Bob Verini – ArtsInLA Time heals everything, so the song goes, and a quick overview of history reveals there’s no calamity so atrocious that the passage of time won’t soften its impact. Shed any tears over the massacre of the Huguenots lately? How about the victims of the Children’s Crusade? Fortunately, art often comes forward … Read more
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA The Burnt Part Boys, now at the Third Street Theater in a co-production with West Coast Ensemble Theater, is an energetic hoot-’n’-hollerin’ musical play that would benefit from a little less hoot-’n’-hollerin’ and a little more straight talk. Read more… David C. Nichols – LA Times If “Floyd Collins” and “Stand By … Read more
David C. Nichols – LA Times A star is reborn in “Funny Girl,” now marching its band out in Fullerton (and soon after, Redondo Beach). This solid 3D Theatricals revival of the classic 1964 musical generally engrosses, and triumphs in lead Nicole Parker. Shining in every detail, Parker’s nuanced, platinum-voiced Fanny Brice withstands the Streisand … Read more
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA As Greek tragedies go, Prometheus Bound poses something of a staging nightmare. There’s no betrayed wife out to murder her own children and her rival, no king brought to understand the truth about the older woman he married. Instead, it’s a solemn religioso pageant in which the god who created mortal … Read more
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn is a report from the feminist front. Folded within a thin narrative is a lot of intriguing conversation, which in the course of two acts brings out numerous perspectives on what women do (and should) need and what they do (and should) want. The talk is … Read more
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA Merlin’s adventures, “untold?” Gosh, hasn’t the saga of the windbag wizard been told a bazillion times, in books (picture and grownup), films, TV movies, and even a couple of Broadway musicals? And the thing is, he’s really such a lousy character when you come right down to it. All-knowing, all-powerful figures … Read more
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA The fiendishly difficult (to stage, and hence usually to watch) Nine proves beyond the range of DOMA Theatre Company. It’s a shame, given the company’s mightily effective Dreamgirls earlier this year, but Arthur Kopit’s gloppy gloss on Fellini’s film 8½ has proved the undoing of many a producing organization. Read more… Now running through August 18.
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA If there’s a more sheerly interesting playwright in the United States these days than Bruce Norris, I don’t know who it is. In a continuing series of audacious, ambitious comedies, he has remained resolutely non-P.C. in questioning some of our culture’s most cherished assumptions on race (his Pulitzer winner Clybourne Park), … Read more
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA Director-writer Nancy Keystone doesn’t exactly crank ‘em out quickly through her Critical Mass Performance Group, but they sure are worth the waiting for. Her 2006 Theatre @ Boston Court staging of Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play made keen sense out of that peculiarly remote text, and now, with Alcestis, Keystone and … Read more
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA A nation should know and experience its classic dramatic texts. Yet the major virtues of many of ours remain virtually unknown, even to many serious theatergoers, solely because the casts are too large for almost any contemporary producer to afford.Read more… Now running in repertory through September 28.