6,591 stories from Stage and Cinema
WHAT DO YOU HAVE A TASTE FOR? Six weeks before the opening of Sacred Fools' cannibal play, one of Stage and Cinema's writers (to whom I will assign the alias "Ethel") asked if she could revi…
PROKOFIEV GETS POLITICAL This is not your usual Romeo and Juliet. Truncated and concentrated, Joffrey Ballet's U.S. premiere of Krzysztof Pastor's two-act treatment of Profofiev's celebrated…
WATER IS THE GIFT OF LIFE Water by the Spoonful is the second play in Quiara Alegria Hudes' "Elliot Cycle," three stand-alone plays written over an eight-year period. Elliot, A Soldier's Fug…
WHEN THE MIDDLE CLASS MATTERED The best thing about this well-earned, state-of-the-art revival of Frank Loesser’s Pulitzer-winning masterwork is this: Â No one dared to update what m…
OUR HEARTS BELONG TO MARY, BUT THE REVUE ABOUT HER LIFE NEEDS REINVENTING The legendary actress and singer Mary Martin would have been 100 years old today, and to celebrate this centennial Y…
DON'T PASS ONÂ PASSION When first I saw Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Passion on Broadway in 1994, it was clear that this shattering new work was like nothing that had come before. I…
NO CLOSURE IN BIRMINGHAM Originally produced at Goodman Theatre in 1989, Sally Nemeth's incendiary two-act, 125-minute Mill Fire depicts the origins and aftermath of its title disaster. This…
NOW SHOW ME HOW TO CHEW IT As a critic I have a confession to make: when reading a play for fun I usually skim over the stage directions. I generally don't care how many chairs are in a room…
I LOVES YOU, STORY I grew up with Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald and Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday singing "Summertime" outside a context of which I was ignorant; I never cared much for…
SOME OF THE GLITZ WORKS, BUT BULLETS BASICALLY SHOOTS BLANKS In keeping with the growing trend of turning films into Broadway musicals, Douglas McGrath and Woody Allen's 1994 comedy, Bullets…
RURALITY AS A METAPHORICAL STRATEGY IN CHEKHOV: CHECK Deconstructing two Anton Chekhov short stories with a series of post-hip Director’s Theater flourishes, Paul Lazar and Annie-B Par…
CHARLES DARWIN AND NATURAL AFFECTION With its intentionally contradictory title, In the Garden: A Darwinian Love Story is not about the Garden of Eden; it is an earnest but unengrossing w…
THE DROWSY CHAPERONE OPENS AT THE NORRIS Before American Musical Theater was reinvented by Oklahoma! in 1943, musical comedies were constructed piecemeal"a comic star here, a songwriting tea…
PREHISTORIC PERSPECTIVE ON THE PRESENT Extended until mid-May, Theater Wit's Midwest debut of Madeleine George's sharp new show has clearly touched hearts and nerves. It's no secret: Full of…
GET SOME TALE In 1918, Igor Stravinsky and Swiss writer Ferdinand Ramuz wrote L’Histoire du soldat (The Soldier’s Tale) a short theatrical work meant to be "read, played, and dan…
A NAIL IN OPERA'S COFFIN As the opera's West Coast premiere, A Coffin in Egypt is frankly disappointing. As the first opera production at the new Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing A…
MATCHMAKERS GET BURNED In the social maze of Regency England, where any successful matrimony required sexual politics and emotional intrigue, novelist Jane Austen understood how love gets lo…
A TOOTHLESS LION James Goldman's The Lion in Winter is a brilliant study in castle intrigue laced with deceit and deception, alliances and allegiances, backstabbing and double dealing. The p…
UNBEREAVABLE Bekah Brunstetter's Be a Good Little Widow is awash with structural issues (ambiguous timeline, disconnected scenes), trite themes and relationships, and a refusal to penetrate …
WHICH GAME IS ON? With the 2014 Hollywood Fringe Festival set to begin in June, I decided to check out Fathers at a Game. I was curious to see why this 50-minute three-hander was being bille…
ON A SEA OF TEARS It’s a play that deals with AIDS, and the central character is a little boy. Okay? So while Coeurage Theatre Company (like many who have produced David Saar&#…
YOU'RE THE TOP, GIRLS For the most part, Joyce, a working class Englishwoman in Ipswich is not a sympathetic or likeable person: She is annoyed by her 16-year-old daughter Angie (who admitte…
STRINDBERG ON PROZAC Throughout my tenure with Stage and Cinema I have criticized a number of productions for staging foreign plays too literally, insisting that it is misguided for director…
RECRUITING FOR THE 1% Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár is much better known for the spindrift, gossamer pleasures of his Liliom (which inspired Carousel) and The Good Fairy (which ga…
TAYLOR-MADE When a visiting dance company plays Los Angeles, it usually offers pieces which cover both the old and the new. And so it is with Paul Taylor, who presented last weekend at the C…
