212 stories by "Jason Rohrer"
A MOUTHFUL OF SAND Kiff Scholl’s production of Raymond King Shurtz’s new play, Under the Desert, is a show that’s impossible to discuss without equivocation. It’s…
SOUR SATURDAY A troubled production is a sad spectacle, especially at a venerable theater that does some fine work. PRT’s new staging of the John Steinbeck novel Sweet Thursday tri…
A GOGOL BORDELLO In adapting Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 comedy The Government Inspector (also known, in direct translation, as The Inspector General) for a modern idiom, Oded Gross has taken…
SMART FOOLERY A young-audience offshoot of the Troubadour Theater Company, the Funky Punks seem dedicated to kiboshing the notion that a clown’s function is to scare children. At t…
"TONGUES IN TREES, BOOKS IN THE RUNNING BROOKS" In order to make me laugh, a Shakespeare comedy must be well-cast. This man’s musings on the darker territories of the heart have ne…
THIS ALMOST GREAT NIGHT Andrew Dolan, a working actor perhaps better known as a writer, had his second completed play produced first, in a Los Angeles world premiere: last season’s kno…
THE FRIEND IN THE DARK Did you ever drive alone across a big, flat stretch of country at night? You and your headlights and the asphalt spinning beneath like a long speckled treadmill " …
A MESS IN BIG POCKETS Imagine yourself not exactly as JFK cheerleader Arthur Schlesinger Jr., but at least a 40ish New Deal Democrat, attending a John F. Kennedy rally in New York City in th…
COMMUNION If the Ahmanson Theater is akin to a cathedral (elevated rules of decorum apply, and a certain dress code, and it’s expensive and showy in such a way as to invite your tithe …
OF GOOD TURNS AND SCREWINGS All emotional reaction comes filtered through prerequisite knowledge: the sound of a crying baby is annoying, unless it’s your baby, in which case that soun…
THE IMPERFECT STORM Over lunch today, I tried to tell someone about Michael Elyanow’s new take on the Medea myth and found myself crying into my tikka masala. The material is horri…
RIGHT UP HALF-BAKED ALLEY Keith Stevenson’s writing in Out There on Fried Meat Ridge Rd. unsteadily walks a line between high and low comedy, veering more often toward sit-comism. …
TAUGHT BY MASTERS William Faulkner might or might not have quipped that Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies he’d ever met. Faulkner definitely did call James both priggish…
GRIEG, INTERRUPTED The Pianist of Willesden Lane features world-class piano playing, a moving story, a performer who has mastered the art of the former but not of the latter, and a director …
REVEALING JUDY HOLLIDAY If you really never cared about Judy Holliday, because you only know her from grating performances in unsophisticated 50's movies, you’re not alone. (Turns …
DRINKS ARE QUICK Corey Womack has produced and stage-managed my two favorite Shakespeare shows of the past year, and so to me she is among the most able and important people working in the A…
LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NATURALISM Much has been written about Eugene O’Neill’s decision to trade first names with his own dead brother Edmund when naming the younger Tyron…
UNFETTERED AND ALIVE In Paris, Dmitry Krymov’s adaptation of an Ivan Bunin story, traces in words, music, and movement a few moments in the lives of two Russian émigrés (Anna Sinyaki…
YOUR OLD-AGE HOME FOR THE CLASSICS Julia Rodriguez-Elliott’s production of Moliere’s The Bungler reminds me of nothing so much as the last two shows I’ve seen at A Noise Wi…
MUCH ADO TO KNOW ITSELF Sean Branney has been as lauded as a Los Angeles theater director can be, and Theatre Banshee has done some great work recently, so it’s disappointing to report…
IT'S JUST IT'S JUST SEX Cole Porter wrote sex comedies; Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Shakespeare wrote them. Michael Frayn wrote them. Georges Feydeau and Arthur Schnitzler …
ONE VERY, VERY SMALL STEP FOR DAMON CHUA Tony Gatto gets an A for effort, having mounted a colorful if unnecessarily literal production of a Damon Chua script that defies dramaturgy and good…
GHOST WRITTEN Henrik Ibsen wrote at a watershed moment in theater history, at the decline of melodrama and the rise of naturalism; some of his best plays reflect a tension between these pole…
COMICAL, HISTORICAL, WHIMSICAL, “POP”ICAL If you like Shakespeare: go. If you hate Shakespeare: go. If you love or loathe Peter Cetera: go. If you dislike ecstatic, a…
BUT ONLY BY A THREAD During Connected, the 2011 dance piece from Australian company Chunky Move at the Luckman Theater in Los Angeles last week, a strip-club cat-call was heard from the audi…
