392 stories from The Wicked Stage
Apologies for light posting lately, but I hope I can compensate with a few tidbits. I recently had the pleasure of looking back over the theater season with Kerry Weber, culture editor at Am…
From this space, four years ago today, I hailed Rocco Landesman's ascent to the helm of the NEA with an anecdote from playwright Oliver Mayer, who used to work in Rocco's office and describe…
I'm not sure the piece I wrote a few months ago about Belleville leads Greg Keller and Maria Dizzia, and their uniquely spiky chemistry playing couples onstage, captured just how much fun it…
Tomorrow, May 29, marks the 100th anniversary of the debut of Le sacre du printemps, the ballet by Igor Stravinsky that revolutionized modern music, or so legend has it (this piece by Matthe…
I first heard about musical Renaissance man Dave Malloy when I graded the reviews for Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage for Critic-O-Meter back in 2009; the repeated comparisons of his ro…
One of the subtexts of the recent news that Backstage would discontinue theater reviews altogether is that it was never inevitable that an actors' trade paper would review theater. Clea…
Remember when the most blazing controversy about David Mamet was his heterodox approach to acting training? The publication in 1999 of his terse, contrarian True and False, which posited, in…
Jenn Harris and Paul Kandel in Silence! (photo by Dixie Sheridan)
Last week I got a news release that Silence! The Musical just clocked its 500th performance, and I couldn't be happier…
For America magazine I've done a combined review of two entertaining and popular shows about iconic women leaders at either end of New York's nonprofit stage spectrum: The Public Theater's H…
On Wednesday night I attended Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, the immersive Russian-indie-rock musical fashioned from a section of War and Peace; I'm reporting on the pie…
The Public's new dance-club sensation Here Lies Love is pretty much as great as it's been cracked up to be (no. 2 on StageGrade, no less!), even if its retelling of the rise and fall of…
On this day in 2007, I posted the following review excerpt:
"Radio Golf" is a formulaic work that illustrates why [August] Wilson was not, in
the end, a great artist: his approach to exami…
Seeing it all before him (@Bettman/CORBIS)
Among the theatrical heavyweights I've had the pleasure to interview is America's greatest living playwright, Edward Albee. It was in 2008, and th…
He's only one had one other L.A. production previously (Four at Celebration Theatre), and one high-profile premiere at nearby South Coast Rep (On the Mountain), both in 2005. But now Christo…
My old friend and boss at the Downtown News, Jack Skelley, used to insist that classical music should be played loud, and I took him to mean not only that he had a taste, as I did, for noisy…
The Lisps et al in an earlier incarnation of Futurity
In this final installment of my three-part interview with César Alvarez (here are part 1 and part 2), we talk about the future of mus…
Part 1 of my interview with The Lisps' César Alvarez went into some detail about his bands' show Futurity, which originated in 2009, played at ART and at the Walker Center last year, and is…
Like Stew and Heidi Rodewald's Passing Strange, The Lisps' Futurity features the band that wrote the show onstage performing the show, and as such it provided Exhibit A"literally, as it was …
Rooting around my back pages, I happened to come across a 2004 post about a number of religion-themed shows I'd seen at the time in L.A. (Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God, the Very Merry Un…
How big of a deal is it that Baltimore's biggest theater has at its helm a Brit, and not just any Brit but Kwame Kwei-Armah, the London-bred son of Afro-Caribbean immigrants from Grenada? If…
Tom Hanks and Maura Tierney in Lucky Guy (photo by Joan Marcus)
The Tom Hanks/Nora Ephron romance, which brought them so much success with romcoms onscreen, has continued even after Ephron…
I just learned that Christopher Shinn's extraordinary three-character two-hander Dying City will get its L.A. premiere in the capable hands of Rogue Machine Theatre"a troupe whose …
photo by Paul Kolnik
This is something of a genre by now, the not-quite-believer's Passion play: from The Last Temptation of Christ to Corpus Christi to The Gospel According to th…
If Eliza Bent's new play The Hotel Colors hits the ear at an odd angle, that is by design: When we hear the play's six Italian characters, holed up together in a tatty hostel in Rome, u…
In the last installment of my long interview with Stew and Heidi Rodewald (here's part 1, and here's part 2), we talk more about Shakespeare, why Homer was a bluesman, and how the theater wo…
