Margaret Gray – LA Times My wife is waiting at our front door for me to finally come home from the war,” says Simon Wiesenthal as he leaves his office for the last time in Tom Dugan’s beautifully written and performed one-man bio-play “Wiesenthal,” now at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. Read more… … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Dermot Davis’ dark comedy is set in the elevator of an urban hi-rise and performed on a proscenium 7-feet wide by 7-feet deep. That makes it unusually problematic to stage, though the challenge is ably met by director Tim Byron Owen and his game two-person ensemble. Read more… David C. … Read more
Jenny Lower – LA Weekly Boredom is contagious in Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, now receiving an energetic revival at the Antaeus Company. The locus of the ennui is Yelena (Linda Park), the gorgeous, restless young wife of Serebryakov (Lawrence Pressman), an elderly professor who has retired to his family’s provincial estate. Read more… Margaret Gray … Read more
Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA Martín Zimmerman’s one-act drama Seven Spots on the Sun explores the impulse of revenge, and the notion of redemption, against the backdrop of a horrifying civil war. The lives of two couples in two separate (but nearby) South American villages are presented as mirror images. Read more… Margaret Gray – LA Times We … Read more
Margaret Gray – LA Times Some of us try to jury-rig meaningful lives using the disheartening fragments at our disposal; others dream of wiping the slate clean and starting anew. Both approaches prove painfully unsatisfying to the lonely characters in Samuel D. Hunter’s play “A Bright New Boise,” the 2011 Obie Award winner being revived … Read more
Dany Margolies – The Daily News There’s a right way to deal with bullies. And then there’s Carrie’s way. The 17-year-old high school senior, whose upbringing by her hyper-religious mother has guaranteed that she will be ridiculed by her classmates, has a supernatural power and bullying brings it out in force. Read more… David C. … Read more
David C. Nichols – LA Times Two weeks remain to catch “The Best of Enemies” in its West Coast premiere at the Colony Theatre in Burbank. The production is mandatory viewing for anyone who values the stage’s ability to provoke thought about serious social issues. Read more… Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw C..P. Ellis was … Read more
David C. Nichols – LA Times In “ICU,” playwright Fielding Edlow diagnoses dark humor in the most dysfunctional family this side of Eugene O’Neill’s Tyrone clan. Here, they’re upper-middle-class New York Jews, snarling and kvetching through the striking environmental staging by Circle X Theatre Company at Atwater Village Theatre. Read more… Now running through October … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Playwright David McMillan’s Watching O.J. cogently encapsulates the passions and perspectives surrounding the murder trial of ex-professional football star and actor O.J. Simpson – an event which captivated America and much of the Western world this month, 20 years ago. Read more… David C. Nichols – LA Times Tomorrow you can be white … Read more
Dany Margolies – Arts In LA First of all, this is indeed your father’s The Sound of Music, in its national tour now launching here. The stage version birthed the film, which retained much of the theatrical book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Read more… … Read more