WHAT'CHA GONNA DO? In a poignant moment in Act II of the new musical Chaplin, cultural icon Charlie Chaplin realizes that life is not a movie. One has to take the tears with the laughter, an…
THE SCHLONG AND SHORT OF IT The great local critic Wenzel Jones, writing about the play "Naked Boys Singing," (another play in which men happily doffed their clothes to showcase their Full M…
A HEALTHY DEBATE George Bernard Shaw observed that, "The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image o…
THE PLOT THAT WOULD NOT DIE Doggedly dedicated but exhausting at nearly three hours, Robert Kauzlaric's adaptation of Wilkie Collins' mystery thriller The Woman in White is, to quote another…
WRONG IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE, OR A TREK THROUGH PEDANTRY Middle-aged misogynist, pedant, and poet Henry Dennett has a chip on his shoulder and a worm in his gut"literally, a gigantic tapeworm…
ONLY IN NEW YORK The next time you pass through Times Square, be sure to wave at the tricked out tour bus with windows that soar to the ceiling, flashing LED lights, and a pounding sound sys…
THE PEASANTS ARE REVOLTING, NOT THE PRODUCTION Set amidst the teeming, verdant jungles of South India, Encounter is an often compelling dance theatrical production from the Navarasa Dance Th…
LANGUAGE AND CUSTOM ARE SOURCES OF HILARITY IN CHINGLISH At a time when Americans may feel a little uneasy about the rising power of China, Berkeley Repertory Theatre offers us a chance to s…
ENTERTAINING, BUT WITHOUT THE COMIC SIZZLE In 2009, Xanadu opened in downtown Chicago that turned out to be one of the delights of the season. It was a silly musical, but hip, satir…
YOU BETTER CATCH THIS BEFORE IT REALLY IS THE LAST SESSION Mike Nussbaum is probably weary of hearing himself called the Grand Old Man of Chicagoland Theater and a local treasure, like Wrigl…
IT’S ALL GREEK TO MEE Charles Mee's plays are audacious, imaginative, weird, sometimes funny, and more often than not, powerful and thought provoking; they are not for all tastes, but …
AMERICANA NOT DEAD YET! Composer Jerome Kern said, "Irving Berlin has no place in American music. Irving Berlin is American Music." This understanding is precisely what Ray Roderick and Mich…
GUILT OF HOPE AND DESIRE The idea that the amount of guilt one feels depends more on one's character than one's crime is the subtext of Marie Jones's play Fly Me to the Moon, an entertaining…
PLODDING ALONG THE TRAIN TRACKS What does it mean to persist in a world without hope? Athol Fugard's The Train Driver tackles human mortality with grim poetic grace, but the New York premier…
"WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T ASK WHAT THIS SHOW WAS ABOUT" Natalie Portman, The Musical! is a two-hour, no-intermission sketch-comedy musical written and directed by Brittany Garms, with music by…
CLASSICAL/CONTEMPORARY MASHUP There are few venues in Los Angeles better suited to productions of ancient Greek plays than the Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater at the Getty Villa. Not…
NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE Author Joan Didion's powerful piece of writing, the elegiac monologue The Year of Magical Thinking, receives its Los Angeles premiere in this intimate production at the…
A WHOLE NEW WORLD Musical revues are a tricky business. While highly enjoyable and entertaining, even high profile compilations like Side By Side By Sondheim and the Fats Waller song book Ai…
IT AIN'T MOZART Louis Nowra's Cosi tells the story of Lewis (Adam Zivkovic) a recent college graduate with a theatrical background who gets a job in an insane asylum. There, he find himself …
SILENCE! THE FRANCHISE Silence! The Musical was one of the big hits of the 2005 New York International Fringe Festival. The parody of Jonathan Demme's 1991 Oscar-winning horror thriller Sile…
THE PLAYWRIGHT MUST HAVE EATEN A PILLOW, BECAUSE THIS PLAY IS DOWN IN THE MOUTH Andy Bloch's The Bellflower Sessions is a bleak, black comedy about Jack Calvin, a victim of "The Great Recess…
CLAP YOUR HANDS IF YOU BELIEVE A theatrical revolution is taking place at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, where a high-tech Broadway spectacle has been swapped for the homespun magic of a talen…
NOT REALLY, NOT REALLY! The most pressing question I had walking out of Athenaeum Theatre's Blagojevich, Blagojevich! was "Was that really necessary?" Â We're already familiar with the lon…
A BROOKLYN LOVE STORY " FUHGEDDABOUDIT! Originally produced as Emergency Used Candles for NYC’s Emerging Artists Theatre One Woman Standing Festival and then followed by a run at the f…
LIFE AS WE KNOW IT Mask work reduces the craft of acting to the essential elements of pose and gesture. That’s all you get when there are no words or facial expressions. Watchi…