Dany Margolies – Arts In LA Farce is a difficult form of theater. Torrance Theatre Company is taking it on, in the form of Ray Cooney’s Run for Your Wife. The set here is sturdy, the actors competent. But, under the direction of Gary Robbins, much of the piece is played as if it were … Read more
Bob Verini – Arts In LA On the heels of Spike Jonze’s award-winning film Her comes another whimsical, futuristic, seriocomic speculation about artificial intelligence’s commercial and emotional potential. This one is Jordan Harrison’s world premiere play at the Taper, titled Marjorie Prime, and concededly it lacks the heft of Jonze’s celebrated Oscar winner, not to mention its unforgettable … Read more
Jonas Schwartz – Arts In LA The Actors Co-op modest production of the Tony-winning The Mystery of Edwin Drood strips away the large orchestrations, the amplified mikes, and the harmonizing chorus and focuses on Rupert Holmes’s ribald script. Led by the superbly dry Peter Allen Vogt, Drood makes for an uproarious evening. Read more… Terry Morgan – Stage Raw You cannot … Read more
Les Spindle – Edge on the Net Also known as “Cockfight Play,” a perhaps less threatening title preferred in some media outlets, Mike Bartlett’s Olivier Award winning British play, “Cock,” makes its L.A. debut in a taut and terrific staging. Read more… Margaret Gray – LA Times “We’re just going around in circles,” a character accurately observes in … Read more
Bob Verini – Arts In LA It’s been 43 years since Helen Reddy rocked the charts with her announcement “I am woman, hear me roar,” the foremost pop anthem echoing the feminist revolution of the 1970s. Divas have continued to warble messages of female empowerment—in numbers too big to ignore—well into this century, and many … Read more
David C. Nichols – LA Times The delicate art of origami provides both metaphor and motor for “Animals Out of Paper” at the David Henry Hwang Theater, and it enfolds the viewer with deceptive simplicity and considerable craft. Read more… Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA The paths of three loner characters intersect in Rajiv Joseph’s Animals Out of … Read more
Margaret Gray – LA Times It may sit uneasily with our notion of Shakespeare to imagine him tackling the hot-button issues of his era like a Jacobean David Mamet. But Bill Cain’s “Equivocation” at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum takes a scholarly theory — that “Macbeth” is a coded chronicle of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 … Read more
Dany Margolies – Arts In LA The weighty ideas expressed in this piece have retained their potency from nearly 2,500 years ago. The skills and vibrancy of the actors here are flawless. Had the two elements meshed, this would be a perfect production. Read more… Bob Verini – Stage Raw Reviewing the 2011 Getty Villa production … Read more
Bob Verini – Arts In LA The unarguable triumph of is the choreography of Janet Roston, which sets a company of 10, many of them veterans of university ballet and modern-dance programs, to dizzying displays of complex movement. From their first worshipful celebration of the young Psyche (Ashley Ruth Jones), through their incarnation of various … Read more
Bob Verini – Arts In LA Productions of this difficult but essential classic are rare enough that any chance to see it performed is a reason for celebration, even a version that’s as spotty and problematic as the one currently at the Garage Theater “in collision with” Alive Theater.’ Two things they get very right. … Read more