6,591 stories from Stage and Cinema
ENCHANTED FORGIVENESS When the sorcerer Prospero discards his magic staff and abjures his spellbinding ways, it is, of course, Shakespeare's swan song too. (The play will no longer be the th…
KILLER PUSSY Suicide! Euthanasia! Incest! Health Care! Racism! Old age! Corporate America! Spirits! The afterlife! Prison! Duplicity! Playwright Josefina López (Real Women Have Curves) is…
AN EVICTION NOTICE FOR THE 1% This is Brecht's real Mother Courage, not "Canteen Anna," the pointless survivor of the cautionary later play who thrives on war (which as, Brecht implies, capi…
GISELLE'S GAZELLES First staged in 1841, Giselle is one of the oldest surviving ballets still in the international repertory, especially because the lead role is a showcase for the world's l…
MAKE IT ANOTHER OLD-FASHIONED PLEASE It's something of a shocker, really. I had a great time watching Let's Misbehave, a jukebox musical slim on both premise and reality. It's actually more …
THE FOREIGNER HAS GOOD REASON TO STAY PUT Some theatre is staged to raise our awareness.  Some theatre is designed to tell a story that will move us emotionally. Some theatre is inten…
PARENTAL RIGHTS, GRANDPARENTAL WRONGS As with her hit debut drama Spinning Into Butter (1999), Rebecca Gilman's newest agitation Luna Gale, directed by Robert Falls at Goodman Theatre, puts …
MASTURBATING IN THE SUBURBS As directed by Scott Elliott, Thomas Bradshaw's ironically titled new comedy Intimacy is not for the squeamish. A male character literally masturbates to internet…
AN OCEAN OF TIME If you ever climb to the top of the Granite Park Chalet trail in Montana, you will find at the end of the hugely winding, desperately steep pathway a log book containing ent…
A PLAY THAT PUTS YOU INTO THE COLD TAKES YOU OUT OF THE COLD When The House Theatre of Chicago decided to bring Rose and the Rime back to the stage this winter, they couldn’t have pred…
NO COMPRENDO CRISTINA I'm throwing in the towel, giving up the ghost, packin' up my mules and headin' West. Lord knows I tried. I watched attentively, I took notes, I came home and read …
A TWISTED TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE Imagine yourself transported back to 1955: Â Forming values in the image of Father Knows Best; solving family problems as cleanly as Ozzie and Harriet; and …
A CASE OF HIGH-TECH FUSION This production is described by Berkeley Rep as "high-tech fusion" and that, I found, indeed is what it is. Two Anton Chekhov circa-1898 short stories, "Man in a C…
QUEENIE WHY? When George C. Wolfe first tried adapting Duke Ellington's unfinished work Queenie Pie in 1986 it was subtitled "A Jazz Operetta in the Key of Make Believe." Ellington called it…
A DANCE OF LIGHT IN DARKNESS A delight for both kids and adults, the clever and inventive entertainment iLuminate brings to mind the image of dancing graffiti. Wearing black body suits equip…
AN EXALTATION OF LARK We all know Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest, and The Children's Hour, even the 1977 film Julia, based on her book Pentimento. But The Lar…
SKETCHY THEATER Velvet Pile's comedic look at identity and commercial branding, A Word from Our Sponsors, is running as part of the Son of Semele Company Creation Festival. Comprised of come…
NO CLOSURE EVER A tangle of shifting sympathies and treacherous turns, Johnna Adams' spare 75-minute, two-hander one-act teeters on a knife edge during every burning second. Its setting and …
ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK To open their second season, the Independent Opera Company (IOC) is performing Franz Lehar's 1905 operetta The Merry Widow. It appears to be a scaling back a…
FAR OUT The Los Angeles premiere of British choreographer Wayne McGregor's FAR opened at Royce Hall last night, and you are advised to cancel all plans and catch the last performance tonight…
WHEN A WORD OR TWO WILL NOT DO A Word or Two is an apt title for Christopher Plummer's solo show about Christopher Plummer and Christopher Plummer's love of language. He wants to celebrate l…
DONE TO DEATH A ton of fun gets dumped in this calculated musical spinoff from Mel Brooks' funniest film. As with The Producers, Brooks' expanded version of Young Frankenstein (with his own …
WHAT A DOG Poor Dog Group's S.M.S.I.W.O.O.F. (SaveMySoul In a WorldOfOddFoices) or 8 bottles of vodka is a dance-centric, multimedia performance based on text messages sent between the membe…
DO TELL MAMA TO COME TO THIS CABARET Just as Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show swallows Annie Get Your Gun, the Kit Kat Klub engulfs a backstage story that becomes a show within a show in Cabare…
STATIC ELECTRA Your college classics teacher be damned: For all the talk about the Greek literary themes of hubris and arête, the Greek tragedies are just gussied up soap operas, with…
