BUT ONLY BY A THREAD During Connected, the 2011 dance piece from Australian company Chunky Move at the Luckman Theater in Los Angeles last week, a strip-club cat-call was heard from the audi…
WHAT IS AN AFRICAN AMERICAN? While many plays purport to examine race issues, few tackle them head on. Ensemble Studio Theatre’s production of The Many Mistresses of Martin Luther King…
COMIC EPHEMERA In Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s 1636 comedy L’Illusion Comique, the modern playwright has abandoned the contextual trappings that make the…
FOR BETTER OR WORSE, IT'S A TELLTALE TITLE Suzan-Lori Parks claimed that her play Fucking A, now playing at the Urban Theater Company, was inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet…
BLACK AND WHITE AND GOOD ALL OVER A smart play is usually a provocative play, but a provocative play is rarely smart. Many playwrights competent to stir controversy have neither the chop…
THE GODOT WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR Samuel Beckett is a great comic playwright. You don’t believe me? Then run, don’t walk, to the Mark Taper Forum and see the blissfully funny and …
A TAWNY STAR IS BORN Tawny Heatherton is the fictional drag persona created by David Drake, the star of My Tawny Valentine at The Laurie Beecham Theatre. As the niece of Joey Heatherton, Taw…
SOMEHOW, IT KEEPS ON WORKING For those who have never seen the 1978 musical Working, the Production Company's current revival may be somewhat of a revelation. The subtitle of Studs Terkel's …
MINT ACTING IN RUTHERFORD & SON The Mint Theater Company's mission is to "excavate buried theatrical treasures" and bring "new vitality to neglected plays." No small task as plays usuall…
ROCK & ROLL CAMP The cast of Rock of Ages is riotously hell bent on making you have a good time. They beat you into submission with energy, wide smiles, and hair"lots and lots of great b…
ODD CASTING CHOICE NEARLY SINKS SHOW There is a perplexing and ultimately infuriating casting choice in the Old Globe's production of Anna Christie that nearly sinks Eugene O'Neill's 1921 ta…
IMPRISONED BY ART Most literary intellectuals have as much business writing about life behind bars as incarcerated felons have teaching text analysis. In the last few months, Los Angeles…
JULIUS CAESAR IN AFRICA Modern theater companies traditionally place Shakespeare into all kinds of settings, eras and cultures in search of new or updated relevance. While the choices for ma…
ALL ABOUT ALFRED AND LYNN Ten Chimneys is the name of the estate near Madison, Wisconsin, where the famous American husband-and-wife acting team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne retreated an…
OH WHAT A TANGLED WEB WE WEAVE While Theatre Unleashed's cast and crew have a gloriously and unashamedly good time bringing The Spidey Project to the West Coast, it's a shame that their sour…
GROUNDLINGS ZERO The best part about cleaning up my DVR last weekend was catching up on Raising Hope, the hilarious FOX comedy. It's funny, surprising, naughty, sometimes dirty, and wholly o…
AMERICAN NIGHT SUCKS, BUT IT SWALLOWS Juan José, a Mexican cop sick of being on-the-take, has crossed the border in search of citizenship, leaving his pregnant wife behind. Panicking over f…
HATE THE MUSICAL, BUT LOVE, LOVE, LOVE THE PRODUCTION Whether you love or hate the musical version of The Color Purple, no one, and I mean no one, can or will deny that this is one of the fi…
A PARADE IS COMING TO TOWN In the NY Times, Christopher Isherwood stated that while the authors of Parade deserve credit for their fidelity to history and their ambition to probe a painful c…
WHAT A DIFFERENCE TEN YEARS MAKE The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later tells the story of Matthew Shepard and how it affected those involved a decade after his 1998 murder. As with its point …
REAL GENIUS OR REAL CLUNKER? Tennessee Williams wrote at least 10 plays that are more accessible and commercially viable than his Camino Real (pronounced CA-mino Reel). Even the most zealous…
RIVER OF DREAMS All good things must come to an end, they say, so it was inevitable that Riverdance would finally end its run, at least in the United States. But will it ever be missed! Play…
TWO MORE ONE-PERSON PLAYS AT THE SKYLIGHT Burke Byrnes’s The Yellow House (Fridays) and Harry Hart-Browne’s Special Delivery (Saturdays) both possess the virtues and weakne…
THE BOOK ISN'T READY, BUT BRING IT ON ANYWAY Bring It On at the Cadillac Palace Theatre is cut from the Legally Blonde cloth of contemporary musical theater: they are both inspired by motion…
WHY DO WE HAVE WHY WE HAVE A BODY? Every few years a vanity project comes along so appalling that one’s jaw hangs open for its entire running time, saliva connecting the lower lip to t…