Bob Verini – Stage Raw South Coast Repertory’s Tartuffe is something to witness, in every sense of the phrase. Audacious and thought-provoking, maddening and enlightening by turns, it’s a worthy addition to the venerable company’s anniversary celebration in its categorical refusal to follow a conventional pathway to the classic that kicked off SCR operations a half-century ago. Read … Read more
Bob Verini – Arts In LA Rogue Machine has turned itself into the go-to organization for provocative two-handers. If Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries lacks the dread of 2011’s Blackbird or the contemporary relevance of 2013’s Dying City, this production, directed by Larissa Kokernot, demonstrates anew the Pico Boulevard company’s knack for finding something precious in the confrontation of one … Read more
Bob Verini – Arts In LA Kimber Lee’s different words for the same thing, directed by Neel Keller, seems intended as an Our Townfor our time. Like the Thornton Wilder classic, it takes a cross-section of a little burg to investigate themes of love, death, and community, though Lee’s strategy is more tightly focused on a single … Read more
Bob Verini – Arts In LA 3D Theatricals has been pulling off ambitious offerings in its spacious Plummer Auditorium digs in Fullerton. I wasn’t able to catch 2013’s acclaimed Parade, though early this year I thoroughly enjoyed a fresh and clever The Producers. The Dawsons—the family who are the 3 D’s—seem to be smart, well-funded, and committed … Read more
Bob Verini – Variety Stars are called stars because they shine brighter than anyone else. Every time Chazz Palminteri sashays into “Unorganized Crime” as Gotham mob scion Sal Sicuso, cool and sardonic, seething with banked menace, you can’t take your eyes off him. It’s a supporting role, but he’s more than enough reason to travel to Hollywood’s … Read more
Pauline Adamek – Stage Raw In 1981, a musical adaptation by Andrew Lloyd Webber of British poet T. S. Eliot’s collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats took London’s West End by storm. Cats was immediately transferred Stateside, where the Tony Award-winning musical still holds the record for being the second longest-running show in Broadway history. Read more… Jonas Schwartz … Read more
Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter Porgy and Bess (the lamentable and disingenuous branding title will not be employed again by this writer) is one of those incomparable works of art that necessarily is always somewhat imperfect in performance. It is too grand, too bold, and too low-down not to be. Read more… Neal Weaver – ArtsInLA … Read more
Hoyt Hilsman – Huffington Post A Coffin in Egypt, a rarely produced 1980 play by Horton Foote would seem an unlikely subject for an opera, but in the hands of the marvelous Frederica von Stade and the talented composer and librettist team of Ricky Ian Gordon and Leonard Foglia, it becomes a tour de force. … Read more
Bob Verini – Arts In LA It can’t be easy to pen a remarkable play about unremarkable people whose main concern is how unremarkable their lives are. (Ask Chekhov.) Yet, Rachel Bonds has pulled it off handily with Five Mile Lake, whose central figures have solid reasons for doubting their own choices and equally solid reasons … Read more
Bob Verini – Arts In LA Noted monodrama writer and performer Daniel Beaty has clearly invested considerable emotion in researching his two-hour portrait of the great Paul Robeson (1898–1976), whose race, progressive politics, and insistence on doing and saying anything and consequences be damned literally demolished his career and reputation. Beaty’s labors are backed up … Read more