6,591 stories from Stage and Cinema
UNTO US A CHILDÂ IS MADE This fascinating drama by playwright Zayd Dohrn is set in the bizarre subculture of women who buy dolls that eerily resemble actual babies. Can this possibly be en…
A BUMPY ROAD TO A STRAIGHTFORWARD POLITICAL THRILLER A deadly explosion goes off in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. The U.S. blames a terrorist group they say is funded by the…
PASSIONLESS PRONOUNCEMENTS Freud's enduring question persists: "What do women want?" Gina Gionfriddo's aggressively hip drama, now in an equally frenetic staging by Kimberly Senior, offers a…
WHEN IN ROME, DO AS THE ROMANS DO (NOT THE BRITISH) With Puccini's Tosca, Lyric Opera has done one update too many this season. Don Giovanni was bumped up 300+ years in time to the 1920s, Ca…
EXCITING QUARTET COMES TO SEGERSTROM I've been on a chamber music kick for about four years now. From intimate salons in living rooms to concert halls, I'm discovering composers I've never h…
MUTANT — AS IN FREAK OF NATURE After watching the roaring, sputtering, and cursing along with regretful descriptions of drug use and parental abuse back in the "bad old days," I had to…
THE JUICY APPLES' SLICE OF LOVE You can't keep an eloquent family down. TimeLine Theatre Company's concurrent productions of election-night episodes from Richard Nelson's Apple Family Plays …
SAILING THROUGH FOG The title of Eugene O’Neill’s 1921 drama Anna Christie is the nom de guerre chosen by a hard-knock 18-year-old who decides that if she’s going to get pa…
ACTION SNAPSHOTS IN AN APPLE HARVEST Commissioned by New York's Public Theatre, the four-part saga Apple Family Plays by the prolific Richard Nelson is a remarkable effort to preserve the pr…
EAGERLY I WISHED THE MARROW For all its surface eccentricity, Nevermore, The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, written, composed, and directed by Jonathan Christenson, …
IT DOESN'T SUCK TO BE AVENUE Q AT CORONADO In the right setting, irreverence is so jovial. Perhaps our era of thought-police and political correctness has made it delicious to pervert that w…
RELUCTANT HEROISM IN A CHANGING CAUSE Oracle Theatre, Chicago's 44-seat public-access venue where tickets are free, just unleashed another populist piledriver. It's a play with several sourc…
NO BOYS IN THIS BAND In only 80 minutes, Grant James Barjas's Accidentally, Like a Martyr assembles the very actual denizens of an obscure, unnamed gay bar on Manhattan's East Side"and ma…
ONE HAND, ONE HEART"ONE HIT! 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/So…
IN GOOD COMPANY "It's a revue, but not a revue," Stephen Sondheim said about Company when he was interviewed at Segerstrom in 2013. This surprised me because the groundbreaking 1970 musical …
LET THERE BE DARK In endurance sagas such as Lord of the Flies and The Blue Lagoon, stranded youngsters on deserted islands try to reimagine civilization by mimicking adult classics, or else…
A TAB OF ECSTASY Following Alberta Ballet's triumphant tributes to the music of Canadian legend Joni Mitchell and England's international superstars Sir Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Fumblin…
CAUGHT IN TENNESSEE'S WALTZ An opera disguised as a play, Tennessee Williams' 1951 labor of longings The Rose Tattoo is the first and last word on heartbreak. The master made a good choice t…
SING OUT, ETHEL! What a difference a vowel makes! After his catchy title The Book of Merman, it seems that Leo Schwartz' delightful world premiere musicale practically wrote itself: Yo…
WIZARDLY THEATER THAT COMES WITH A HEART The Woodsman, James Ortiz's delightful and dark invention, which he stars in and co-directs with Claire Karpen, dramatizes the story of how the Tin M…
ONE MIRACLE TOO MANY A very righteous offering from Stage Left Theatre, Penny Penniston's world premiere Keys of the Kingdom is a well-intentioned attempt to build bridges between ideologica…
HIT AND MISS SEMI-HORROR Calling your 75-minute compilation Scary Stories 2015 puts the premium on terror, a concept or condition that's hard to compete with real life. In the thoughtfully p…
FALSTAFF LITE There's potent psychology operating inside Shakespeare's two-part Henry IV, the twin tales of a false father and a false son. The latter is Prince Hal, the fiery rebel whose…
A YEAR OF ECSTATIC MOMENTS Last year, as ever, I missed what I am told was some of the best theater that went up in Southern California. I don’t know what’s Best or Most. I saw s…
¡FIGARO! ¡FIGARO! ¡FIGARO! An updating of The Marriage of Figaro took New York by storm in 2013. Taking the debate over immigration reform, a multi-cultural English/Spanglish adapta…
