This OSF production may not have the star power of the film coming out at Christmas, but it has the buoyancy & complexity of feeling that turned "Into the Woods" into a modern classic.
The actors mingle with one another and audience members before the show as if what lies ahead is not an official performance but just another rehearsal. The casually dressed musicians take t…
Rebecca Gilman, the talented author of such plays as "Spinning Into Butter," "Boy Gets Girl" and "The Glory of Living," is known for confronting social problems head-on. Racism and white hyp…
There are no household servants in Joe Orton's "What the Butler Saw," which is appropriately set in a psychiatric clinic. The title, once popular for blue movies, is a British phrase referri…
The setting for Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance" is "the living room of a large and well-appointed suburban home," and scenic designer Santo Loquasto has conjured the scene so sumptuously…
Whenever Mike Nichols worked in the theater, it was inevitably an event, the focal point of the season " the show you simply had to get tickets to or be left in the conversational cold.
When the newly reworked version of Bill Russell and Henry Krieger's "Side Show" opened at the La Jolla Playhouse last year, the production didn't fix all the musical's flaws, but it did reve…
NEW YORK -- Broadway bid farewell to one of its favorites on Monday at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre in a tribute titled "Everybody, Rise! A Celebration of Elaine Stritch."
NEW YORK " If Hugh Jackman decided to headline a musical tribute to the Yellow Pages, Broadway theatergoers would line up around Times Square. But the Tony-winning song-and-dance man/"X-Men"…
Taking stock of Center Theatre Group on the occasion of the Music Center's 50th anniversary is a bit like trying to summarize an up-and-down marriage. So many reasons to leave, so many cheri…
The busy afterlife of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," Victor Hugo's 1831 doorstop novel about a church bell ringer with severe chiropractic difficulties, continues with a musical adaptation t…
At the center of Diana Son's drama "Stop Kiss" is a brutal attack on two women locked in an embrace. The scene is reported rather than graphically dramatized, but the violence clarifies so m…
"Once upon a time," the open sesame of childhood fantasy, worked its magic on adults Sunday at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, where an "Into the Woods" reunion was held with the show's …
Elaine Stritch didn't originate the role of Claire, the alcoholic loose cannon of Edward Albee's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1966 drama "A Delicate Balance." But she did put her corrosively funny…
"King Lear" is regarded as Shakespeare's pinnacle achievement in tragedy, a masterpiece of vast scope and overwhelming intensity. How big is it? A.C. Bradley, the great Shakespearean scholar…
Suicidal depression is easy to overact. The temptation for an actor is to make clarifying gestures when the character's impulse isn't to explain but to withdraw.
"Zealot," Theresa Rebeck's new play at South Coast Repertory, is ostensibly set in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, at the start of the Hajj, the annual holy pilgrimage that able adult Muslims are requi…
In an age of vacuous celebrity, in which body parts can go viral and a good plastic surgeon can get you a bigger pay day than talent, it is heartening to report that Broadway's leading men s…
"Pippin," the Tony-winning revival that transformed Roger O. Hirson and Stephen Schwartz's musical into a circus theatrical, has pitched its tent at the Hollywood Pantages, and it has been q…
"No one has the opportunity of tormenting one another as thoroughly as a man and woman who love one another (= hate one another)," Swedish playwright August Strindberg observed with his usua…
Depending on your taste for kink, "Venus in Fur," David Ives' twisty tale about a casting session between a smug playwright and an earthy actress trying out for the role of a well-born 19th …
In late summer rumors began circulating of a potential coup within Los Angeles' thronging and boisterous smaller theater scene.
The old conundrums about happiness " who's entitled and whether it can be lastingly achieved " are at the heart of Jessica Goldberg's "Better," which is having its world premiere courtesy of…
If the spirit of the theater could be incarnated, it would have looked and sounded very much like Marian Seldes, the Tony Award-winning actress who died Monday after an extended illness. She…
'Bright Star,' the quaint new musical by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell at the Old Globe in San Diego, has a luscious bluegrass score. Too bad the book is such a floridly melodramatic throwb…