6,591 stories from Stage and Cinema
STILL THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL This reviewer has a confession to make: I don’t particularly like musicals. I'll happily laugh at the jokes and delight in the dancing, but the styl…
PUNCTURING PREVARICATIONS We've seen a lot of lying lately"enough to make Pierre Corneille's 1644 comedy The Liar cruelly contemporary. An uncharacteristic farce from a famously tragic drama…
A SUBURBAN WEST SIDE STORY Sadly, hate conquers all in West Side Story, but the love we see and feel can hold its own. Though over a half-century old, the Bernstein/Laurents/Sondheim/Robbins…
PHILLIPE JORDAN, LORD OF THE RING Little more than 200 years since the birth of Wagner, and the world still can't get enough of the German composer. Love him or hate him, he is one of the mo…
THINK GLOBALLY, DANCE LOCALLY Leaps of faith meet jumps for joy. Closing its 2016-2017 season with a bold new offering by Alexander Ekman, Global Visionaries is a salute to the future and th…
BEFORE ANY GLASS MENAGERIE, A PRISON SWEATBOX It's not the "odor of mendacity" that wafts through this Tennessee Williams play"it's more like the whiff of tear gas. The "kindness of stranger…
PERFECT IMPERFECTIONS Growing up on a steady diet of animated and live-action Disney films and in the shadow of the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, which I visited every year until I was 1…
DISCO DESPAIR Now festering at Chicago's A Red Orchid Theatre, 3C, David Adjmi's 90-minute one-act, is perversely perky, as zany as a zombie. With rapid-fire non-sequiturs and six crazy/need…
COME SALUTE THE END OF AN ERA It’s a bit surreal, but the the theater community’s longest-running AIDS-related benefit is having its final fundraiser on Saturday May 13, 2017. Th…
HAPPY HOAX OR LITERARY LARCENY? Can we really separate a creator from his art? Can our sense of Shakespeare feel more real to us than his characters do? These aren't rhetorical questions: A …
HIVE AGAINST HIVE Bees, it seems, are humming their last. In the future,honey could well be synthetic. Appropriately debuting on Earth Day weekend, this world premiere from Chicago's Victory…
A WHOLE NEW WORLD FROM BROADWAY: A MUSICAL THAT TRULY SOARS "Open sesame" indeed! It’s "Abracadabra" times ten as the arrival of Aladdin in Chi-town feels as triumphant as Prince Ali's…
SONDHEIM'S CARE PACKAGE FOR LOST LOVERS In a melodically and lyrically mediocre time like, for instance, 2017, even lesser songs by Stephen Sondheim beat half the musicals at large. In 1981 …
THE LOVE CONTINUES [Editor's Note: To celebrate the work being done on intimate stages in Los Angeles, the Center Theatre Group (CTG) is producing Block Party at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. CT…
BRIDGE TO SOMEWHERE I once picked up a hitchhiker a half-mile from a state prison. It was dusk. He wore prison blues and carried a child’s backpack full of knives, cigarette lighters a…
PRIMO AND PRIMO A strange thing happened on the way to the duo piano recital of the once-married pianists Martha Argerich and Stephen Kovacevich at Disney hall last Saturday. A few minutes b…
"IT'S A FREE COUNTRY!" It's one of the seven wonders of the American theater: Few sights on stage are as magical as watching Billie Dawn wise up. This dumb-as-a-rock good-time girl slowly wa…
AN IDENTITY QUEST COMES UP EMPTY As the cops say, "Nothing to see here, folks. Move right along." Or, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there is no "there there." Both cautions apply to Goo…
DEATH BY ANECDOTE A playwright dredges up her past at her peril. As with Goodman Theatre's current confusion King of the Yees, Sarah Ruhl's For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday is a very…
THEATER ON TAPE Once the mainstay of fringe festivals and performance art houses, one-person plays showcasing the likes of James Whitmore and Lily Tomlin became financially viable in the lat…
IT’S TIME FOR S’MORE GROUNDLINGS Who doesn’t love sitting around a campfire scaring the crap outta some brat? Who doesn’t love canoe trips down a rocky brook? Who …
FINAL WEEKEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD If you think the end of the world is scary, how about the end of a run of a terrific new play and you missed it? The Ovation-recommended Apocalypse Pla…
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS As a part of A Noise Within's 25th Season, co-Artistic Director Julia Rodriguez-Elliott helms an extraordinary production of this 1964 hit musical, Man of La Mancha, ad…
FINDING FOCUS Linda Vista is billed as "an adult comedy about immature behavior." Surprisingly tender, Tracy Letts' Steppenwolf stunner examines one man's mid-life crisis from all sides and,…
A FIRSTÂ DATE THAT GOES WELL The device of having characters receive advice from a conscience or someone from their past is tried and true in musicals: They’re Playing Our Song‘…
