34 stories by "Deborah Klugman"
Spielberg and Company Deliver a Tumultuous Tale for Our Times
Ansel Elgort as Tony and Rachel Zegler as Maria in 20th Century Studios' WEST SIDE STORY, directed by Steven Spielberg. Photo…
One of African American playwright Inda Craig Galván's central themes is the struggle of African American women for self-realization and respect.  A Hit Dog Will Holler isn't her…
A Portrait of Beauty in Flux.
Several weeks ago a colleague of mine, film critic Amy Nicholson, wrote an article in the LA Weekly about the importance of distinguishing between wort…
Sporting a message of sisterhood and tolerance, Wendy Graf's well-intentioned but clumsy drama builds around two half-sisters: Julia (Diarra Kilpatrick), an ambitious attorney living and wor…
Firemen is one of those intense discomfiting plays that at times can have you squirming in your seat, wishing you'd opted to see something less painfully and graphically real. It's also, des…
One would have thought (perhaps hoped is the better word) that Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee's 1955 play Inherit the Wind, about the 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial, would have lost some o…
Oscar Wilde is famous for his sparkling wit, but there's not much spark to this humdrum production of An Ideal Husband, Wilde's moral-minded comedy about a prominent public figure facing a c…
In Kos Kostmayer's On the Money, directed by Tom Ormeny, three overworked and underpaid employees with pressing financial problems debate whether or not to steal from their boss whose sole c…
Plays or films about middle-aged men in midlife crisis are pretty common, which doesn't mean there isn't room for one more, provided the writing is sharp, the plot details fresh and the char…
What do Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy have in common? In Scott Carter's intellectually upscale comedy, all three are smug anthropomorphic spirits, trapped in a single cha…
So What Did Happen in Dallas? Writer/director Christian Levantino Weighs In Most Americans of a certain age still bear the imprint of that day in Dallas when President Kennedy died. L…
Richard Reich Makes the Case for the Besieged Middle Class in this Articulate Documentary Former Secretary of Labor and unabashed liberal Robert Reich speaks to the decline of the Ame…
Though it unfolds in the present, writer/director Asghar Farhadi's beautiful new film underscores how difficult it can be to elude the past. His first to be shot outside his native Iran, the…
A Boy's Dark World Illuminated The title of director George Tillman Jr.'s latest effort, The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete, is not to be taken literally, though you might think…
Stagey Performances and Poor Tech Choices Sabotage a Great Play Death of a Salesman, the classic drama by Arthur Miller, is about American capitalism and the price it extracts from the every…
Filmmaker Jem Cohen's Museum Hours strives to be a meditation on art and life, a reflection on the interchangeability between the painting and sculpture housed in a great museum and the ways…
The Time Being (2012) is a visually arresting film, an ambitious effort undercut by a problem script and a forgettable performance by lead actor Wes Bentley. Bentley plays Daniel, a young pa…
In her smart and funny show Suburban Showgirl, solo performer Palmer Davis portrays alter ego Wendy Walker, a talented dancer who struggles to juggle a passion for her art with motherhood an…
The Magic is Missing in This Latest Neil Jordan Film Byzantium is a name that conjures up mystery and magic, but there's little of either in this awkward vampire film, directed by Neil Jorda…
Comedies for adults come along so rarely these days, it's a pleasure to have one to praise. Directed by Craig Zisk from a smart, perceptive script by Stacy and Dan Chariton, The English Teac…
If you're not a Woody Allen fan " and I am not " you may have trouble relating to writer/director Sophie Lellouche's pleasant if uninspiring chick flick whose hook " the main character's obs…
In the title role Dana Delaney transforms this middling comedy into a crackling satire that makes trenchant commentary on the abuse of power. Delaney plays Chloe, the wife of an ambitious la…
For most of its running time, Violeta Went to Heaven plays out as an engaging although not quite intimate biopic " an illuminative portrait of Chilean singer and artist Violeta Parra (Franci…
In Samuel D. Hunter's The Whale, Charlie (Matthew Arkin) an obese gay man confronting his own mortality reaches out to the daughter he walked out on years ago. Like Hunter's play A Bright Ne…
Adaptation of Rudolfo Anaya's Classic Novel Looks Pretty, Lacks Depth Review by Deborah Klugman Rudolfo Anaya's coming of age novel Bless Me, Ultima, was published in 1972 at a time when cul…
