130 stories by "F. Kathleen Foley"
Playwright Raymond J. Barry straddles the naturalistic and the mannered in "Foreclosure or Yelling at Women Walking Their Dogs," a new play closing this week at the Greenway Court Theatre in…
Suspend individual judgment in the blind service of an ideology, and the result is evil. That's the underlying theme of Jesse Mu-En Shao's "The End Times," now premiering at the Skylight The…
Watching "The Cause, My Soul," a world-premiere visiting production at the Odyssey, can be an exasperating experience " not because the play is bad or even middling, but because it so narrow…
Don't look for ambiguously tortured protagonists or tedious plot developments in "Othello." Arguably one of Shakespeare's most simply structured tragedies, it offers as straightforward a por…
To call Will Arbery's "The Mongoose" an oddity would be an understatement. Now in its world premiere at the Road on Magnolia, the play is an engagingly nonsensical, frustratingly elliptical …
Fifteen years ago, Roy Battocchio's "Thicker Than Water" had its world premiere at Theatre West and quickly became one of the most popular offerings in the now-53-year-old theater's history.…
Tony Abatemarco's "Forever House," now in its world premiere at the Skylight Theatre in L.A., offers plenty of charm, vividly comic characters and gut-busting one-liners. That said, a few of…
When they first burst onto the scene in the 1960s, Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield, a.k.a. the Righteous Brothers, faced an unusual problem: White radio stations boycotted their brand of blue…
It's hard to believe, but the Troubadour Theater Company has been around for more than 20 years, doing turn-away business at venues around Southern California. The group's productions inc…
Reviewing an established hit that has been running for decades seems a tad presumptuous -- sort of like criticizing the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade for an off-key marching band. After all…
Shakespeare's histories can prove baffling, particularly in the aggregate. England's monarchical succession is tough to grasp for all but the most dedicated scholars. However, those who thin…
About 20 years ago director Elina de Santos helmed a landmark production of "Awake &Â Sing!" that ran for nine months to sellout houses at the Odyssey Theatre in West L.A. Now De Santos r…
First produced off-Broadway in 1990, Stephen Sondheim's "Assassins," book by John Weidman, didn't receive a Broadway production for well over a decade. And although that Broadway run resulte…
Playwright Wendy Graf grapples with the reasons a young American woman would convert to Islamic radicalism in her world premiere solo show, "All American Girl," an InterACT Theatre Company p…
The pith of Harold Pinter is in the subtext. Innocuous interchanges " about a pilfered cheese roll, a ticking clock, a piece of fried bread " take on layers of meaning and menace that transc…
One of two world premieres in Theatre West's annual Writers-in-Rep series, Jule Selbo's "Boxes" is a taut exercise in psychological manipulation that is one of those rarities in the contempo…
Playwright Dominique Morisseau displays plenty of fire in "Sunset Baby," her heartfelt but undisciplined drama now in its West Coast premiere at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble.
Playwright Charles Evered takes the low road to easy sentimentality and derivative storytelling in "Class," a West Coast premiere at the Falcon.
In 1940, during the height of the Battle of Britain, the City of Benares set sail from Liverpool to Canada with some 90 refugee children aboard.
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's musical play, "The Threepenny Opera" was famously mounted in 1945 Berlin just after the war.Â
The Troubadour Theater Company, that inimitable local treasure founded and led by clown extraordinaire Matt Walker, has never done a bad show. Even the group's lesser efforts have been r…
In "Dirty," a West Coast premiere at the Zephyr, playwright Andrew Hinderaker balances precariously between soapbox and gutter. For the most part the play maintains its dramatic equilibrium,…
Since time immemorial, the plot device of a dead child has propelled drama from Iphigenia to Ibsen to "Rabbit Hole." At a comfortably cathartic distance, audiences have thrilled to the unima…
Tom Stoppard has always balanced his lambent intellectualism with a certain cheeky playfulness, all the while toying with conventional notions of dramaturgy and breaking new ground in the th…
What is perhaps Edward Albee's most unlikely play, "The Goat Or, Who Is Sylvia?" is certainly one of his very best.
