The Blue Iris by Athol Fugard. David C. Nichols – Backstage In The Blue Iris, prolific South African playwright Athol Fugard treads delicately yet resolutely through the landscape of the heart. In doing so, the venerable 80-year-old dramatist cannot help clutching at ours, as this riveting…
Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw. David C. Nichols — Back Stage After opening with a revisionist ’60s Measure for Measure that entertainingly served the Bard, the forces at Theatricum Botanicum take on Heartbreak House and serve George Bernard Shaw even better. Shaw’s deathless 1917 allegory about British socioeconomic factions heedless of…
Incident at Vichy by Arthur Miller. David C. Nichols – LA Times Resolute craft drives the cautionary content of Incident at Vichy at the Sierra Madre Playhouse. Arthur Miller’s 1964 study of detainees in Nazi-occupied France isn’t exactly top tier, but when executed as intensely as this…
West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim andArthur Laurents. David C. Nichols – LA Times It’s not just the exposure to countless editions of West Side Story that causes us to stagger dazed and elated from the Chance Theater. Less a revival than a…
The Pianist Of Willesden Lane by Mona Golabek. Mayank Keshaviah – LA Weekly History is most powerful when we see the “all” through the small — the panorama of the textbook through the peephole of the personal. Acclaimed pianist Mona Golabek give…