Wednesday, August 1, 2012
BEST BE ON YOUR AVANT-GARDE Understanding the origins of REDCAT, the downtown center for innovative visual, performing, and media arts, will assist the uninitiated in preparation for the ava…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:04PMSaturday, July 28, 2012
IT COULD HAVE BEEN WONDERFUL Attendees who had never seen Stephen Sondheim being interviewed in person must have been licking their chops with every juicy morsel that the legend said about h…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:03PMFriday, July 13, 2012
GOLD DISCOVERED IN THE PLAINS I rolled my eyes when I heard about the plot of Harmony, Kansas, a musical having its world premiere at Divisionary Theatre in San Diego. Heath is a gay Kansan …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:27PMThursday, July 12, 2012
NO EVIL. NO GOOD. There are few who do not know the story. The devil possesses Regan, the innocent 12-year-old daughter of movie star Chris MacNeil, who is working on a film in Georgetown. A…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:51PMWednesday, July 11, 2012
TWO CRITICS; TWO STAGED READINGS; BASICALLY ONE OPINION From Jason Rohrer: Plays in the Park, Brian Conners’ collection of one-acts (only one of which is set in a park), intends to sho…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:20AMFriday, July 6, 2012
ALL THE WORLD’S A GLOBE After previewing in the month of June, The Old Globe officially opens the 2012 Shakespeare Festival this week. Adrian Noble returns for his third season as the inte…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:03PMSunday, July 1, 2012
LEARNING OF A DEATH PENALTY FOR ONE’S EXISTENCE Uganda has an alarming history when it comes to human rights violations, but recent developments against gay people are horrifying. In 2005,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:00AMFriday, June 29, 2012
THREE’S COMPANY ON SHROOMS The concept of David Adjmi’s flawed but entertaining new play 3C is an intriguing one: to take Three’s Company, an iconic, milquetoast ABC sitcom (which star…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:52PMThursday, June 28, 2012
RING IT ON! I hadn’t read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring since junior high, and the movie, which is the first installment of Peter Jackson’s gorgeous film trilogy The Lord…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:15PMSaturday, June 23, 2012
WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE Somewhere around half-way through Guy Zimmerman’s The Black Glass, a “Hollywood Fringe Festival premiere,” my mind began to wander. Every …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:14PMWednesday, June 20, 2012
A MISSIONARY’S POSITION At rise: A critic is writing when the doorbell rings. The critic opens the door and reveals Savannah, a perky, Southern, cheerleader-type with pamphlets in her hand…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:12AMSaturday, June 16, 2012
ATTEND THIS PLAY Go see Language Rooms now. I bought a ticket with no intention of a review, but Yussef El Guindi is far and away one of the most exciting new playwrights I have heard in yea…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:47PMA MUSICAL DIVIDED CAN STILL STAND How I adore Musical Theatre Guild, which is presenting a full-out, highly professional concert staging of the 1975 musical Shenandoah. MTG offers the chance…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:41AMMonday, June 11, 2012
NO WAY The current production of No Way Around But Through, a world premiere play by Scott Caan, contains many ingredients that explain why L.A. has little to no reputation as a fountainhea…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:00PMGUESS WHO’S COMING TO THE WEDDING DINNER? Immediate Family, written by Chicago actor and playwright Paul Oakley Stovall, is part sitcom and part dysfunctional family drama, garnished with …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:13PMSunday, June 10, 2012
REAPPLYING MAKE-UP ON THE SAME CORPSE Your enjoyment of The Addams Family, now on its National Tour, will depend largely on your expectations. If you are a discerning musical theater aficion…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:59PMWednesday, June 6, 2012
¿POR QUÉ? I have been trying to figure out sixty ways from Sunday’s opening of Los Otros just exactly how to approach a critique. The new one-act musical by composer Michael John LaChius…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:33PMTuesday, June 5, 2012
VERY IMPERVIOUS AND HARD TO GET, OR WHAT THE HELL..? I’m debating whether or not to tell you to go to Hell. Should you choose to go, playwright Steve Yockey will take you there in the worl…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:41AMTuesday, May 29, 2012
PIECE OF EIGHT Conceived by Ashlin Halfnight and Melanie Sylvan at New York’s Electric Pear Productions, Synesthesia can easily be classified in the “Why Didn’t I Think of That?” Dep…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:40PMMonday, May 28, 2012
TOO MUCH TRAGEDY SPOILS CLEVER CONCEIT Prior to curtain at Sacred Fools’ production of Stoneface, the packed house watched samplings of Buster Keaton’s films, projected on a screen cente…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:12PMSaturday, May 26, 2012
IT IS (BUT SHOULDN’T BE) DONE There was something that felt particularly showcase-y about It Is Done, which can best be described as a 22-minute episode of The Twilight Zone laboriously st…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:27PMThursday, May 24, 2012
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY BECOMES A MUSICAL COMEDY 1931 was a crossroads in American history. With no economic recovery in sight, the Depression had people edgy, and when Americans are edgy, they …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:16PMWednesday, May 23, 2012
MUSICAL TAKES ON REALITY TV What better place than the stage to examine the phenomenon of Reality TV? One would hope that by now, Americans would be wise to the fact that these shows, whethe…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:23PMMonday, May 21, 2012
BONA FIDE ACTING FUELS DIDACTIC SCRIPT At about the same time that the United States entered WWI, units of the 24th Infantry Regiment, one of the Army’s four black regiments, set up camp o…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:13PMSaturday, May 19, 2012
WHERE IS MRS. O’LEARY’S COW WHEN YOU NEED HER? Had the inexhaustible 57-year-old Christie Brinkley performed “Roxie” on America’s Got Talent, I would have demanded that she…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:57PMIT WOULD HAVE BEEN WONDERFUL East West Players’ cross-cultural take on the Stephen Sondheim/Harold Wheeler musical A Little Night Music highlights one of the most shimmering and romantic s…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:12AMFriday, May 18, 2012
BETTER BE ON YOUR AVANT-GARDE Have you ever eaten at a new restaurant and summed it up thusly?: “I have no idea what I just ate! It was a little tough to chew and digest, but the presentat…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:33PMTuesday, May 15, 2012
A CAPTIVATING GENDER-BENDING STORY In Michael Premsrirat’s thoroughly engaging The Girl Most Likely To, an unnamed teenage Boy (a winning Tobit Raphael) is, and always has been, in the wro…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:22PMTHE PAINT JOB ON THIS PROMISING MUSICAL NEEDS DARKER COLORS NPR’s This American Life is where I first heard about the 1997 film Hands on a Hard Body, which documented a 1995 dealership-spo…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:33PMDEAFTRAP Writer Stephen Sachs and the Fountain Theatre have come up with what would appear to be a fresh approach to Rostand’s classic play, Cyrano de Bergerac. In this modern-day version,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:43PMFriday, May 11, 2012
A WAR OF IDEAS For the first forty-five minutes of City Lit’s OPUS 1861, a miracle occurred: I wept. Consistently. The simple but mighty idea is this: six actors dressed in simple army fat…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:23PM 
