3,354 stories by "Tony"
The afterlife has always enjoyed a sturdy tenancy on the musical stage, but "High Spirits""Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray's tuneful graft onto Noël Coward's "Blithe Spirit""has, until now, …
For Heartbeat Opera's presentation of Massenet's exquisite "Manon," the co-adaptors Rory Pelsue, who also directs, and Jacob Ashworth, the company's artistic director, take a scalpel to Mass…
By loosening the moorings that usually tether one actor to one role, director and adaptor Karin Coonrod peers, with unusual intimacy, into Lear's psychic weather. The choice to distribute hi…
Anne Gridley begins "Watch Me Walk" by taking its title at punishingly literal face value. She introduces herself, grips her walking stick"never a cane, a semantic correction that quickly re…
THREE ERAS, ONE MISSED OPPORTUNITY Brownstone collapses under unfocused, baffling staging Catherine Butterfield's Brownstone (2008) is built around a solid, even enticing idea: we have three…
REAF'S IF THIS IS LOVE " A ONE-NIGHT CABARET VALENTINE Big voices, big heart, and Jason Brock right in his element Since 1995, REAF (Richmond/Ermet AIDS Foundation) has been bringing amazing…
The choreography by Toran X. Moore is exquisitely attuned to both context and cast. Moore's steps and motifs create a full canvas of movement that breathes with the beat and bends to the dem…
Sarah Kirkland Snider's first opera arrives with a confidence that feels almost paradoxical: it is at once tightly focused and lavishly expansive, a work that fixes its gaze on a single hing…
CHAMBER MUSIC IN AN IDEAL SETTING Glorious acoustics, a resonant space, and musicians who know how to listen to one another. There are few places in Los Angeles better suited to chamber musi…
SIX QUEENS BEAT A FULL HOUSE A Clever, Electrifying Concert That Sometimes Overwhelms Its Own Story History serves us well in stories for musicals. From 1776 to Evita to Hamilton, all the pl…
WHEN CLOWNING, THERAPY, AND TRAUMA COLLIDE Rachel Troy's fierce, genre-breaking solo triumph is fully realized, ferociously smart, and genuinely exhilarating. I receive thousands of invitati…
REVENGE AS ENTERTAINMENT With Will Swenson and Lesli Margherita, La Mirada goes all in for this major revival Some shows you make time for. Others you plan around. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Ba…
What "If We Kiss" captures, with rare delicacy, is the way young people experience such convergences as both comic and catastrophic. The play treats adolescent feeling with respect, refusing…
A DELICIOUSLY VERY WRONG WAY TO CELEBRATE THE HOLIDAYS Santa's dead, the carols are cursed, and Zombie Joe wants your soul for Christmas If you survived Urban Death: Tour of Terror in Octobe…
Greenberg's greatest achievement is his refusal to inflate or apologize for the material. He treats "The Baker's Wife" as what it is: a musical of sensibility rather than momentum, concerned…
In "BUM BUM (or, this farce has Autism)," EPIC Players"New York's indefatigable standard-bearer for neuroinclusive performance"unfurls a world premiere that feels less like a conventional ne…
In the cavernous expanse of the Park Avenue Armory, where spectacle often arrives inflated to mythic proportions, "The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions" materializes as a freque…
HERBERT ROSS'S BOHÈME RETURNS Beauty polished, questions still lingering Puccini's tale may be endlessly familiar, yet the recent Los Angeles staging shows how even the most well-trodden …
Iraisa Ann Reilly in her one-woman show "A Bodega Princess Remembers La Fiesta de los Reyes Magos, 1998" at Ensemble Studio Theatre (Photo credit: Valerie Terranova) If you venture into the …
In its final form, the piece stands as both elegy and proclamation: a testament to a heritage reclaimed, and to the fierce, necessary act of making contact"full, unguarded, and profoundly hu…
A PRINCIPLED PRODUCTION Simon Stephens' deceptively simple romance finally reveals its cosmic heart in close quarters at Skylight Theatre Director Cameron Watson delivers a remarkably authen…
DON'T JEW HAVE ANYTHING BETTER TO DO? {From the Archives " Back in 2010, when Facebook was still fun and Broadway still flirted with stereotypes like they were going out of style (which they…
By the time the play reaches its understated yet piercing climax, the question is no longer whether ChiChi and Theodore are "right" for one another"though that question lingers"but rather wh…
CUTE MEETS CUTE, AGAIN Rendered with a rom-com frame around a night of emotional archaeology, Douglas Lyons's Table 17, briskly staged by Zhailon Levingston, wants to be irresistible, and fo…
A RIPPING GOOD YARN WITH A JOLLY GOOD CAST OPERATION MINCEMEAT EXTENDS ON BROADWAY When I first encountered Operation Mincemeat at Riverside Studios in London back in 2022, it was a scrappy,…
