OPERA RETURNS TO RIVERSIDE, AND IT'S BRINGING A 54-PIECE ORCHESTRA The Riverside Lyric Opera's gala concert on March 7 marks a rare moment for the Inland Empire: a full-scale operatic event …
THREE SYLVIAS, ZERO THRILLS Beth Hyland's world premiere at the Geffen Playhouse arrives with the kind of literary bait that makes theater people clasp their reusable water bottles in deligh…
PATRON SAINT OF THE SECOND-RATE A rigorously intelligent and theatrically thrilling revival that restores Shaffer's parable to full force Schopenhauer once drew a distinction between talent,…
TWO MONOLOGUES IN SEARCH OF A DIALOGUE Justin Tanner has spent decades making chaos look easy. Those early Cast Theatre productions like Pot Mom and Zombie Attack trafficked in a particular …
THE ACTRESS WHO MADE THE RIDICULOUS PROFOUND Catherine O'Hara, who has died aged 71, could make you laugh and break your heart in the same scene. Most performers pick a lane; she moved betwe…
Three Couples, Zero Accumulation With a score that forgets to remember, The Notebook drowns in its own mawkish bathwater There's a musical version of The Notebook that might actually work. A…
THE PLAYWRIGHT WHO CHOSE RADIO OVER JAWS Steven Spielberg had asked Tom Stoppard to write the screenplay for Jaws, and Tom said he couldn't as he was writing a play for the BBC. Spielberg sa…
A Night with a Gentleman Thief: Pacific Opera Project's Delightful Fra Diavolo Daniel Auber's Fra Diavolo amassed over 900 performances at the Opéra Comique during the 19th century before b…
AMAZING THEATER HERE AND NOW Kai A. Ealy stands in a doorway wearing a coat that looks like it weighs forty pounds. Maybe it does. His Herald Loomis has just walked off seven years of forced…
WHEN GRIEF MEETS THE ALGORITHM The terrible beauty of grief is that it makes us do irrational things with the most rational tools. In Lauren Gunderson's anthropology, now in its North Americ…
When creation becomes choreography in Frankenstein, the laboratory turns into a stage of desire Mary Shelley's creation continues to haunt not only literature but the stage, where movement a…
HUZZAH AND HO-HUM The curtain speech at Huzzah! " which opened Thursday at The Old Globe " comes with bassoon and tambourine: silence thy phones, feed not ye actors. This bit of business tel…
A Town, a Tragedy, and the Triumph of Kindness The musical Come From Away " with book, music and lyrics by married couple Irene Sankoff and David Hein " tells the remarkable true st…
MURDER NEVER SOUNDED SO SWEET The gentleman killer returns to Southern California with a smile that could polish the silver. In a joint run between Laguna Playhouse and North Coast Repertory…
OUTBREAK OF MANNERS: WHEN POLITENESS TURNS CONTAGIOUS The play begins with a picture of composure. Five parents sit at a polished library table in a progressive private school in Berkeley. T…
THEATRICAL ARRHYTHMIA La Jolla Playhouse has always been fairly adventurous in its programming, but its latest premiere chooses a subject that feels less like theatrical fodder than a medica…
OPERA WITHOUT WALLS: VERISMO IN THE PARK Pacific Opera Project opened Pagliacci into the open air of Heritage Square Park last night, and the result was a strangely festive collision of carn…
A FIELD OF PUNS IN FULL BLOOM Corn puns are like tequila shots. A few will make you smile and loosen you up, but by the time you are ten or twelve deep you start to wonder how you got here a…
SHAKESPEARE, INTERRUPTED About five minutes into & Juliet, Juliet belts "…Baby One More Time" with such raw confusion you half-believe Britney's lyrics might hold the secrets of the un…
COMING HOME When Fiddler on the Roof opened on Broadway in 1964, it collected nine Tony Awards and captured the universality about families weathering change. But backstage, Zero Mostel a…
CRYSTAL PALACE: AWAKENING PERFECTS THE IMPERSONAL It opens with darkness. Then light fractures across a sixty-foot glass stage that shouldn't exist but does, spinning and splitting into impo…
VISIONARY OF STILLNESS AND LIGHT The line was always the thing. Before speech, before movement, there was line. Line as structure, line as breath, line as the actual measurement of time. In …
A VOICE THAT SPANNED CONTINENTS AND CENTURIES The trouble with singers who insist on being versatile is that they make everyone else look lazy. Dame Cleo Laine, who died on July 24th at her …
THEATRE TURNED ALL THE WAY UP There are moments in the theatre when everything converges: writing, performance, design, direction, and something indefinable that transforms craft into revela…
A CHRONICLER OF PRIVILEGED ANXIETY In the peculiar ecosystem of American theatre"where earnestness often trumps elegance and message supersedes craft"Richard Greenberg, who passed on July 4,…