Saturday, September 16, 2023
DR. STAGELOVE or: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING DISNEY’S REMAKES WILL BOMB Huzzah! As if by magic carpet, Aladdin—the stage musical—has flown into the City of Angels for a two-week st…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 02:59AMThursday, July 6, 2023
WISHES ARE CHILDEN In the wake of news that Center Theatre Group, home of three major L.A. theaters, is “pausing” productions at their mid-size Mark Taper Forum and offering “select pr…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 03:02AMTuesday, May 2, 2023
A LUMINOUS NIGHT MUSIC I’m a little dizzy, bubbly—not from any reception champagne, mind you, but from seeing my very first production of A Little Night Music. It’s left me floating. (…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 08:02PMMonday, March 6, 2023
LOVELESS DISINFORMATION As I’m ushered into Antaeus Theatre Company’s mainstage theater at Kiki & David Gindler Performing Arts Center in Glendale to see Love and Information, I’m …
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 07:59PMTuesday, February 28, 2023
THE SECRET’S OUT: THIS GARDEN’S IN BLOOM It’s been almost a year since Ahmanson Theatre ushered in spring with the national tour of Hadestown. This season (thank ye, Fates!), spring ha…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 02:59AMSunday, February 26, 2023
HELP WANTED AT THE LAPIN AGILE As I wrote last Sunday in my review of Sunday in the Park with George: “art isn’t easy.” Having just now seen Picasso at the Lapin Agile, I’ll add to t…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 03:55PMTuesday, February 21, 2023
SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE JUST GETS BETTER WITH TIME “Art isn’t easy,” sing the cast of players in Sunday in the Park with George; the words are most notably sung by the artist-pr…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 02:52AMSunday, February 12, 2023
WAITING TO EXHALE Getting its West Coast Premiere at the Geffen Playhouse’s mainstage Gil Cates Theater, The First Deep Breath, a 2019 play by Lee Edward Colston II, is an overstuffed fami…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 04:38AMSunday, November 13, 2022
CHEAP THRILLS WON’T LIFT YOUR SPIRIT You never forget your first. Mine happened in the West End of London in the year 2000. The Woman in Black* (Stephen Mallatratt’s adaptation of Susan …
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 08:40PMThursday, August 4, 2022
THE ANACHRONISMIACS Poetry is all the rage in the madcap comedy, The Metromaniacs, David Ives’ 2015 English “translaptation” of La Métromanie (1738), an obscure French farce by Alexis…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 05:40PMMonday, July 18, 2022
CLASS ACT Nestled comfortably inside the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, Hershey Felder: Chopin in Paris is an enchanting “play with music” on the life …
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 05:17AMWednesday, July 13, 2022
MOULIN ROGUE! It wasn’t just the powerhouse romance between Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman. With its frenetic theatrics and killer soundtrack (virgin ballads locking lips with re-imagined…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 10:41AMTuesday, June 14, 2022
SAY “UNCLE!” Far be it from me to criticize Anton Chekhov. The long-deceased Russian playwright and short story writer is regarded as one of “The Greats” in all of literature; who am…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 04:54AMThursday, May 26, 2022
OUR CELEBRATION This year marks the 125th anniversary of the birth of Thornton Wilder. As part of the Wilder125 celebration, about 150 productions of his plays are being staged worldwide, in…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 01:06AMSaturday, May 7, 2022
SKIN DEEP As I made my way through a gaggle of gay-listers to see “Los Angeles’s steamiest show” at the Hudson Theatre in Los Angeles, that’s when I saw it – yet missed it complete…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 09:17PMWednesday, May 4, 2022
WHO’S AFRAID OF A MODERN BEOWULF? When Covid hit, I curled up one night, script in hand, poring over Edward Albee’s 60-year-old play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Perhaps the daily …
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 02:32AMSunday, May 1, 2022
PRAISE THE GODS! As soon as the plunger-muted trombone began to wail, and ache, and wail again; as trickled sweat watered ivories being tickled on an upright piano; as the hmmm’s of the ch…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 02:59AMThursday, April 28, 2022
SURRENDER (TO) DOROTHY Forty years ago, Dustin Hoffman lit up the silver screen as struggling actor Michael Dorsey in the gender-swapping, smash-hit comedy, Tootsie. Really, who can forget t…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 05:55PMThursday, April 7, 2022
M-I-C-K-E-Y (WHY-OH-WHY-OH-WHY?!) When I saw Lucas Hnath’s name attached to A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney – a boldly-titled play now getting…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 12:52AMThursday, March 31, 2022
DEADWOOD OR GIN? Fine actors of stage, television, and film, JoBeth Williams and Joe Spano unite their decades of work and talent to kick off a national tour of The Gin Game at the Rubicon T…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 02:32AMFriday, March 18, 2022
SCHISM BUDDIES “Are you Jewish?” Spoken by the leading players in playwright Lindsay Joelle’s Trayf, the question could also be relevant for the audience itself. Before you walk away d…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 09:35PMTuesday, March 15, 2022
THE PLAY WE NEED What starts as a joke ends in a laugh — all the way to the bank! — in The Play You Want, a world premiere comedy by Bernardo Cubría. Directed by Michael John Garcés, t…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 01:30AMSaturday, March 12, 2022
DON’T MISS AT ANY COST… BANK ON IT Recently I saw a play which forced me to ask: with the amount of stellar entertainment available to us at home, why would anyone spend this much money …
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 02:29PMTuesday, February 22, 2022
THE KIDS AREN’T ALL RIGHT Ever heard of Godwin’s Law? If you’ve spent a sizable amount of time on social media you’ve surely experienced it. An adage from the ‘90s, Godwin’s Law …
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 06:12PMWednesday, December 22, 2021
CAGES … AND THE FUTURE OF THEATER In late September, the long-delayed Tony Awards proudly announced: “Broadway’s Back!” Yet even before Christmas, theaters from The Great White Way t…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 03:32PMWednesday, December 8, 2021
LOST IN THE DESERT Winner of 10 Tony Awards including Best Musical of 2018, Itamar Moses’s The Band’s Visit is one of the most highly-awarded shows in musical theater history. And yet, t…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 02:59AMSaturday, December 4, 2021
SCROOGED After a year or two since Covid shutdowns made in-person theater nearly unheard of, a new adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has made its way from London to Broadway…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 11:27AMThursday, May 20, 2021
WHAT A WONDER [Editor’s Note: Just after we published Marc Wheeler’s glowing review of A Noise Within’s production of Alice in Wonderland, the theater had to go dark due to COVID. Fort…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:53PMWednesday, May 20, 2020
CALIFORNIA STREAMIN’ Even after postponing the remaining productions of their 2019/2020 season due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Geffen Playhouse is forging ahead. While the UCLA-owned the…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 04:47PMSunday, March 8, 2020
WHAT A WONDER Childhood whimsy is seen through the looking-glass of adult sophistication at A Noise Within. Based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through t…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 05:39PMMonday, March 2, 2020
OUR INKBLOT INTERPRETATIONS: SPLAT, SPLAT, SPLAT, SPLAT, SPLENDID Theater isn’t just what it brings to us, it’s also what we bring to it. At least, that’s the general idea behind Open …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:08PM 
