Thursday, May 23, 2013
I first heard about musical Renaissance man Dave Malloy when I graded the reviews for Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage for Critic-O-Meter back in 2009; the repeated comparisons of his ro…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 11:59AMOne of the subtexts of the recent news that Backstage would discontinue theater reviews altogether is that it was never inevitable that an actors' trade paper would review theater. Clea…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 11:52AMThe composer David Malloy is a one-man band, almost — with at least four duties, including a starring role — in “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.”
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 11:06AMWednesday, May 22, 2013
Remember when the most blazing controversy about David Mamet was his heterodox approach to acting training? The publication in 1999 of his terse, contrarian True and False, which posited, in…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:31AMTuesday, May 21, 2013
Jenn Harris and Paul Kandel in Silence! (photo by Dixie Sheridan)
Last week I got a news release that Silence! The Musical just clocked its 500th performance, and I couldn't be happier…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:32AMMonday, May 20, 2013
For America magazine I've done a combined review of two entertaining and popular shows about iconic women leaders at either end of New York's nonprofit stage spectrum: The Public Theater's H…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:54AMFriday, May 17, 2013
On Wednesday night I attended Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, the immersive Russian-indie-rock musical fashioned from a section of War and Peace; I'm reporting on the pie…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:33AMThursday, May 16, 2013
The Public's new dance-club sensation Here Lies Love is pretty much as great as it's been cracked up to be (no. 2 on StageGrade, no less!), even if its retelling of the rise and fall of…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:35AMWednesday, May 15, 2013
On this day in 2007, I posted the following review excerpt:
“Radio Golf” is a formulaic work that illustrates why [August] Wilson was not, in
the end, a great artist: his approach to e…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:42AMTuesday, May 14, 2013
Seeing it all before him (@Bettman/CORBIS)
Among the theatrical heavyweights I've had the pleasure to interview is America's greatest living playwright, Edward Albee. It was in 2008, and th…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:15AMSaturday, May 11, 2013
He's only one had one other L.A. production previously (Four at Celebration Theatre), and one high-profile premiere at nearby South Coast Rep (On the Mountain), both in 2005. But now Christo…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 02:39PMThe playwright's 'Dying City,' now at Rogue Machine Theatre (and the new 'Teddy Ferrara' in Chicago), examines the damaged and what damage follows. NEW YORK — David Mamet has his hustl…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 01:00PMFriday, May 10, 2013
My old friend and boss at the Downtown News, Jack Skelley, used to insist that classical music should be played loud, and I took him to mean not only that he had a taste, as I did, for noisy…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:45AMThursday, May 9, 2013
The Lisps et al in an earlier incarnation of Futurity
In this final installment of my three-part interview with César Alvarez (here are part 1 and part 2), we talk about the future of mus…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:42AMWednesday, May 8, 2013
Part 1 of my interview with The Lisps’ César Alvarez went into some detail about his bands’ show Futurity, which originated in 2009, played at ART and at the Walker Center last year, an…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:18AMTuesday, May 7, 2013
Like Stew and Heidi Rodewald’s Passing Strange, The Lisps’ Futurity features the band that wrote the show onstage performing the show, and as such it provided Exhibit A—literally, as i…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 10:00AMMonday, May 6, 2013
Rooting around my back pages, I happened to come across a 2004 post about a number of religion-themed shows I'd seen at the time in L.A. (Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God, the Very Merry Un…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:30AMThursday, May 2, 2013
How big of a deal is it that Baltimore's biggest theater has at its helm a Brit, and not just any Brit but Kwame Kwei-Armah, the London-bred son of Afro-Caribbean immigrants from Grenada? If…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 12:18PMKwame Kwei-Armah has written a play inspired by “A Raisin in the Sun” that is being staged in repertory with “Clybourne Park” at CenterStage in Baltimore under the umbrella title “…
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 12:15PMTom Hanks and Maura Tierney in Lucky Guy (photo by Joan Marcus)
The Tom Hanks/Nora Ephron romance, which brought them so much success with romcoms onscreen, has continued even after Ephron…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 11:45AMWednesday, May 1, 2013
I just learned that Christopher Shinn's extraordinary three-character two-hander Dying City will get its L.A. premiere in the capable hands of Rogue Machine Theatre—a troupe whos…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:27AMTuesday, April 30, 2013
photo by Paul Kolnik
This is something of a genre by now, the not-quite-believer's Passion play: from The Last Temptation of Christ to Corpus Christi to The Gospel According to th…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:30AMMonday, April 29, 2013
If Eliza Bent's new play The Hotel Colors hits the ear at an odd angle, that is by design: When we hear the play's six Italian characters, holed up together in a tatty hostel in Rome, u…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:30AMThursday, April 25, 2013
In the last installment of my long interview with Stew and Heidi Rodewald (here's part 1, and here's part 2), we talk more about Shakespeare, why Homer was a bluesman, and how the theater wo…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:57AMWednesday, April 24, 2013
photo 2012 by Stephen P. Marsh
In this second installment of my talk with Stew and Heidi about rock and theater (part 1 here), we get deeper into the divide between the two, and talk about …
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:19AMTuesday, April 23, 2013
If you made a list of the singer/songwriters whose work pointed them toward the theater, let alone made them seem likely to have a Broadway show built around them, let's be honest, would Ste…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:30AMThursday, April 18, 2013
My recent post on why I depart from the chorus of hallelujahs for Matilda led the paper of record to ask me to write about my (relatively) lonely position (though I see that Feingold ha…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 02:50PMA writer reflects on what it’s like not to agree with popular opinion, prompted by his lukewarm response to the much-celebrated “Matilda.”
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 02:08PMWednesday, April 17, 2013
A passage from We Are Proud To Present a Presentation etc. in which one actor coaxes another into the right emotion for a scene.
I don't usually get the chance, or at least I seldom take…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 08:48AMTuesday, April 16, 2013
Jackie Sibblies Drury, whose latest play is running in Providence, R.I., is a playwright of the moment for creating works that are collaborations by actors, a director and a writer.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 04:47PMA human moment at last (photo by Joan Marcus)
It’s hard to wear a smile and a sneer at the same time, but Matilda the Musical sure does try. This new British import is both day-glo bright…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 08:50AM 
