Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Actor John Barrymore, star of theater and screen for a quarter of a century until his death in 1942, was thrown out of prep school after having been seen entering a brothel. This detail…
Neal Weaver – LA Weekly When playwright Tom Dudzick was growing up in Buffalo, N.Y., in the 1950s, one local landmark was a 20-foot shrine for the Blessed Virgin, beside a small barbershop. According to local legend, the shrine was…
Pauline Adamek – LA Weekly Katie Rubin’s energetic solo piece presents a typical tale of the struggling actor who, yearning for success, ventures on a journey of spiritual discovery and then cobbles together a string of experiences and calls it…
David C. Nichols – LA Times Charles Dickens meets Lewis Carroll, literally, in “A Perfect Likeness” at Fremont Centre Theatre in South Pasadena. This beautifully appointed two-hander about the authors of “Great Expectations” and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” isn’t exactly…
Melinda Schupmann – Arts In LA From 1954 to the present, Reginald Rose’s Emmy-nominated teleplay on CBS’s Studio One has been rewritten as a theatrical piece, was made into an Academy Award–winning film with some of the finest actors in…
Neal Weaver – LA Weekly Ketti Frings’ 1958 adaptation of Thomas Wolfe’s autobiographical novel tells the story of young writer-to-be Eugene Gant (Grant Tambellini) and his embattled efforts to break free of his grasping, controlling mother, Eliza (Alison Blanchard), and…
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Lone-Anon is, at core, an Orwellian social satire, set five years in the future, when the NSA and/or FBI has set up a watch list for people with antisocial tendencies. For instance, if you’re invited to a party on…
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Coincidentally, two unrelated plays about group therapy opened last week in small theaters less than a mile from one another. Neil McGowan’s comedy Lone-Anon, about maladroit loners subjected to court-ordered therapy, is running late…
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly James Goldman’s smart 1968 drama re-imagines a nightmarish home-for-the-holidays reunion for the dysfunctional family of 12th century monarch Henry II and his estranged wife, Eleanor (historically, a brilliant duo whose early political conquests rocked their…
Mayank Keshaviak – LA Weekly It’s probably not surprising that a show about a vampire that opened on Halloween night features great costumes and is quite the visual spectacle. A fantasia spanning three acts and three vastly different time periods…