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
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
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw “I guess all families have their ups and downs,” says Eleanor of Aquitaine in James Goldman’s perennially popular comedy drama about 12thcentury royals. But in most families, the ups and downs don’t come as fast and furiously as in this play, and certainly they’re never expressed quite so articulately, with … 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