FANTASTIC, INDEED Fantasticks may be the longest running musical in America, but Amanda Dehnert's magical production at South Coast Rep should run forever. The backdrop for this timeless won…
A FRATERNITY OF MASTER THESPIANS At its core, Jeff Stetson's Fraternity is about the two options that face black men in today's society (or, at least, the society of Birmingham in 1987, when…
BEDEVILED An off-stage character is tortured by a Salem court in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, a play which dramatizes the Salem witch trials of 1692. As heavy stones are placed upon his che…
NOW THIS YOU GOTTA SEE Of the 32 shows I attended in Chicago recently, the most charming experiences were with four musical revivals, three from Broadway's heyday — the 1930s through t…
A fascinating phenomenon is occurring in the theater, one which was elucidated by many shows that I saw in Chicago over the past couple of weeks. As the art of playwriting (to wit: storytell…
I REMEMBER THE AMUSEMENT PARK BUT FORGOT WHAT THE RIDE WAS ABOUT The more I think about the Hypocrites' latest theater spectacle, Ivywild, the more entranced I feel about the imaginative pro…
CORNOGRAPHY It's been 70 years since Rodgers and Hammerstein ushered in the "golden era" of Broadway musicals with Oklahoma! and some dust has settled on the green corn of the 40s. Well, an …
DYING TO DIRECT It turns out that a career as a top literary agent at William Morris and CAA served as a solid stepping-stone for Michael Peretzian's dream job: directing in theater. As an a…
PERFECTED STORIES Ever since Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories premiered at South Coast Rep in 1996, and especially after it hit the Broadway boards starring Linda Lavin in 2010, the…
LEAVE IT TO CHILDREN’S THEATER TO MAKE THE BIGGEST STATEMENT OF ALL The biggest opening in Chicago last week was the behemoth pre-Broadway spectacle Big Fish, but right across to…
BLIZZARD TALE In meteorology, the phenomena known as Lake Effect occurs when a cold system glides over the warmer water of a large lake and dumps huge amounts of precipitation, usually snow,…
PLOUGHED UNDER BYÂ GOOD INTENTIONS AND BADÂ SONGWRITING What a great idea: Create modern folk songs to represent Americans whose voices have been given short shrift (or ploughed under) b…
FAUST IN SPACE Just because I recommend Trap Door's latest production doesn't mean that I understand it. Core of the PUDEL (pronounced "poodle") is an Avant Garde/Experimental/Movement Theat…
ALMOST A FULL MOON The theater has been sorely affected by electronic communication. Since the advent of the internet, at least, the cumbersome amount of news bits and twittering has infecte…
OH BROTHERS! Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: Talk about a musical with a strange history! It begins with the Ancient Roman legend "The Rape of the Sabine Women" " attributed to Plutarch " f…
THE MUSICAL WITH LEGS Musical Theatre West's (MTW) exuberant production of A Chorus Line proves that the musical is as fresh as the day it appeared almost forty years ago, when the standard …
SO MANY ATROCITIES IN ONE EVENING When stories appear which elucidate the carnage during WWII, many look to heaven and ask, "Why?" But the script and execution of Our Class, about a true-lif…
NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED Henrik Ibsen stated that he had no conscious thought of making propaganda with A Doll's House (1879). Yet many productions have a feminist bent: Nora is the misu…
BETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE A soldier named Mario returns from Iraq just in time for the 2005 New Year's celebration with his East Los Angeles family, friends and novia " but he also retur…
MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL Although he wrote at least 15 complete operas, Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968) is not a familiar name, even to many in the opera world. The first-generation modernist…
FOOD FIGHT Using Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children (1939) as a template, writer Peter Howard has created a wartime tale about the need to survive in challenging times. But the war isn…
EVERYBODY HAS A BALL AT THIS CINDERELLA Gioachino Rossini's Cinderella (La Cenerentola) was written in 1817 during the bel canto era when operas were written to showcase beautiful singing, b…
NETHER NOR Reality is the state of things as they actually exist, right? Not anymore. It's fascinating that the World English Dictionary defines reality as "the state of things as they are o…
HAVING ISSUES WITH ISSUES Ken LaZebnik's On the Spectrum, which opened last week at the Fountain Theatre, belongs to a genre known as Theatre of Identity, aka Social Issues Theatre; the idea…
NOT WORTH THE WEIGHT The title of Samuel D. Hunter's The Whale refers to three things. The first is Charlie, a homebound, 600-pound tutor who instructs online classes in expository writing. …