Hoyt Hilsman – Huffington Post Even in this subdued and somber rendering of a pair of Chekhov stories, Mikhail Baryshnikov and his creative partners from the Big Dance Theater display a magical grace and style that transcends the bleakness of Chekhov’s tales. Big Dance Theater directors Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, who also adapted the … Read more
BobVerini – Arts In LA The premise of Benjamin Brand’s Taste, as the management of Sacred Fools Theater Company has been unabashedly eager to trumpet in preopening publicity, is a compact made between two men to meet for dinner, at which the guest is to be killed, butchered, cooked, and eaten by the host in what … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly What happens when an illness of tsunami-like proportions lays waste to your life? In Emilie Beck’s family drama Sovereign Body, Anna (Taylor Gilbert), a chef and restaurateur, lives happily with her husband (Kevin McCorkle), mom (Bryna Weiss) and two daughters: 20-year-old Callie (Dani Stephens), bursting to be out on her own, … Read more
David C. Nichols – LA Times That rarefied place where craft, collaboration and content create theatrical poetry is everywhere in “The Last Act of Lilka Kadison” at the Falcon Theatre. Indeed, this delicately potent West Coast premiere, a co-production between the Falcon and Chicago’s Tony-winning Lookingglass Theatre Company, often seems to be composing itself before … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw In Robert E. Sherwood’s 1934 play, The Petrified Forest, a world-weary writer, Alan Squier (skillfully etched by John DeMita), happens into a remote café in the Arizona desert, and in the space of a few short hours has stirred the eternal ardor of the café owner’s starry-eyed daughter, Gabby (Leona Britton) … Read more
Pauline Adamek – Stage Raw During the ‘greed is good’ ‘80s and the tumultuous era of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, London-born playwright Caryl Churchill informed her scathing political satires with an examination of feminist themes — challenging and charting the evolving notions of gender and sexuality in the workplace. Her plays were bold, different, … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw Salani (Jennifer Hubilla), the central character in Velina Hasu Houston’s charmless chick lit musical, is a lovely orphaned teen, an upright individual who must contend with poverty, hard labor, and arrogant or lustful employers before triumphantly attaining freedom and self-realization. The story is set in British Ceylon circa 1939; Read more… Neal Weaver – … Read more
Deborah Klugman – ArtsBeatLA Sporting a message of sisterhood and tolerance, Wendy Graf’s well-intentioned but clumsy drama builds around two half-sisters: Julia (Diarra Kilpatrick), an ambitious attorney living and working in Manhattan, and Neyla (Yvonne Huff), her newly discovered sibling, whom Julia’s father had sired when he was a soldier in Iraq. Read more… Dany Margolies – Arts … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly While the overarching message in playwright Steve Yockey’s fractured farce Disassemblyisn’t quite clear, its clever irony is nonetheless unmistakable. Each of the comedy’s daft desperate-for-love characters spins in his or her own idiosyncratic orbit. One exception to this needy bunch would be Evan (Alexis DeLaRosa), an accident-prone jock worshipped by both his … Read more
Deborah Klugman – ArtsBeatLA One would have thought (perhaps hoped is the better word) that Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s 1955 play Inherit the Wind, about the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial, would have lost some of its relevance by now. Like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, it was written in response to the close-mindedness and prosecution of freedom of thought that swept through the … Read more