Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen Believe it or not, the characters in the musical version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory do not actually enter the titular chocolate factory until the very end of act one. That’s right, over an hour in to this perplexing adaptation there is nary an Oompa Loompa in sight.Read more… … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Capital & Main Evelina Fernández’s world premiere play, The Mother of Henry, is set within Los Angeles’ Eastside barrio, Boyle Heights, in 1968. It was a watershed year. Although change was in the wind — the anti-war protests, civil rights marches, the farmworkers’ strikes — the murders of MLK and Bobby Kennedy, just two … Read more
Lovell Estell III — Stage Raw In the lobby of the theater in a plastic case, there is a life-size reproduction of the skeleton of Joseph Merrick, or “John” as he is referenced in the script for The Elephant Man. The night this reviewer attended, there was a small crowd gathered around it, staring in wonder … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw Playwright Michael Weller’s messy marital drama transpires over the course of one night, during which time a married couple unleash all the frustration, disappointment and unrequited passion they’ve kept bottled inside for 18 long years.Read more… Now running through April 7
Rob Stevens – Haines His Way When Albert Einstein died of a brain aneurysm at Princeton Hospital in 1955, the pathologist who performed the autopsy ended up stealing Einstein’s brain. The physicist had left specific instructions for his remains to be cremated, and they were, except for his eyes and his brain. Dr. Thomas Harvey eventually … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw It’s hard to imagine a more painful life event than the death of a child — especially when that child is shot by police and the perpetrator goes free. That almost unbearable grief that a mother must feel is creatively addressed in Black Super Hero Magic Mama, Inda Craig-Galván’s latest play….Read more… … Read more
Lovell Estell III — Stage Raw Shakespeare’s best plays are a rich source of complex, conflicted characters and readily lend themselves to creative, critical exploration or inspired adaptations. Of course, there are always risks when treading the path of the unconventional, but there are also creative successes. Director Matthew Leavitt’s updated take on the Bard’s … Read more
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen “We are the Wolves. We are the Wolves,” a group of teenage girls chants, each repetition of the phrase growing in both volume and urgency. The Wolves are a high school indoor soccer team, and the subject of Sarah DeLappe’s play of the same name currently in its … Read more
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen Lackawanna Blues, Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s autobiographical solo show, has been on quite a journey since it first premiered at the Public Theater in New York in 2001. After that first production, which won a special citation Obie Award, it played at multiple regional theaters across the United States before being … Read more
Margaret Gray – LA Times Every once in a while we experience a flare-up of puzzlement about why so few women pursue careers in math and science — even now, despite progress in gender equality.Read more… Now running through March 24