Saturday, 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 08:08PMMonday, March 25, 2013
NOT YOUR RANK-AND-FILE PRODUCTION No getting around it: Robert Massey’s Rank is talky and familiar. Without a top-flight cast and director, this show could easily be lost in the vast…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:59AMWednesday, March 20, 2013
THE WILDE ACCORDING TO BURBANK By Los Angeles standards, Theatre Banshee’s The Importance of Being Earnest is pretty good. It’s a time-tested script; the actors know their line…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:21PMSunday, March 10, 2013
HOWLER Steve Yockey’s new play isn’t new, and it isn’t a play. The first contention first: Part of a new promotional concept of “rolling world premieres” designed speci…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:36PMSaturday, March 9, 2013
SMILE, AND SMILE, AND BE A VILLAIN Since civilization stopped executing them outright, the notorious have always had the fallback of a second act as freakshow attractions. From 1883 well i…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:00AMSaturday, March 2, 2013
GO GET LOST IN AUSTEN I drove to Jane Austen UnScripted directly from a production of Oklahoma! as grand and empty as the wind sweepin’ down the plains. With a quarter of the cast of th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:01PMFriday, February 22, 2013
WAY TOO EARLY PLAYS Imagine you’d never heard of the Wooster Group, and that you knew nothing of the avant-garde theater’s storied history, or its origins in the downtown scene o…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:33PMWednesday, February 6, 2013
AN IMPROVISED TRUTH Los Angeles-based Impro Theatre opens a run of Jane Austen: UnScripted on Valentine’s Day at the Pasadena Playhouse’s Carrie Hamilton Theatre. Their most rece…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:48PMWednesday, January 30, 2013
IN THE SHADOW OF STARS David Wiener’s ten-year-old, never-before-produced play Cassiopeia needs work. As usual at Boston Court, this experimental piece has received a production so g…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:21AMThursday, January 24, 2013
AVOIDABLE MADNESS There’s a show running right now at a smaller venue of a state-of-the-art West Side arts complex. It’s a foreign import, a one-woman show that, in a different…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:28PMTuesday, January 8, 2013
CRACK YOUR CHEEKS By placing himself in the charge of his fickle children, old King Lear abandons the security of his own reason to wander an inhospitable wilderness. It’s a fitting …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:00AMThursday, December 13, 2012
VOLUBLE Once in my earnest youth I dogged a homeless man around lower Manhattan for a whole night, from his steady gig panhandling the car line into the Holland Tunnel through four hoursR…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:29PMWednesday, November 21, 2012
PLEASE SIR, WE WANT SOME MORE SeaGlass Theatre only does one show a year, which is remarkable, since they’re such a spirited bunch. For instance, it’s a shame to miss Paul Stro…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:44PMTuesday, October 16, 2012
A PRO-CHOICE ARGUMENT Michael Michetti’s staging of Kathryn Walat’s Creation will, I hope, long hold the record in my experience for Most Literal Production. This decidedly non…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:59PMSaturday, October 13, 2012
LIKE THE LAST, AND THE ONE BEFORE THAT About twenty minutes into John Hurt’s solo performance Wednesday, the character Krapp’s voice on tape said, “Extraordinary silence tonigh…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:50AMMonday, October 8, 2012
AN OCTOBER UNSURPRISE Scott Zigler learned to direct theater from David Mamet, which is like having David Ortiz teach you how to pitch for the major leagues. A designated hitter thinks eve…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:30PMOFF AND ON Once again, I talk to a troupe of foreign artists, and once again, apart from the art, there’s an utter lack of coherent understanding between their world and mine. ItR…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:20AMFriday, October 5, 2012
HAUNTED BY EXPOSITION Last October, Hollywood stuntman Jon Braver put up Delusion, a much-celebrated high-end haunted house. One of Mr. Braver’s purposes with this project, which he …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:58AMMonday, October 1, 2012
KIDS KILL THE DARNEDEST THINGS Much has been made recently of the physical and psychological dangers of bullying and hazing. Less is said of their value as a teaching element that makes ne…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:57PMFriday, September 21, 2012
UNDER MY SHOE If the comedy in Under My Skin were any more broad, it would require a wider stage than the one at the Pasadena Playhouse. If the play were any less funny, it would have to w…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:31PMThursday, September 20, 2012
THIS RABBIT IS EARLY FOR ITS DATE Keliher Walsh’s new play, Year of the Rabbit, treats with respect and compassion the lives of three families wracked by war. The gravity of the text…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:45PMWednesday, September 19, 2012
CHEKHOV’S GUN, SERLING’S CIGARETTE The most authentic and thoughtful staging of Anton Chekhov I’ve experienced in America didn’t use any Chekhov script you’ve r…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:42AMSaturday, September 8, 2012
LIFE AS WE KNOW IT Mask work reduces the craft of acting to the essential elements of pose and gesture. That’s all you get when there are no words or facial expressions. Watching a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:53PMThursday, September 6, 2012
WITH A LITTLE LOVE, THIS COULD BE GREAT The perfect show is like the happy marriage: you can go decades without seeing one. If the script is good, the lead actor is usually somebody’…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:27PMSunday, August 26, 2012
A MOUTHFUL OF SAND Kiff Scholl’s production of Raymond King Shurtz’s new play, Under the Desert, is a show that’s impossible to discuss without equivocation. It’s n…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:54AMTuesday, August 21, 2012
SOUR SATURDAY A troubled production is a sad spectacle, especially at a venerable theater that does some fine work. PRT’s new staging of the John Steinbeck novel Sweet Thursday tries…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:40PMThursday, August 2, 2012
A GOGOL BORDELLO In adapting Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 comedy The Government Inspector (also known, in direct translation, as The Inspector General) for a modern idiom, Oded Gross has taken…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:19PMTuesday, July 31, 2012
SMART FOOLERY A young-audience offshoot of the Troubadour Theater Company, the Funky Punks seem dedicated to kiboshing the notion that a clown’s function is to scare children. At the…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:00PMThursday, July 19, 2012
“TONGUES IN TREES, BOOKS IN THE RUNNING BROOKS” In order to make me laugh, a Shakespeare comedy must be well-cast. This man’s musings on the darker territories of the heart have …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:52PMWednesday, July 11, 2012
TWO CRITICS; TWO STAGED READINGS; BASICALLY ONE OPINION From Jason Rohrer: Plays in the Park, Brian Conners’ collection of one-acts (only one of which is set in a park), intends to sho…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:20AMMonday, July 2, 2012
THIS ALMOST GREAT NIGHT Andrew Dolan, a working actor perhaps better known as a writer, had his second completed play produced first, in a Los Angeles world premiere: last season’s kno…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:55PM 
