Jonas Schwartz – Arts In LA Kevin Saunders Hayes’s ambitious multimedia experimentations with silent films returns to Los Angeles with a funhouse version of the Lon Chaney classic Phantom of the Opera. Projecting the film on the big screen, the production comments on the movie by intensify the experience with original songs, dance, and wild costumes. … Read more
Margaret Gray – LA Times Let’s Make a Deal’s” Wayne Brady as the lead in a revival of “Kiss Me, Kate”: It almost sounds like an especially wacky draft in some fantasy stunt-casting league for theater directors. Sheldon Epps of the Pasadena Playhouse has not only made it happen, he has used it as the … Read more
Jonas Schwartz – Arts In LA The Actors Co-op modest production of the Tony-winning The Mystery of Edwin Drood strips away the large orchestrations, the amplified mikes, and the harmonizing chorus and focuses on Rupert Holmes’s ribald script. Led by the superbly dry Peter Allen Vogt, Drood makes for an uproarious evening. Read more… Terry Morgan – Stage Raw You cannot … Read more
Neal Weaver – Arts In LA Playwright Neil LaBute is so prolific, and has created in so many different and varied media, that it’s virtually impossible to generalize about his work. (His program bio is downright intimidating.) But in many of the scripts for which he is best known—Fat Pig, In the Company of Men, … Read more
Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter The last of Neil Simon’s trilogy of quasi-autobiographical accounts of his coming-of-age years in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, Broadway Bound stands among his plays as perhaps the most free from easy nostalgia, and therefore the most honest. In this sturdy 1986 drama, the requisite comedy arrives more or less … Read more
Bob Verini – Arts In LA The good graces of the Geffen Playhouse are responsible for Los Angeles’ introduction to one Dixie Longate: Alabama native, single mom, social critic, and, above all, housewares entrepreneuse in the unveiling of Dixie’s Tupperware Party. Read more… Margaret Gray – LA Times You might assume that a one-woman show called “Dixie’s … Read more
Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter If one cares about the movies, and about comedy (and what can life be without them?), the soul of Buster Keaton (played here by French Stewart) needs must be spliced into one’s DNA. One cannot help but feel proprietary about one’s personal relationship to the bottomlessly expressive, impassive Keaton, … Read more
Jonas Schwartz – Arts In LA In one of the famous lines from The Godfather, Don Corleone tells his eldest son, “Never tell anyone outside the family what you are thinking again.” The don would have burst a gut if he had seen what Brooke Wyeth, the protagonist of Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, has written about her family in … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Zombies From The Beyond, which premiered off-Broadway in 1995, takes place in the Eisenhower Years, that era of dull certitude when the Soviet Union was America’s arch-enemy and the possibility of creatures from outer space invading the planet haunted American popular culture. Read more… Jonas Schwartz – Arts In LA The … Read more
Margaret Gray – LA Times Whenever I read about the artistic scandals of the past — the near-riot provoked by Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” for example — I glumly conclude that we have grown so jaded that art has lost its power to appall. Read more… Steven Leigh Morris – Stage Raw Playwright Alice Tuan’s … Read more