6,591 stories from Stage and Cinema
CRITIC COVETS HEART It is unfair but true that in watching 24th Street Theatre’s American premiere production of Finegan Kruckmeyer’s Man Covets Bird, one automatically compares …
LUCIO SILLA REVELS IN YOUTH'S BEAUTY Mozart's early chamber opera Lucio Silla, written at the precocious age of sixteen, is an excellent example of the bel canto style. Not only is the singi…
KILLING COUSINS Serial killers can be fun. In the film Theatre of Blood Vincent Price sardonically played a Shakespearean actor, a hate-filled ham who doggedly "offs" the critics who panned …
INHOSPITALITY IN A HOSPITAL A few weeks ago I spent a couple of nights at a hospital waiting for someone to be born. A couple of weeks later I spent a few more nights at the hospital, includ…
OSCAR'S JUKEBOX It's a title to win a crowd on the spot: The revue Hollywood's Greatest Song Hits just requires the right arrangements for a cabaret showcase of four solid talents. Add to th…
GET CARRIE’D AWAY The key words in the title Carrie: The Killer Musical Experience are Killer Experience. Director Brady Schwind has taken a forever-troubled musical based on sou…
SOMETHING UNSATISFYINGLY APOCRYPHAL There are a few things that might not be entirely true about the Blank’s "World Premiere" of Jeff Tabnick’s Something Truly Monstrous, which o…
CAPTURES EVERYTHING BUT THE COMEDY Two big ironies attach to the new show at the Broadway Playhouse in Water Tower Place. First, it's called Unspeakable but it's not afraid to say anything: …
VON TOURIST TRAPP The original stage version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music was such a crowd pleaser that many are surprised to learn the 1959 Mary Martin vehicle received v…
WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME …I would Love you ten years before the flood; And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews " Andrew Marvell It’s a measure of progr…
I'M FEELING UNLUCKY The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence is Theatre Wit's latest local premiere by Madeleine George, author of Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England, a 2014 pro…
IN CHARM’S WAY Turning a beloved French film into an American stage musical is a dicey proposition at best, but that's precisely what Berkeley Rep has done with Jean-Pierre Jeunet's 20…
THE OLD TESTAMENT MEETS THE NEW WORLD A saga of American origins, John Steinbeck's most ambitious novel was published in 1952 and, three years later, starred James Dean and Julie Harris in a…
OOH LA LA FOR LA CAGE AUX FOLLES If any gay activist ever derides this delightful musical, they would do well to remember just how radical La Cage aux Folles was when it hit Broadway in 1983…
SUNNY AND SCARE You think theater in Los Angeles can be frightening? Well, here's entertainment that's intentionally soulless. "It's so funny, you'll laugh your head off" takes on a whole ne…
BREAD AND BOXING Raw as realism requires, good plays about boxing are more than just Rocky slugfests. Like Clifford Odets' seminal Golden Boy, they transform an atavistic popular distraction…
I DID IT FOR THE DAUGHTERS Does evil alter when it switches sexes? Right now the Storefront Theatre is hosting No Beast So Fierce, adaptor/director Max Traux's gender-bending exploration …
DRAMATIC PROFILING In the three years since American Theater Company debuted this corrosive cultural tragicomedy on the North Side, Disgraced has become a massive hit, with revivals on Broad…
A TRAGICOMEDY WITH TRICKS Well, why not do The Tempest as a magic show? It comes with Shakespeare's territory. During the Duke of Milan's unhappy exile, deposed by his nefarious brother, wit…
ONE SKETCH, TWO STYLES When the National Theatre of Great Britain produced One Man, Two Guvnors, playwright Richard Bean's 2011 update of Carlo Goldoni's 18th Century comedy, The Servant of …
A RARE TREAT SERVED PIPING HOT The Stephen Schwartz/Joseph Stein musical The Baker's Wife never made it to Broadway. The musical folded in Washington. D.C. in 1976 before reaching New York C…
THEY DO IT ALL FOR US 14 years ago, terror became a date in the calendar. "9/11" casts an ever darker shadow onto the future. It also remains the latest official loss of American innocence. …
YOKED ASUNDER Don't believe the ironic title of a first-act song: Daisy and Violet Hilton were not your "Typical Girls Next Door." Conjoined (or "Siamese" twins), they were, grotesquely enou…
LOS PECES VIOLENTOS There is a dark parable in the bible, in Luke or maybe John; it’s in the Scheherazade " the tale of the thousandth night, perhaps. Your translation didn’t hav…
ME NEXT TIME I’m running up Pico. It’s 7:54 p.m. and I just parked on Rimpau because I’ve only lived in L.A. for 18 years and Google Maps told me Theatre Theater was .1 mil…
