Monday, September 24, 2018
THE ENDURING LEGACY OF JERRY HERMAN AND THE ‘STAR VEHICLE’ The chief pleasure in Musical Theatre Guild’s presentation of Mame at the Alex Theatre is hearing the music, full-out, as wri…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:55PMSunday, September 23, 2018
LOVE AND TOLERANCE BEGIN AT HOME Debra Jo Rupp is like a hurricane in miniature. She takes us inside a character’s small, unexpected, interior storms. We see and feel her mind and emotions…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:25PMFriday, September 14, 2018
MODERN LOSS MEETS THE ORPHEUS MYTH, BUT NEVER MAKES IT TO THE OTHER SIDE A superb cast tackles life and death in José Rivera’s new play The Untranslatable Secrets of Nikki Corona, now in …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:36PMTuesday, September 11, 2018
THE WAR OF ROSES — AND WEEDS Christian Barillas is adorably frazzled and enormously appealing in Native Gardens at the Pasadena Playhouse. He plays Pablo Del Valle, an ambitious lawyer…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:59PMMonday, September 10, 2018
MURDER WITHOUT END Sha’Leah Nikole Stubblefield is already a mesmerizing, ethereal presence on stage when you take a seat for Rogue Machine’s American Saga Gunshot Medley: Part 1, now in…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:16AMSunday, September 9, 2018
WE ARE THE MEAN GIRLS The subhead of Jocelyn Bioh’s 2017 play, now at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, is alluring but ultimately misleading. School Girls; Or, the African Mean Gir…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:22PMFriday, September 7, 2018
THE BIRTH OF TRUMP’S RACIAL BLUE-COLLAR DIVIDE Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage places much of the action of Sweat, now at the Mark Taper Forum, in a working-class bar in Reading, Pennsy…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:40PMTuesday, August 28, 2018
MAGIC IN THE MUSIC Sometimes jukebox bio-musicals get so caught up in the fame and fortune of the journey that they miss the creative passion that is the true force driving most artists forw…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:54PMMonday, August 27, 2018
THE MOTHER OF THEM ALL “Don’t call me a liar,” a mother says. “But you lied,” responds her daughter simply. And all holy hell breaks loose. In I Go Somewhere Else from Playwrights�…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:56PMMonday, August 20, 2018
RED SCARE IN BROOKLYN I was at a dinner party in New York once and met a 97-year-old woman who embodied a kind of Upper West Side left-wing glamour I find intoxicating. She had grown up in a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:51PMALMOST PARADISE There are many pleasures on display in the newest incarnation of the bluegrass musical Paradise, which has been in development for over five years. Now at Ruskin Group Theatr…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:23PMMonday, July 30, 2018
THE PLEASURES OF WEBFOOT COCKLEWOMEN AND MINCED CAT Under Milk Wood is a vivid combination of poetry, drama, and music that was first performed as a radio play in 1954, and it is squarely ro…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:56AMMonday, July 23, 2018
EMOTIONAL TURMOIL AND MUSICAL BLISS One of the pleasures of the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble’s production of Side by Side by Sondheim is the experience of hearing voices without amplification.…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:37PMFriday, July 13, 2018
THE TRAGIC COMEDY OF LOVE Antaeus Theatre closes its season with a terrific production of Three Days in the Country, Patrick Marber’s adaptation of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. Tur…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:16PMMonday, June 18, 2018
HALLUCINOGENS, MAN-WHORES & CHINA PEOPLE I’m not sure why Steve Chang chose to call his world premiere one-man show at the 2018 Hollywood Fringe Festival A Complete Waste of Time. It i…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:58AMFriday, June 15, 2018
MOTHER COURAGE IN MOTOR CITY The marvel of scenic designer Rachel Meyers’ work greets you when you enter the theater at the Geffen Playhouse, and draws the audience into Skeleton Crew, the…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:31PMMonday, June 11, 2018
ONE ARMENIAN, ONE TURK, ONE ROOM – WHAT ARE THE ODDS? “Your blondness has not served you the way we had hoped,” says a woman to her daughter, as a husband and father is dying of heart …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:21AMMonday, June 4, 2018
A WALL WILL NEVER STOP A BUTTERFLY When I was a kid, the word “wetback” had negative connotations, but I don’t remember it being considered particularly hateful. My mother even used it…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:49PMMonday, May 21, 2018
BUT IS IT GOOD FOR THE JEWS? I love Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. It feels a bit highfalutin putting it that way, as if I sit around reading Victorian classics when not appreciat…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:55AMMonday, May 14, 2018
“I’M NOT ALONE ANYMORE, I HAVE ME!” Charles Busch once said he thought of himself as the Loretta Young of drag, specializing in creatures of artifice, vanity, and soulful, ofte…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:43PMSaturday, May 12, 2018
WHEN METAPHORS BECOME MONSTERS Art thrives when it dances on the edge of a razor — flaunting itself and teasing us — fully embracing the risk of toppling over at any moment and s…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:55PMFriday, May 4, 2018
KIDS RULE IN ENERGETIC ROCK There is an announcement before the start of School of Rock The Musical. After the expected exhortations against using electronic devices, we are assured that yes…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:13PMFriday, April 20, 2018
BLINDING SON I’m half Latino, half Eastern-European Jew, and I’m gay. But I know nothing of what it means to be African-American in a country founded on hating the color of your skin—a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:37PMFriday, April 13, 2018
TOGETHER ALONE Keilly McQuail and Will Von Vogt are absolutely riveting in Significant Other, Joshua Harmon’s mostly funny, sometimes sad take on the pitfalls of being the GBF (gay best fr…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:06PMSaturday, March 10, 2018
SEX WORK/#METOO/FUTURE TENSE Sarah Jones is a prescient writer and an actor of rare gifts and remarkable range. It’s no wonder that an early patron and supporter was Meryl Streep, for like…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:22PMSaturday, February 10, 2018
THE JOY OF SURVIVAL Marin Ireland is mesmerizing and deeply moving in Ironbound. She plays Daria, a Polish immigrant. To my ear, her accent is impeccable — and most importantly, entirely c…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:51PMMonday, January 29, 2018
A TRAGI-COMEDY OF VIOLENCE Harold Pinter’s The Hothouse is exactly the kind of play I hope to see at the Antaeus Theatre Company. It is a classic to some but not to others, and there’s a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:20PMMonday, January 22, 2018
LOVE AND “COMPASSIONATE SILENCE” We are living through an era that seems to value greed, hypocrisy, narcissism and blatant dishonesty over truth and meaning. This makes the journ…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:58PMWednesday, November 15, 2017
WOMEN BEHAVING BADLY In Mike Bartlett’s play about the imagined aftermath of Queen Elizabeth II’s death, men hold inherited titles, but women, both living and dead, hold the keys to powe…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:57AMMonday, October 30, 2017
THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF SAVAGES Who would have imagined that a 30-year-old stage adaptation (by Christopher Hampton) of a 1782 novel (by Choderlos de Laclos) would be so devastatingly of the …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:54PMSunday, October 22, 2017
LIGHTING UP THE SOUTHERN SKY Carmen Cusack is luminous. She uses her whole self—physically, emotionally, vocally—to open herself to the audience, holding every last one of us in her lovi…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:21AM 
