6,591 stories from Stage and Cinema
CELEBRATING BROADWAY ROYALTY When I tell you that the Original Broadway Cast Recording of the revue covering Harold Prince’s oeuvre mostly works, it’s an enormous compliment. For…
NO SHY VIOLET Based on The Ugliest Pilgrim, a short story by Doris Betts, Violet — with book and lyrics by Brian Crawley and music by Jeanine Tesori — takes place in 1964 and fol…
BUT IS IT GOOD FOR THE JEWS? I love Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now. It feels a bit highfalutin putting it that way, as if I sit around reading Victorian classics when not appreciatin…
FILLING THE VOID IN L.A. THEATER Neither my friend nor I were looking forward to this play — I mean, good grief, when I heard that it was about a couple of “fools” going on…
GIMME THAT DO-RE-MI, BOYS The 1960 musical Do Re Mi is about a would-be big shot named Hubie Cram, a wheeler dealer who just can’t make the big time. As his wife Kay says, they have 40…
OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF CENTENARIANS "Life is short. It's up to you to make it sweet." No cliché in Emily Mann's moving 1993 play, this is one of many hard-earned pearls of wisdom in her gener…
SOME ENCHANTED EVENING, INDEED Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1949 Broadway hit South Pacific is so full of familiar, classic numbers that it almost feels like a Broadway review in itself �…
“I'M NOT ALONE ANYMORE, I HAVE ME!” Charles Busch once said he thought of himself as the Loretta Young of drag, specializing in creatures of artifice, vanity, and soulful, often …
PATTI QUAKES, PATTI SHAKES. PATTI GETS HER CAKES You can only listen and love: The former Patricia Louise Holt-Edwards oozes energy on stage. She kicks off her shoes in sheer delight. Loving…
PROMETHEUSÂ SETS THE STAGE AFIRE Imagination sometimes seems abstract. It's a term you can't always savor — until you see it blossom before you. It's in full force in City Lit's revi…
WHEN METAPHORS BECOME MONSTERS Art thrives when it dances on the edge of a razor — flaunting itself and teasing us — fully embracing the risk of toppling over at any moment and s…
YOUR FLIES ARE OPEN The running joke behind this unauthorized musical based on a 1954 novel and a 1963 film is how it hides its homage: To avoid copyright infringement, we never hear "Flies"…
BLENDING BANANAS AND BORSCHT Mark Harelik's 1985 play The Immigrant is based on the story of his grandparents, Haskell and Leah Gorehlik, immigrants from Russia who settled in the tiny centr…
SPLITSVILLE Five years after its world premiere, L.A. is just now getting Amy Herzog’s disturbing domestic thriller. Both praised and not, the controversy with this one-act has been…
NOT A TENNESSEE WALTZ The strangest thing about Suddenly Last Summer is that the main character is never seen. But, talked about for 90 minutes by two dangerously partisan women, he's …
AN UPDATED BABY IS STILL CAPTIVATING THEATER For all its melodrama, Jane Anderson's The Baby Dance has always been one of my favorite plays since I first saw it at Pasadena Playhouse in 1990…
A HONEYMOON IN GLENDALE More fun than walking away a few bucks ahead from a black jack table, this pell-mell, silly-sweet, old-fashioned musical comedy (ya know, gangsters, lovers, Elvis imp…
EAGER FOR EGAN It was sheer luck that I've been able to see Broadway Baby Susan Egan in over 10 shows since the mid-1980s. From intimate stages (Babes at the Matrix; Hello, Again at the Blan…
WEST SIDE GLORY It's a relief that Chita Rivera, one of the last great holdovers from the Golden Age of Broadway is still performing today, and you'll get only one-night — Thursday May…
MAKE A NIGHT OF IT THIS SUMMER WITH TWO BIG SHOWS The West End, one of the great epicentres of the Theatrical world, is undergoing something of a renaissance these days. It has always popula…
A BLUES REVUE A female-centric revue from 1980, Sheldon Epp’s Blues in the Night celebrates the melancholic but often very humorous songs of black American folk origin. The blues as we…
KIDS RULE IN ENERGETIC ROCK There is an announcement before the start of School of Rock The Musical. After the expected exhortations against using electronic devices, we are assured that yes…
A LOT OF BLOOD WILL OUT Blood will have blood. It also sells tickets. And the theater's thirstiest sanguinary spectacle remains the unspeakable Scottish tragedy. The darkest doings the Bard …
A ROTTEN KIND OF GUN CONTROL It's an inhuman term, “collateral damage.” Usually it's reserved for supposedly dispensable victims, necessary sacrifices for a nobler cause. But wha…
A PLAY THAT POOPS ON ITSELF The animal realm (we won't say kingdom) fairly teems with same-sex survival. In all, over 1,500 species experiment with alternative lifestyles: Sapphic seagull…
