Margaret Gray – LA Times After Rachel Bonds’ “Five Mile Lake” had its world premiere in 2014 at South Coast Repertory, news that SCR would be producing Bonds’ new “Curve of Departure” this fall was thrilling. Read more… Now running through October 15
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw The shooting of unarmed teen Michael Brown in 2014 sparked a groundswell of angry protest in Ferguson, Missouri where the tragedy occurred. Captured on camera for the world to see, his killing spotlighted the endemic racism in that community and others like it across the United States.Read more… Now running … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw This play by Deborah Lawlor, co-founder of the Fountain Theatre, is perhaps a fictionalized personal memoir. It’s about Freddy Herko, a gifted young dancer and pianist, whose talent blazed in New York City’s avant-garde scene in the 1960s, only to be snuffed out by drug addiction. Herko died when he … Read more
Jonas Schwartz – TheaterMania In Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the Stage Manager guides audiences through the fictional New Hampshire town of Grover’s Corners. She confides in the audience, shares secrets, and points out revelations. Which is why the casting of Jane Kaczmarek in Pasadena Playhouse‘s production makes sense. Read more… Frances Baum Nicholson –The Stage Struck Review When … Read more
Katie Buenneke – Stage Raw Sometimes the best way to watch a movie or TV show is to kick back with a glass of wine and some friends and yell at the TV whenever the characters do something you don’t agree with. Resolving Hedda, the new play now at the Victory Theatre in Burbank, offers a … Read more
Frances Baum Nicholson –The Stage Struck Review Every once in a while one comes across a performance which may outweigh the play it takes place in. In this case, a good play becomes greater because of one person who takes a playwright’s words and their own and their director’s understandings and makes of them something … Read more
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw To paraphrase a theater maxim of Edmund Kean’s, “Tragedy is easy; comedy is hard.” It’s an assertion that’s proved true time and again. Harder still, perhaps, is successfully combining these two genres into one play, as the disappointing Big Night at the Douglas proved a couple of weeks back.Read more… Rob Stevens … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw Jean Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot (translated by Maurice Valency) has always been one of my favorite plays. Written in 1943 and premiering after the playwright’s death in 1945, it’s a witty whimsical takedown of perfidious capitalism and a paean to the artists and free spirits who oppose them.Read more… The Stage … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Capital & Main Ball culture — the subject of the 1991 documentary Paris Is Burning and the backdrop for Filipino-American playwright Boni B. Alvarez’s new play, Fixed — developed out of Harlem in the 1960s.Read more… Now running through October 22
Lovell Estell III — Stage Raw August Strindberg’s 1900 tale about a monumentally unhappy marriage has been neatly touched up in this adaptation by Irish playwright Conor McPherson. As bleak as it is funny, it unfolds on an island fortress in Sweden that was once a prison (nicely rendered interior of gloomy faux brick, arched … Read more