Monday, August 4, 2014
BROADWAY VIA THE CATSKILLS AND THE ACTORS STUDIO I like plays featuring middle-aged guys who did everything right and still can’t figure anything out. So Ron Sossi and Larry Field…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:55AMFriday, August 1, 2014
SWEET, DREAMY Based on the true story of a rabid blue-collar fan whose dream of making friends with her favorite Grand Ole Opry star came true in 1961, Always…Patsy Cline is an enormou…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:11PMTuesday, July 29, 2014
AGONY UNVISITED In this play by Tim Livingston, apparently his first, an artist and self-proclaimed protagonist named Joey (played by the author’s brother Joey Livingston) complains in…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:54PMMonday, July 14, 2014
A BLOODY BUT WORTHWHILE MESS When Kenneth Clark asked of William Shakespeare, “who else has felt so strongly the absolute meaninglessness of life,” he illustrated the point with this spe…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:23PMMonday, July 7, 2014
The web site for which I am a critic, Stage and Cinema, has enjoyed a boom recently from which I am grateful to benefit. Not that I get paid; there are people who know how to work th…
SOURCE: Bitter Lemons at 09:37AMSunday, July 6, 2014
DOOM DOOM DOOM In the Boom Boom Room is a David Rabe play that did not win a Tony in 1974. In it, Rabe demonstrates no particular affinity yet for female characters, of whom there are many…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:47PMSunday, June 29, 2014
GODDAMN CHEKHOV, AGAIN I suspect nobody really likes The Seagull except theater people. It established for the modern age some of the essential playwriting untouchables: a play about act…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:04PMSOBER CANNIBALS, DRUNKEN CHRISTIANS This show made me wish I had chosen to sit through Lost Moon Radio’s Million Dollar Hair again. If this sounds like faint praise, it is; I did not e…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:13PMMonday, June 16, 2014
ITHACA John Perrin Flynn and Brenda Davidson’s production of Penelope is so vivid that it’s hard for me to imagine the play in any other presentation – even though I’ve r…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:55PMCOMFORT CANCER Steven Dierkes has written the play one thinks of writing after a friend gets a brain tumor. Like a character in Land Line, I once was a guy who talked long-distance day aft…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:23AMSunday, June 15, 2014
IMPORTANCE AND FRIVOLITY Radically altering the circumstances of a revered text is the prerogative of any new production. It’s one of the methods theater reserves to drag fusty old p…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:27PMSaturday, June 14, 2014
LOST Lost Moon Radio’s new Hollywood Fringe Festival show is by far the least impressive Lost Moon outing I’ve seen. A departure from their usual late-night free-form radio sho…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:50AMWednesday, June 11, 2014
THE RISE AND FALL OF A TRANSFERRED PRODUCTION When it was originally presented at Sacred Fools, Vanessa Claire Stewart’s play had a subtitle (The Rise and Fall and Rise of Buster Keato…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:24PMSunday, June 8, 2014
BRIGHT LIGHTS ON A DIM HORIZON Two hit men wait in a shitty Vegas motel for the boss to give them a goddamn call. One of ‘em (Leon Russom) is an all-business, no-shit guy on the verg…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:47PMSaturday, June 7, 2014
Message on a scrap of linen found inside a cigar tin purchased in Bucharest, 2003: For seven years in the vigor of my youth I had made a living as a stuntman and rigger in Los Angeles. When …
SOURCE: Bitter Lemons at 08:12AMThursday, May 29, 2014
DEARTH OF DRAMA Steven Drukman’s Death of the Author takes its name, premise, and some of the devices in its dialogue from a Roland Barthes essay on postmodernism. It’s wonderf…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:50PMSaturday, May 10, 2014
THEATRICAL ANTHRAX In Ellen McLaughlin’s 2011 play Ajax in Iraq, a heroic American soldier, A.J., is raped by her sergeant. Her Iraq War story parallels that of the Trojan War hero i…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:54PMMonday, May 5, 2014
Opening night, in the alley behind the theater, the light over the stage door burnt out. The overcast had been thick all day and at 7:00 it might have been midnight, so the lead actor missed…
SOURCE: Bitter Lemons at 03:26AMMonday, April 28, 2014
I LOVES YOU, STORY I grew up with Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald and Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday singing “Summertime” outside a context of which I was ignorant; I never cared much…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:41AMRURALITY AS A METAPHORICAL STRATEGY IN CHEKHOV: CHECK Deconstructing two Anton Chekhov short stories with a series of post-hip Director’s Theater flourishes, Paul Lazar and Annie-B Par…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:13AMMonday, April 21, 2014
ON A SEA OF TEARS It’s a play that deals with AIDS, and the central character is a little boy. Okay? So while Coeurage Theatre Company (like many who have produced David Saar’…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:27PMSunday, April 13, 2014
TITTY GARAGE Shows that are listed at two hours and fifteen minutes shouldn’t be forgiven for running three hours, unless they are written by a genius like Mikhail Bulgakov. One of that …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:27PMThursday, April 10, 2014
THREADBARE In the 1950s, dissident South African Can Themba wrote a short story called “The Suit,” describing a cuckold’s response to his wife’s infidelity – specifically h…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:38PMMonday, April 7, 2014
WELL MET BY MOONLIGHT Some plays are just too good to be easily staged. In my experience Shakespeare’s most beloved comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, has defied more directors…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:29AMTuesday, April 1, 2014
SHAKESPEARE WISHES HE WERE THIS FUNNY Mistaken identities, cross-dressing, puns, fart jokes and dick jokes and pussy jokes. You know where you can find these? Movies starring Saturday Ni…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:58AMI fell off the wagon sometime last month. I’m not sure what day it is, to tell you the truth. I hadn’t had a drink in something like ten years; maybe eleven. I should have kept g…
SOURCE: Bitter Lemons at 04:19AMSunday, March 23, 2014
PROMETHEUS BOUND In a production as stately and reverent as its subject was startling and rebellious, Philip Hayes Dean has directed his own one-man-with-musical-accompanist play to a stands…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:23PMNOT EVEN GOD Hugh Whitemore’s 2001 play God Only Knows breaks some of the most basic rules of dramaturgy: a gun is introduced which does not go off; an argument is begun which is not f…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:33PMFriday, February 28, 2014
Social justice warriors, take heed! Right now, you’re full of fix-the-world and stop-the-madness. Packed with outrage and frustration. Shit’s not right! Everybody’s not equ…
SOURCE: Bitter Lemons at 08:15PMSaturday, February 22, 2014
STILLED LIFE In 2007, Noel Coward and David Lean’s 1945 film Brief Encounter, a somewhat maudlin expansion of the 1936 Coward one-act Still Life, was turned into a stage spectacle by C…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:38PMMonday, 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 02:11PM 
