The 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 06:36PMThe 1992 Los Angeles Uprising, known more colloquially as the “L.A. riots,” happened almost 31 years ago. Anna Deavere Smith’s play about it, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, premiered in …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 10:32PMPlays concerning the supernatural or people attempting to communicate with the departed have been with us for a while, from Noël Coward’s comical Blithe Spirit to Prince Gomolvilas’ exc…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 12:00PMStephen Sondheim revolutionized musical theater. He took his initial mastery of the classic tuner (from shows such as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, West Side Story and Gyps…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 12:00PMPlays in which family secrets are tragically revealed are nothing new – Oedipus and his mom were shocking audiences back as far as 429 BCE. In the U.S., the 500 lb. gorilla of this genre w…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 12:00PMThe first time I saw a play by Will Eno was about 15 years ago, by Circle X Theatre Company of The Flu Season. It was an excellent production in many ways, but there was one scene in which a…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 12:00PMProduction photos by Jeff Lorch. Memory plays are a tricky proposition. Hew strictly to the truth and the story may not be dramatic enough; indulge in creative license and literal-minded …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 11:24PMAccording to a survey conducted by American Theater magazine, Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s is currently the most produced play in the U.S. It’s not surprising that Nottage’s work is being …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 05:32PMI’m a horror film fan. I probably see 75-100 horror movies a year, and have done so for a long, long time. So I can state with certain knowledge that the cheapest of all scares is the jump…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 06:42PMWhen Harper Lee wrote her novel To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, she didn’t think it would be a big success. Sixty-two years later, the book has been taught to millions of students in school…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 07:18PMThe epigraph of E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel, Howards End, is “Only connect…” This motto mainly referred to opening oneself up to the world and other people for greater understanding a…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 02:19PMIn my experience, ninety percent of the time that there’s an issue with a theatrical production, the problem is the play itself. It’s surprisingly rare for the main trouble to be with th…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 09:07PMReligion is ever with us, for good or ill. We humans seem to be hardwired with a need for the numinous. Steven Levenson’s play, If I Forget, begins with a psalm and ends with a vision, the…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 06:48PMMere days after the abomination of the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade, discussing a play about toxic masculinity seems almost too topical. Cisgender white men are running amok waging…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 08:33PMAs the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Technology zooms forward, but human nature remains stubbornly persistent. Thus a play such as Anton Chekhov’s Uncle…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 08:07PMAt this point, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a theatrical peak so frequently attempted that you can see, as on Everest, the frozen bodies of thespians who chanced and failed the perilous ascent …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 07:24PMBitchiness, thy name is Albee. Has there ever been a play that reveled in so much in mean-spirited badinage as Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Sour wit courses through the…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 01:12PMPlays that chart the course of a romantic relationship have long been a staple of theater. Stories told in a nonlinear way are less common but not unheard of. When you take the previous two …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 02:18PMI have a rule about avant-garde theater: if an artist chooses to deliberately obscure his/her/their meaning via unusual methods or flirts dangerously with pretentiousness, the play had bette…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 08:33PMWhen I told people I was going to see a new production of Sarah’s Ruhl’s play, In the Next Room, I received a series of blank stares, but when I included its subtitle, or the vibrator pl…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 08:54PMSome theater locations seem to be blessed, and in Los Angeles, one of those lucky places is The Matrix Theatre on Melrose. It’s been producing and presenting high-quality shows for more th…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 11:42PMOne of the core American principles is the right to free speech. However, this glorious principle runs into trouble when truly evil groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or Nazis wish to spread th…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 08:06PMIt’s 1998 in midwestern U.S.A, and three rap-loving teens live in a suburb of The City called The Hill. Hank (E.E. Williams) wants to be a rapper but maybe doesn’t have the performance c…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 05:33PMIt’s a Wonderful Life is now an undisputed holiday classic, but its road to perennial status was as long and difficult as its hero’s journey to happiness. It began as a short story calle…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 02:06PMIt’s the most wonderful time of the year…except for theatergoers. December is generally when every show except for A Christmas Carol or The Nutcracker shuts down for the holidays, but th…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 08:48PMThe discussion of wealth inequality has come up a lot in this young century, as the accumulation of massive fortunes goes to fewer and fewer people while millions suffer all over the world. …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 05:03PMTheatre is an amazing artform, but one of the things it does less well is genre storytelling. Drama, comedy, musicals – absolutely. Even fantasy or thrillers. But horror, action, westerns …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 11:06PMSo my first large audience theatre experience since being fully vaccinated featured women sporting two-foot-long phalluses singing Liza Minnelli songs in a Greek amphitheater on the grounds …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 07:18PMIn 1970, journalist Studs Terkel released his book, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, in which he interviewed people about living through that desperate time and how they …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 04:18PMOnce it became apparent that the Covid pandemic wasn’t going to be a short catastrophe, and theaters everywhere had to close their doors for more than a year, one thing was very clear to m…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 05:36PMPlays that feature a series of short scenes with different characters whose relationships to each other become clearer as the story goes on have been popular since Arthur Schnitzler’s La R…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 06:36PM
