Craig Schwartz
Ellen Dostal – Broadway World
Never has the relationship between Iago and Roderigo in Shakespeare’s OTHELLO stolen the show like it does in the current A Noise Within production, directed by Jessica Kubzansky.
Read more…
Now running through April 28
Craig Schwartz
Frances Baum Nicholson – Stage Struck Review
There is a certain fascination in the fact that two theaters in Pasadena are featuring plays based on looking sideways at a Shakespearean works. At Boston Court, a new play looks at “The Merchant of Venice” from the Jewish perspective. At A Noise Within it’s the now-classic “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” in which two seemingly superfluous characters in “Hamlet” become the center of a debate about existence.
Now running through November 18
Craig Schwartz
Frances Baum Nicholson –The Stage Struck Review
Of all of Oscar Wilde’s creations, the overall theme of “A Picture of Dorian Gray” has most become a part of the English language.
Rob Stevens – Haines His Way
In his program notes for the current A Noise Within’s production of his adaptation of A Picture of Dorian Gray, director Michael Michetti states “Oscar Wilde was perhaps the nineteenth century’s most infamous homosexual”. Read more…
Ellen Dostal – Broadway World
They say a picture paints a thousand words. In director Michael Michetti’s compelling stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s A PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, it does more than that. It captures a lifetime.
Read more…
Now running through November 15
Craig Schwartz
Jonas Schwartz - TheaterMania
Farce is a science, a series of actions and reactions. People slam and swing open doors, they race up and down stairs, they misplace their clothing. If farce is a science, Noises Off deserves a Nobel Prize for physics.
Read more…
Rob Stevens – Haines His Way
What has eight doors and revolves? Answer: Fred Kinney’s double-sided set for A Noise Within’s revival of Noises Off. This marks the company’s third revival of Michael Frayn’s farce in the past decade or so.
Read more…
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw
Arguably one of the funniest farces in the contemporary British canon, Michael Frayn’s 1982 play revolves around a touring company of actors attempting to stage a frolicsome sex comedy called “Nothing On.”
Read more…
Now running through May 26
Craig Schwartz
Jonas Schwartz - TheaterMania
Progress treads so slowly it almost feels backwards. Lorraine Hansberry’s award-winning play A Raisin in the Sun premiered almost six decades ago, but American culture still grapples heavily with racism and other prejudices. The Younger family of the play grabs at the American dream, but society keeps moving the brass ring just out of reach.
Read more…
Now running through April 8
Craig Schwartz
Ellen Dostal – Broadway World
By the time Shakespeare gets to the last of his history plays concerning the Wars of the Roses*, HENRY V, the party boy who would be king has become a man. Gone are the indiscretions of youth seen in the earlier HENRY IV plays, which follow young Prince Hal on his escapades with Falstaff and the Eastcheap gang.
Read more…
Frances Baum Nicholson – The Daily Breeze
Of all Shakespeare’s history plays, the one which has always fascinated me most is “Henry V.”
From its prologue, which defines the very essence of live theater and the suspension of disbelief, through the humanity of its central figure wrestling with the understood demands of the crown and the lasting echoes of a misspent youth, it has an articulation of language and emotion which have always caught my imagination.
Read more…
Rob Stevens – Haines His Way
The idle, degenerate, boozing and whoring Prince Hal from Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays grows up quickly when he ascends the throne and chooses to go to war with France in Henry V.
Read more…
Jonas Schwartz - TheaterMania
A war pageant, Shakespeare’s Henry V portrays a king evolving into a formidable force. Codirectors Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott incorporate music, pomp, and studied performances to elevate the text and keep audiences engaged. Some directorial choices in this A Noise Within production, though, wound Act 1′s momentum. However, a triumphant Act 2 leaves audiences rousing for the English crown.
Read more…
Now running through April 6
Photo by Craig Schwartz
Jonas Schwartz - TheaterMania
A Christmas Carol is perfect fare for the holidays. It captures the importance of giving, sharing with loved ones, and reevaluating past choices. A Noise Within‘s co-producing artistic director Geoff Elliott has created his own adaptation, which has been performed at the theater for the last six years.
Read more…
(Photo by Craig Schwartz)
Katie Buenneke – Stage Raw
Though it was written in 1893, George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs. Warren’s Profession, now playing at A Noise Within in Pasadena, feels surprisingly contemporary. While Shaw scripted these conversations 124 years ago, the basic arguments the characters engage in have changed little in the intervening years.
Read more…
Frances Baum Nicholson –The Stage Struck Review
It would be tough, in the English-speaking theatrical canon, to find any playwright more unromantic than George Bernard Shaw. His view of the social arrangements of adult life in late Victorian and early 20th century Britain were quite clear in the arguments his plays made (and continue to make) about the entire subject.
Now running through November 18
Photo by Craig Schwartz)
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 Struck Review
Jean Giraudoux’s classic play “The Madwoman of Chaillot” is one of those plays everyone should see at some point in life. Though written in 1943, during the Nazi occupation of France, and only performed after the playwright’s death, it is often associated with a celebration of the end of tyranny.
Jonas Schwartz - TheaterMania
French author Jean Giraudoux’s classic comedy The Madwoman of Chaillot was written in 1943, while Germany occupied France, only for it to be first produced in December 1945 when the war had come to a halt. Yet in today’s world, when fracking, contaminated water, and plutocracy flood the national headlines, the play seems ripped from our daily headlines.
Read more…
Now running through November 11
![[photo: Craig Schwartz]](http://ladramacriticscircle.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/tale.jpg)
[photo: Craig Schwartz]
Any time someone translates a novel to the stage, there is risk involved. The depth of interior monologue, the detail of setting and character, the convolutions of plot and emotion, even the poetry of language used to provide all of this, are all limited by the confines of the stage and the time frame expected of a standard play.
Rob Stevens – Haines His Way
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” With those words novelist Charles Dickens began his classic book A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859. Read more…
Now running through November 19
Craig Schwartz
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens has been a staple of western literature since its publication in 1859, and has been adapted many times over—as movies, television mini-series, radio shows, a short-lived Broadway musical, and plays.
Read more…
Jonas Schwartz - TheaterMania
A solid cast enlivens Charles Dickens’s epic A Tale of Two Cities at A Noise Within, which is tautly directed by Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, who drive home comparisons between the bedlam in 18th-century Europe and the current political climate.
Now running through November 19
Photo by Craig Schwartz
Frances Baum Nicholson - San Gabriel Valley Tribune
When one first hears that A Noise Within has reset the powerful 1960s musical “Man of La Mancha” in a modern prison in the developing world, it can make one nervous. After all, it is based not only on one of the great works of international literature, but a historical figure who actually did end up imprisoned by the Inquisition for a segment of time. Read more…
Katie Buenneke – Stage Raw
Miguel de Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, a story about a man who famously tilts at windmills, over 400 years ago. Three hundred and fifty odd years later, Dale Wasserman, Joe Darion and Mitch Leigh wrote Man of La Mancha, a musical imagining of Cervantes and his fictional knight. Now, A Noise Within tries to bring the story into the present.Read more…
Jonas Schwartz - TheaterMania
Now running through May 21