1,324 stories by "Charles McNulty"
Critic's Notebook: 'Twelfth Night' and 'Richard III' with English actor Mark Rylance at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre face off against 'Macbeth' with Ethan Hawke at Lincoln Center.NEW YORK &md…
Brian Dennehy's performance at the Mark Taper Forum is forceful and heartfelt, but the Sebastian Barry play that nods to Irish history lacks momentum. Whatever form Irish novelist and playwr…
Handcrafted magic in the cheeky prequel to Peter Pan employs simplicity and audience imagination to cast its spell.These days it seems as though every time I turn around there's another inst…
LOS ANGELES — Ever since Stephen Sondheim reached the four-score mark three years ago, the spotlight has shifted from his work to the legend himself. There have been birthday galas, mu…
Despite a cumbersome setup, the romantic comedy 'Parfumerie' playing in fancy Beverly Hills digs makes a festive holiday treat for adults.Scrooge still holds a monopoly on holiday theater, b…
One-woman show 'I'll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers' turns out to be just the right fit for the Divine Miss M.NEW YORK — Tea time at Sardi's, and in rushed Bette Midler too busy…
Playwright Young Jean Lee shares the bleak facts of life in her delightful hipster cabaret.Death and denial were made for each other, but for those facing tragedy, the raw truth can be a ton…
The musical 'Side Show' flopped on Broadway in 1997 but won an enduring audience. Bill Condon enters the scene to relaunch the musical. Not all problems are solved, but there's power aplenty…
Anne Barton, one of the 20th century’s foremost Shakespeare scholars, died Monday in Cambridge, England. She was 80 years old. The announcement was made by Cambridge University, wh…
The blunt '12 Angry Men' at Pasadena Playhouse confronts racial relations by remaking Reginald Rose's jury into six black and six white men.Direct from the age of black-and-white television,…
Critic's Notebook: The hot-ticket Broadway revival of 'The Glass Menagerie,' Tennessee Williams' breakthrough play, underscores the poetry-tinged beauty of his writing. More productions like…
The Latino Theater Company drama at the Los Angeles Theater Center is tantalizing but feels like a work in progress.Marcus Gardley taps into some fascinating, and for many little known, hist…
'The Black Suits,' a new musical co-created by Joe Iconis, offers a no-stakes, Partridge Family/After School Special sort of tale about a fledgling band. Still, Iconis is a talent in the mak…
Set in one room, the South Coast Rep production goes further than many works in presenting meaningful character interaction.Amy Herzog's "4000 Miles" is a small drama that's confined to one …
Audra McDonald, in an L.A. Opera-presented concert at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, digs deep into musical theater songs old and new, combining purity of emotion with purity of sound.Audra …
Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz and Rafe Spall wrangle for the emotional upper hand in Harold Pinter's 'Betrayal,' directed by Mike Nichols. The guys get the focus; Weisz's character is odd man o…
Muddled beginning, smudgy staging and distracting songs in this musical ultimately add up to a tender honesty.NEW YORK — "Fun Home," the musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel's extraord…
Alison Pill radiates Old Hollywood and theatrical style in an adaptation of 'Wait Until Dark' that only partly dusted off an outdated work.The suspense is laboriously built up in the Geffen …
A family of con artists are as ruthless with one another as they are with their marks in Carla Ching's clever but labored drama at South Coast Repertory.In the program for "Fast Company," a …
The characters are more involving than the plot in Samuel D. Hunter's play at the Old Globe about unresolved relationships.SAN DIEGO — Characters in drama don't have to be likable, as …
Stanley Kauffmann, who died Wednesday at 97, will be remembered for his intellectually rigorous, neatly manicured film reviews -- the meditative yin to Pauline Kael’s ecstatic yang.
The fusion of Jeff Buckley songs with 'Romeo and Juliet' is sometimes hypnotic at the Old Globe, but more often it jangles.Shakespeare and contemporary popular music might seem strange bedfe…
'The Sunshine Boys,' with former 'Taxi' stars Danny DeVito and Judd Hirsch at the Ahmanson Theatre, feels dated and a step slow.The knock against Neil Simon in the early days was that he car…
Critic's notebook: The festival has created a significant cultural event and allowed us to appreciate the scope of an unorthodox theater town.Nearly all of the shows in Radar L.A. have packe…
An erotic 1933 story from Japan is beguilingly rendered in a joint production by Complicite and Japan's Setagaya Public Theatre.Rarely has the dance of shadows, the interplay of light and da…
