writer, and director settle for professionalism. To get it up there and know your lines, to raise a question or resolve a story, to light the performe…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:37AMSunday, July 7, 2013
IN PLAIN SIGHT Eddie Carbone (Vince Melocchi) is a good man whose frustration at not getting everything he deserves - in this case his adopted niece Catherine (Lisa Cirincione) – cos…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:37PMWednesday, July 3, 2013
SELFISHNESS AND SACRIFICE Alcestis is the old Greek story of a man who allows his wife to sacrifice her life for his. As interpreted by Euripides, T.S. Eliot and others, it has much to say…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:02AMThursday, June 13, 2013
YES, EVERYONE Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister were BBC television shows that ran on American PBS stations when I was a kid; I resented them for not being Monty Python, and dismissed th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:19PMMonday, June 10, 2013
ME NO LIKE Brandon Baruch’s new play answers the question, What if a tedious dipshit got cloned? Failed actor and drunken doofus Tuck (Benjamin Durham) sponges off his girlfriend Gem…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:12PMTuesday, June 4, 2013
ABNORMALLY REAL When you avoid musicals as strenuously as I do, after a while you wonder why. For some time I decided that it was the generally trite treatment of serious issues, a gripe w…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:47PMWednesday, April 17, 2013
HISTORY AS MYTHOLOGY AS ROCK AND ROLL Dan Dietz’s American Misfit is the kind of smart, provocative entertainment that stimulates the best part of an audience: its appreciation. As p…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:50AMSaturday, April 6, 2013
THE BLEEDING HEART OF DARKNESS Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness concerns an English ship captain’s journey to the Belgian Congo, and the revelatory effect of his encounte…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:08PM 
