Tuesday, September 11, 2018
THE RIGHT TO DO WRONG Count this among the finest offerings from a Chicago theater: Shattered Globe Theatre’s kinetic staging of Chris Hannan’s adaptation of Crime and Punishment is flaw…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 03:00AMMonday, 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…
Linked From 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…
Linked From 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…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 03:40PMThursday, September 6, 2018
TRAPPED IN A DREARY DRAMEDY There’s a tender scene at the start of HOMOS, OR EVERYONE IN AMERICA (a perversely paradoxical title) that wants to convince us that Jordan Seavey’s lads real…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 02:22PMTHE WORLD IS FLAT Musical revues are a tricky business. While highly enjoyable and entertaining, even high profile compilations such as Side by Side by Sondheim and the Fats Waller songboo…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 04:45AMWednesday, September 5, 2018
PLAY ON Opening Night of the 2018 PLAY LA Festival of New Plays takes place Friday, September 7, at CASA 0101. Doors open at 7:00 pm at the Casa 0101 Gallery space for Hotel Mariachi, phot…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 12:25PMThursday, August 30, 2018
NO CLOSURE FOR GENOCIDE Family is how history happens. As Arthur Miller wisely showed in All My Sons, The Gift and The Crucible, change radiates outward. Even, or especially, an immense …
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 08:54PMWednesday, August 29, 2018
SWEATING IT OUT Sweat, Lynn Nottage’s 2017 Pulitzer winner for drama — couldn’t have come at a better time. Since its arrival, the play has been hailed as a benchmark for our times…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 09:14PMTuesday, 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…
Linked From 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…
Linked From 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…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 06:51PMAND NOW, WITH FURTHER ADO… Not only is it one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, but Much Ado About Nothing contains a favorite character: Dogberry. This bumbling constable arrives much …
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 06:17PMALMOST 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…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 05:23PMA WAY TO GHOUL OFF THIS SUMMER It’s not easy for a frightfest to work (or play) just as well as a laff-fest, let alone to be both: A delightful exercise in creepy-crawly quirkiness, Night…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 02:29PMLOVE ON A LINER, OR COLE PORTER’S SHIP OF FOOLS It’s still “de-lovely,” but, steeped in bon-vivant euphoria and Roaring 20s’ hedonism, this 1934 musical is so silly it’s hard to …
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 02:55AMSaturday, August 18, 2018
A STORY OF IMPORTANCE Unlike manipulative Broadway machines such as Priscilla and Kinky Boots, which shove issues down our throats, the societal consequences for a homosexual in A Man of…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 02:14PMWednesday, August 15, 2018
LOOKING FOR PROOF Proofreading: It may be a lost art. As an editor, I have become accustomed to scanning copy everywhere for mistakes, either in grammar or with facts. But lately, the effect…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 01:26AMMonday, August 13, 2018
THE LEGEND THAT GOT AWAY No, this show isn’t how fans want to remember Judy Garland at the bittersweet end. End of the Rainbow, Peter Quilter’s sardonic salute to a star on the skids, is…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 08:05PMEVEN WHEN YOU’RE HAIR CAN’T HOLD UP, THIS MUSICAL CAN To say you like Hairspray really doesn’t cut it. Do you mean the 1988 John Waters film starring Devine and newcomer Ricki Lake…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 02:58AMWednesday, August 8, 2018
WORD FOR WORD’S PERSONAL VICTORY LAP MAY BE THE BEST DEEP KISS YOU’VE EVER HAD San Francisco’s Word for Word has been transforming classic and contemporary fiction into amazing…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 05:31PMTuesday, August 7, 2018
HOLDING OUR ATTENTION Playful and powerful, hilarious and anguished, Tommy Murphy’s Holding the Man is a 2006 drama based on an immensely successful 1995 memoir. The author was apprentic…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 03:27PMMonday, August 6, 2018
ABBONDONZA If ever there was a reason to say, “Absolutely, positively, do not miss this event,” this is it. For one night only on Sunday August 19 at 7pm, Musical Theatre West…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 09:43PMSunday, August 5, 2018
THE GLOBE MAKES IT LOOK LIKE A WALK IN THE PARK Barefoot in the Park, Neil Simon’s second Broadway hit after Come Blow Your Horn, played a staggering 1,530 performances in its initial run,…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 04:20AMDAMAGE CONTROL Sometimes everything old is just — well — old again: The fourth entry in Pride Films and Plays’ five-show PAC Pride Fest, Hurricane Damage is a bittersweet wor…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 02:57AMSaturday, August 4, 2018
SWEET AS PIE, FLAKY AS CRUST, OR BOTH? If the heat in the kitchen is getting you down, you may want to head on over to Hollywood, where the Broadway hit Waitress arrived last night for a lim…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 03:40PMTuesday, July 31, 2018
SHE’S BA-A-A-ACK For those who think the sun won’t come up until 2020, here comes another Annie, that 1977 optimistic spitfire of a musical — based on the Harold Gray comic st…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 09:32PMA FUNNY THING’S HAPPENING AT NORTH COAST REP Only in Ancient Rome! Pseudolus, the wise-cracking slave (Omri Schein), can earn his freedom if he can somehow get the pretty, bubble-heade…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 02:55AMMonday, 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…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 12:56AMSunday, July 29, 2018
CLASSICAL MARTYRS AS NEW JERSEY HOUSEWIVES Imagine Medea, Clytemnestra, Antigone and Cassandra — ancient anti-heroines with loathsome mates, a religious martyr, and a disrespected prop…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 02:09PMThursday, July 26, 2018
ITCHING TO BE SWITCHING ROLES Burt Grinstead and Anna Stromberg’s take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde switches between comedic farce and serious …
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 04:11PM 
