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 a show. The result is a meandering yarn featuring miscellaneous miracles and offering little insight … Read more
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA With two weekends to go until Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde vacates Actors Co-op in Hollywood, those who enjoy horror stories brought to the stage don’t have many chances to take it in. But they should make the effort. An ensemble of six sports fine accents and great versatility in bringing … Read more
Bob Verini – Arts in LA This world premiere musical, now at Kirk Douglas Theatre, manages to get plenty of new wine into very old, if not downright dusty, bottles. The saga of the making of the eponymous garage band soars despite a paper-thin, clichéd plot; derivative character types; and QED themes of friendship and … Read more
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles comes to us with a considerable reputation as a Pulitzer Prize finalist, but whatever virtues this intergenerational seriocomedy may possess, they certainly don’t come through in South Coast Repertory’s version.Read more… Now running through November 17.
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA “She didn’t say much but she said it loud.” That’s Eva Peron (1919–1952) as assessed by nemesis Che Guevara during the prologue of Evita. But as it happens, the accusation of saying very little, very loudly has dogged the Andrew Lloyd Webber–Tim Rice through-sung tuner ever since it emerged as a … Read more
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA This production is a buoyant treat from first to last. Full disclosure, this is coming from someone with a lifelong antipathy to mistaken-identity plots—you know, the ones in which one opportune word from a character would set everything right immediately, but that word is arbitrarily withheld until the 11th hour. That’s … Read more
Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA Legendary comedy writer Neil Simon’s 1972 play The Sunshine Boys has an excellent premise: two old vaudevillian stars who worked together for over 40 years, but who haven’t spoken in over a decade, are reunited for a TV spot. (In fact, it was a good enough premise for Fellini to copy for Ginger e … Read more
Terry Morgan – LAist Late great science fiction author Philip K. Dick’s two thematic questions that ran through almost all of his work were “What is reality” and “What does it mean to be human?” While his novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is an example of the former question, a nightmarish tale of … Read more
Les Spindle – Edge on the Net In chronicling the beginning of a momentous chapter in the history of gay culture, namely the initial outbreak of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, Larry Kramer’s watershed play “The Normal Heart” offers a deeply moving snapshot of an era, while imparting timeless truths.Read more… Bob Verini … Read more
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA For R II, Jessica Kubzansky’s adaptation currently being performed at the Theater @ Boston Court, Shakespeare’s Richard II has lost not just six letters from its title but also about 25 percent of its text and upwards of 90 percent of the ensemble usually assembled to perform it. In R II, John Sloan portrays the … Read more