RING IT ON! I hadn't read J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring since junior high, and the movie, which is the first installment of Peter Jackson's gorgeous film trilogy The Lord of th…
WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE Somewhere around half-way through Guy Zimmerman's The Black Glass, a "Hollywood Fringe Festival premiere," my mind began to wander. Every opport…
A MISSIONARY'S POSITION At rise: A critic is writing when the doorbell rings. The critic opens the door and reveals Savannah, a perky, Southern, cheerleader-type with pamphlets in her hand. …
ATTEND THIS PLAY Go see Language Rooms now. I bought a ticket with no intention of a review, but Yussef El Guindi is far and away one of the most exciting new playwrights I have heard in yea…
A MUSICAL DIVIDED CAN STILL STAND How I adore Musical Theatre Guild, which is presenting a full-out, highly professional concert staging of the 1975 musical Shenandoah. MTG offers the chance…
NO WAY The current production of No Way Around But Through, a world premiere play by Scott Caan, contains many ingredients that explain why L.A. has little to no reputation as a fountainh…
GUESS WHO'S COMING TO THE WEDDING DINNER? Immediate Family, written by Chicago actor and playwright Paul Oakley Stovall, is part sitcom and part dysfunctional family drama, garnished with ra…
REAPPLYING MAKE-UP ON THE SAME CORPSE Your enjoyment of The Addams Family, now on its National Tour, will depend largely on your expectations. If you are a discerning musical theater aficion…
¿POR QUÉ? I have been trying to figure out sixty ways from Sunday's opening of Los Otros just exactly how to approach a critique. The new one-act musical by composer Michael John LaCh…
VERY IMPERVIOUS AND HARD TO GET, OR WHAT THE HELL..? I'm debating whether or not to tell you to go to Hell. Should you choose to go, playwright Steve Yockey will take you there in the world …
PIECE OF EIGHT Conceived by Ashlin Halfnight and Melanie Sylvan at New York's Electric Pear Productions, Synesthesia can easily be classified in the "Why Didn't I Think of That?" Department.…
TOO MUCH TRAGEDY SPOILS CLEVER CONCEIT Prior to curtain at Sacred Fools' production of Stoneface, the packed house watched samplings of Buster Keaton's films, projected on a screen center st…
IT IS (BUT SHOULDN'T BE) DONE There was something that felt particularly showcase-y about It Is Done, which can best be described as a 22-minute episode of The Twilight Zone laboriously stre…
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY BECOMES A MUSICAL COMEDY 1931 was a crossroads in American history. With no economic recovery in sight, the Depression had people edgy, and when Americans are edgy, they …
MUSICAL TAKES ON REALITY TV What better place than the stage to examine the phenomenon of Reality TV? One would hope that by now, Americans would be wise to the fact that these shows, whethe…
BONA FIDE ACTING FUELS DIDACTIC SCRIPT At about the same time that the United States entered WWI, units of the 24th Infantry Regiment, one of the Army's four black regiments, set up camp on …
WHERE IS MRS. O’LEARY’S COW WHEN YOU NEED HER? Had the inexhaustible 57-year-old Christie Brinkley performed "Roxie" on America's Got Talent, I would have demanded that she make …
IT WOULD HAVE BEEN WONDERFUL East West Players' cross-cultural take on the Stephen Sondheim/Harold Wheeler musical A Little Night Music highlights one of the most shimmering and romantic sco…
BETTER BE ON YOUR AVANT-GARDE Have you ever eaten at a new restaurant and summed it up thusly?: "I have no idea what I just ate! It was a little tough to chew and digest, but the presentatio…
A CAPTIVATING GENDER-BENDING STORY In Michael Premsrirat's thoroughly engaging The Girl Most Likely To, an unnamed teenage Boy (a winning Tobit Raphael) is, and always has been, in the wrong…
THE PAINT JOB ON THIS PROMISING MUSICAL NEEDS DARKER COLORS NPR's This American Life is where I first heard about the 1997 film Hands on a Hard Body, which documented a 1995 dealership-spons…
DEAFTRAP Writer Stephen Sachs and the Fountain Theatre have come up with what would appear to be a fresh approach to Rostand's classic play, Cyrano de Bergerac. In this modern-day version, C…
A WAR OF IDEAS For the first forty-five minutes of City Lit's OPUS 1861, a miracle occurred: I wept. Consistently. The simple but mighty idea is this: six actors dressed in simple army fatig…
TIMON ON OUR HANDS OK, raise your hand if you have read Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. No? Do you even know how to say Timon? It is pronounced TIME-uhn. Have you seen a production? Probably …
TOO MANY THEATER INGREDIENTS SPOIL THE BROTH If there were a Joseph Jefferson Award simply for risk-taking in the theatre, Brandon Bruce would most assuredly win for his direction of John We…