Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw Unbound, by D.G. Watson, takes place in 2012. A man and a woman awaken in a hotel room in the same bed, neither having a clue who the other person might be. A common enough scenario in this day and age, the situation evolves into one much more unusual. Read more… Paul … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw Playwright Jon Robin Baitz has always tended to treat his subject matter obliquely and to view it from a slightly skewed vantage point. But here, he’s tackled his subject head-on, becoming downright confrontational. And since his subject is Donald Trump, the result is both volatile and controversial. If Baitz was … Read more
Melinda Schupmann – Arts In LA High energy is the name of the game in Musical Theatre West’s 64th-season opener. With a large ensemble of talented singers and dancers, Memphis lives up to its Tony-award winning pedigree and delivers a thoroughly entertaining look at the music scene in the 1950s in the heavily segregated South. Read more… Now … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw Kurt Vonnegut was a prolific writer, perhaps best known for his anti-war Slaughterhouse Five and for Cat’s Cradle, a novel which plunged into a dystopian science fiction and urged defiance of religion and any other institution — science, the family, the state — promoted as an object of veneration. Read more… Now running through … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw Sparkles (Barkley Romero) is a 17-year-old Latina who lives with her mother, Lisa (Lena Marie), in a Highland Park house which tends to slide downhill whenever they miss a mortgage payment. (This is magic realism with a vengeance!) Read more… Now running through November 13
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw The Geffen Playhouse has had a fruitful relationship with playwright Donald Margulies, resulting in memorable productions such as Shipwrecked! An Entertainment, Dinner with Friends and Collected Stories. It’s only natural the theatre would want to continue this successful streak, which leads to the current revival of Margulies’ earlier work, The … Read more
Jonas Schwartz – TheaterMania During its 25th anniversary season, A Noise Within revives Molière’s madcap play The Imaginary Invalid after first performing it in 2001, but this time with Constance Congdon’s 2007 adaptation. Zany as a Marx Brothers movie, the farce delves into hypochondria and the perversity of the patriarchy. Though some of the modern speech in Congdon’s text … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw In The Recommendation, playwright Jon Caren offered a searing take on class and privilege. In The Need to Know he examined how the behavior of an unconventional person might trigger suspicion and paranoia in others. Read more… Now running through October 30
Paul Birchall – Stage Raw Sometimes a play can go up a little too early — and I am afraid that is the case with this drama co-written by Alicia Adams and Peter Monro. Its bones are in all the right places, but its narrative is slight and its tone is heavy and flat. Read … Read more
Lovell Estell III – Stage Raw Irish playwright-performer Pat Kinevane returns to the Odyssey Theater with a new piece that explores “life lived on the fringes of society.” Kinevane’s previous works, Forgotten and Silent, were performed at the Odyssey in 2011 and 2012, and with Underneath, the third piece in the trilogy, he brings us a very unconventional ghost … Read more