One of the things I most admire about the work of Stephen Sondheim is that he actively tried new things within the musical format. He certainly set himself technical challenges, such as tell…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 04:42PMAlthough new plays can be exciting and are crucial to the continuing vitality of theatre, I’m especially fond of older works, the more obscure the better. It’s cheap time travel, immersi…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 09:18PMMessage plays are a pillar of western theater. Our entire theatrical ecosystem is unthinkable without works such as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House or Larry…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 08:18PMIn my twenty-five years of theater reviewing, time and again when I find myself less enthusiastic about a show, ninety-nine percent of the time the culprit is the writing. One would think th…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 10:24PMThornton Wilder’s 1942 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Skin of Our Teeth, is an assuredly odd duck. It’s eighty-two years old but still seems postmodern with its frequent fourth-wall br…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 02:32PMIn my fifty-seven years of life, I’ve never seen this country so divided and tribalized. I think the media bears a lot of blame for this, referring to us as living in red or blue states an…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 02:03PMFans of history can’t help but wish they were there for private, unrecorded conversations between famed historical figures, to be the proverbial fly on the wall and gain insight into what …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 12:00PMWelcome to Watching the Dark, a regular column featuring essays, articles and reviews about horror films. Written by Terry Morgan. Longlegs in cinemas This is the third piece of a thr…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 03:48PMThe first time I read Jon Robin Baitz’s 1991 play, The Substance of Fire, and later saw the film made from it, I liked it. I wasn’t alone – the success of that play catapulted Baitz in…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 06:32PMIt may be less well known now, but back in the 1960s, the character of surfer girl Gidget was popular and influential, the subject of novels, films and TV series starring the likes of Sandra…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 02:18PMWelcome to Watching the Dark, a regular column featuring essays and articles about horror films. Written by Terry Morgan. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House from Netflix Qu…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 10:06PMWelcome to Watching the Dark, a new regular column featuring reviews and articles about horror films. Written by Terry Morgan. The Blackcoat’s Daughter from A24 The Angels, They Fo…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 08:12PMMusicals can have many different formats, but the two most prevalent structures these days are the traditional and the jukebox. The traditional (incorporating Sondheim, because his changes a…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 01:36PMWelcome to Watching the Dark, a new regular column featuring reviews and articles about horror films. Written by Terry Morgan. You Can’t Run Forever from Lionsgate I’ve been a cr…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 04:12PMIf the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, perhaps the road to freedom is paved with righteous anger? Henrik Ibsen may have thought so when he wrote his proto-feminist play, A Doll�…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 02:18PMAccording to the great sages of the internet, Hamlet is the most produced play in world history, and whether or not that claim is true, the indecisive Dane is certainly ubiquitous. And if it…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 04:42PMStephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd is my favorite musical. Its combination of a beautiful score, clever lyrics and unusually gruesome subject matter is sui generis. When it�…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 09:48PM“A sad tale’s best for winter,” Shakespeare has one of his characters opine in his penultimate work, The Winter’s Tale, an odd duck of a play that’s mostly been overshadowed by his…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 01:32AMI find one-person shows one of the most difficult types of theatre to review, for several reasons. If the quality of the writing or performance isn’t good, there may be nothing but negativ…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 11:18PMAlthough no year in which the Mark Taper Forum is at least temporarily shuttered and the Kirk Douglas Theatre’s programming is reduced can be said to be an entirely positive year for Los A…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 07:42PMOne of the great pleasures of theater is seeing a revival of a classic play not only succeed on its own merits but also be relevant to modern times. Certain works such as The Crucible or Ene…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 12:18AMSometimes great actors can save a bad play. The sheer strength of their talent or the brilliance of their star power dazzles us into not noticing or caring that the vehicle they’re in is l…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 05:07PMThe first time I encountered Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, I identified strongly with the title character, both with his frustrations and what he thought of as the tragedy of his life. As I got o…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 01:49PMMeasure for Measure has been referred to as Shakespeare’s “#MeToo play,” a story in which a man in power uses his clout to try and sexually abuse a woman, except that she stands up to …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 06:03PMIn a world in which a repulsive con man can get elected president and turn the entire Republican party into a credulous and insane mob, it’s to be expected that somebody would try to write…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 07:04PMFor better or worse, it’s human nature to find the misfortune of others amusing. YouTube is filled with videos of people making mistakes or getting hit somewhere unpleasant by a stray ball…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 10:13PMWhen I got to my seat at the Atwater Village Theatre, I saw a note. It informed me that this seat was in “the Crabby Zone,” and that performers in crab costumes with outsized claws would…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 02:49PMI have seen a fair number of Shakespeare plays altered by directors in my day, from modernizations to setting/era changes, and the main thing is that the alterations have to successfully ill…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 04:19PMThe subject of unlikely friendships is always intriguing (however will this cat and dog get along?), and none seems more unlikely than the friendship between boxing legend Muhammad Ali and e…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 09:19PMLaguna Playhouse, in association with Gare St. Lazare, Ireland and the Rubicon Theatre Company, presents the rolling Southern California premiere of The Realistic Joneses by Will Eno. Th…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 03:06PMThe reasons that a piece of art works in one format but not so well in another are many and varied. In a time in which seemingly everything is being turned into a musical, and every animated…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 06:36PM
