Thursday, 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 10:53AMINHOSPITALITY IN A HOSPITAL A few weeks ago I spent a couple of nights at a hospital waiting for someone to be born. A couple of weeks later I spent a few more nights at the hospital, includ…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:53AMSOMETHING UNSATISFYINGLY APOCRYPHAL There are a few things that might not be entirely true about the Blank’s “World Premiere” of Jeff Tabnick’s Something Truly Monstrous, whi…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:52AMWORLD ENOUGH AND TIME …I would Love you ten years before the flood; And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews – Andrew Marvell It’s a measure of pro…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:52AMMonday, September 28, 2015
LOS PECES VIOLENTOS There is a dark parable in the bible, in Luke or maybe John; it’s in the Scheherazade – the tale of the thousandth night, perhaps. Your translation didn’t h…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:53PMME NEXT TIME I’m running up Pico. It’s 7:54 p.m. and I just parked on Rimpau because I’ve only lived in L.A. for 18 years and Google Maps told me Theatre Theater was .1 mil…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:53PM“DON’T LOOK AT ME” Jillian Leigh’s second play, Hooked, is extremely ambitious and fairly successful in the hands of director Terri Treas, producer Michael Zand, and a strong…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:53PMRAVE ON Almost a month ago, I went to Rogue Machine’s storytelling night for the first time. You know storytelling nights – they’re like poetry slams, only whiter and less poli…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:53PMFriday, September 4, 2015
RECREATION My editor and I didn’t toss a coin to see who would write the review – he’s smarter than that; he wrote a very nice preview piece, the kind I find very difficult, an…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:49PMSaturday, August 15, 2015
DISILLUSION ON DEMAND In Rob Mersola’s Luka’s Room, Nick Marini plays a blithe, typical, technology-addicted college sophomore who has a rough summer after his father stops payin…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:49PMSunday, August 9, 2015
REAL THING I hate it when people talk about the need to “support” a good cause. Guilt is simply bad salesmanship. It kills it for me. It killed Save-the-Whales, and it sure didn’t …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:41AMSaturday, July 25, 2015
SUCCESS You have had at least one dream in which the universe of potential joy is realized in a moment. The moment is ethereal and tangible, in the way of dreams. For me this dream is always…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:31PMTuesday, July 21, 2015
SYNTHETICS AND STRUCTURE Excelling at stage picture, Jaime Robledo sets a lot of toys in motion in Sacred Fools’ latest offering, recently extended into August. Robledo’s direct…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:51PMMonday, July 13, 2015
RHYMES WITH SIEVE In her play Shiv, the third part of an immigrant-experience trilogy first workshopped in 2013, Aditi Brennan Kapil writes of a character (played by Monika Jolly) named afte…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:32PMMonday, July 6, 2015
THE AMERICANS Tracy Letts wrote a bleak comedy in 2007 that sold a lot of tickets, won a bunch of prizes and ensured his writing career at least a footnote in the big books. August: Osage Co…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:01PMTuesday, June 23, 2015
THESE, OUR PLAYWRIGHTS Kinky Neon Rocker is one of those rally-round-the-flag excuses theater people use to put on shows: A beautiful old curved-wood rocking chair, painted in day-glo motley…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:39PMSaturday, June 13, 2015
HITCHES IN EXECUTION In his latest one-hour act, Simon Coronel divides the world into three categories: people who want to know how a magic trick is done, people who don’t want to know…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:17AMTuesday, June 2, 2015
HAROLD THE CONQUERING HERO Harold Pinter wasn’t an Ivory Tower practitioner who won a Nobel for writing twenty-nine shocking plays about morality and five or six books of rather precio…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:01PMMonday, June 1, 2015
THE UNEXPECTED CUE Yasmina Reza is the most internationally popular playwright France has produced in a long time; certainly since Jean Genet, possibly since Molière. Her 1994 play Art, in …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:21PMTuesday, May 26, 2015
RULIER THAN THOU I came to this show in a bad mood and left in a better one, which is as much praise as I can heap on a one-woman show about identity issues. There’s no theatrical faun…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:20PMTHEATER OF WHAT THE FUCK As an impresario and creative force, the man who calls himself Zombie Joe is the envy of the North Hollywood arts scene. Largely on the remarkable popularity of Urba…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:20PMFriday, May 22, 2015
THE CRAGS OF DELIVERANCE If bad reviews are the flattest line my pen can draw, a steppe of the imagination that writes its unsurprising self, a good review is the Caucasus. To critique Impro…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:55PMSaturday, May 9, 2015
LUMBER Workshopped once onstage in 2000, Stephen Fechter’s The Woodsman had its play form set aside while Fechter and director Nicole Kassell turned it into a screenplay that won the 2…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:23PMWednesday, April 22, 2015
I went to a show last night at a theater that has been going out of business for years. A long time ago I acted there; my writing was performed there. I’ve seen many shows there, good …
SOURCE: Bitter Lemons at 06:35AMSaturday, April 11, 2015
Seen this yet? Of course you have. That’s the Black Guy Killed by a Cop video for last week. He wasn’t the only one, but Walter Scott got the attention. A couple days later, out …
SOURCE: Bitter Lemons at 06:39PMWednesday, April 1, 2015
Bitter Lemons learned early this morning that Actors’ Equity Association President Nick Wyman and Executive Director Mary McColl have jointly received a coveted honor from inter…
SOURCE: Bitter Lemons at 03:29AMTuesday, March 17, 2015
Blogger Isaac Butler has publicly called for Bitter Lemons to retract or revise what he calls a “factual error” in an article by Kevin Delin. What our editor Colin Mitchell doe…
SOURCE: Bitter Lemons at 02:30AMThursday, March 12, 2015
If the Waiver War hinged on this debate, Equity lost yesterday. If I were an AEA member in any American city, I would listen to this episode of Warren Olney’s excellent Which Way L.…
SOURCE: Bitter Lemons at 03:50AMWednesday, February 25, 2015
I came to L.A. in the late 90s with the primary intention of not doing any more low-rent theater. Back in New York, I’d been the worst director and second-worst actor on Delancey Stree…
SOURCE: Bitter Lemons at 03:37PMSaturday, February 14, 2015
SHOW BIZ KIDS Cineastas at least doubles the self-reflexion of your average REDCAT show. In this new Argentinian play, written and directed by Mariano Penzotti, you watch no fewer than four …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:43AMSunday, February 8, 2015
These Re-Imagine LA Theatre guys are some of the bravest people in town. I mean it. Stupid is not what they are; foolhardy, yes. Which is a kind of brave. I mean, they did it. In the face of…
SOURCE: Bitter Lemons at 06:47AM 
