Neal Weaver – Stage Raw Lorraine Hansberry is securely enshrined as an important black playwright, but what few people remember nowadays is that she was also a lovely young woman, with gamin charm and an impish sense of humor. Read more… Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze “What happens to a dream deferred?” asked Langston Hughes … Read more
Lovell Estell III – Stage Raw There was a time when gas was eleven cents a gallon, a new car might run you a thousand dollars, average wages were under two thousand dollars a year, and thousands of unsuspecting American citizens deemed unfit and undesirable were forcibly sterilized by the government, with the full aid … Read more
Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze What a fun, frolicsome summer musical “Cabaret” is! Get your tickets now to this cheery confection! Do you see how easy it is to act based on a few words of what you want to hear? To not read further, to fail to ask for supporting facts, to act … Read more
Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze No doubt avid theatergoers and especially those fascinated by playwright Tennessee Williams will have already bought tickets to his rarely produced “Kingdom of Earth,” running at West Los Angeles’ Odyssey Theatre. Read more… Now running through August 14
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw One of the definitions of “meta-theatrical” is a theatre piece that constantly reminds the audience that they’re watching a play — one which comments on theatre in general. One famous example of this technique is Our Town, where the Stage Manager — not the narrator, mind you, but explicitly the Stage … Read more
Jonas Schwartz – TheaterMania Grey Gardens, based on the 1975 cult classic documentary, is a gem of a one-act musical. Unfortunately, there are two acts. In wanting to flesh out the characters who were captured in the film, book author Doug Wright, composer Scott Frankel, and lyricist Michael Korie focus the entire first act on … Read more
Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze Stories like this have been told before, many in exactly this way, where a nay-saying parent and a self-doubting inner voice cannot stem the creative force of an artist who soars above them to shape an art form. Read more… Les Spindle – Edge on the Net The genres of … Read more
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw Eccentricities of a Nightingale was Tennessee Williams’ 1951 rewrite of his earlier Summer and Smoke. It was supposedly his preferred version of the story, and one can see why. The main character of Alma is more clearly delineated, and the drama springs more from her choices than from fate. The current production … Read more
Dany Margolies – Press-Telegram Healing and forgiveness are the stuff of solid old-time storytelling. But playwright Sarah Ruhl guides her characters down fresh, quirky paths to those results in “The Clean House.” Read more… Now running through July 17
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw Because of the confluence of events surrounding the American presidential election — including Donald Trump’s provocative and unconstitutional attempts to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S., the mass shootings in Orlando, and the heated debate about how to deal with Muslim terrorists, Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Disgraced seems even more relevant than … Read more