Neal Weaver – Stage Raw Anna Ziegler’s play is a subtle examination of tangled human emotions — perceptive but only moderately satisfying. The play is threaded with many references to the mythological Icarus who fell to his death when he flew too close to the sun. Sarah quotes W. H. Auden’s poem “Musee Des Beaux … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw George Bernard Shaw once observed that it is useless to argue with a clergyman because his livelihood depends on his not changing his mind. But the remark could equally well be applied to anyone whose career depends on defending and maintaining a particular point of view —and that could be … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw Bugaboo (Bug) is the nickname of a feisty blue-collar woman (Heidi Sulzman) who’s incarcerated in the Henderson County, West Virginia jail on a drug charge. She’s been alone in her cell for 42 days, which is hard on her because she’s a compulsive non-stop talker and has been deprived of … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw Playwright Debbie Bolsky set out to write a classic old-style madcap comedy, but what she produced is a singularly improbable farce.Read more… Now running through January 14
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw Playwright Sam Bobrick gained much of his early experience in the world of TV sitcoms, and that has left its mark. New York Water is a rather generic example of the genre — with cardboard characters and action largely dictated by neither plot nor character, but by the need to … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw Premiering in 1976, this unique and unusual musical, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by John Weidman, and additional material by Hugh Wheeler, has no love story and no romantic ballads. Instead, it provides a lively impressionistic history of the Westernization of Japan, from 1853, when Commodore Perry … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw This Cornerstone Production of Magic Fruit, written by Michael John Garces and directed by Shishir Kurup, is a dystopian fantasy, loosely based (oddly enough) on Mozart’s The Magic Flute. It asks the question, along with several others: Can we produce enough food to feed Earth’s ever-growing population without destroying the planet?Read more… … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw City Garage Theatre has been one of the more interesting companies in L.A., and their work has always been polished and professional. Director Frederique Michel and producer Charles Duncombe are good people. But over the years they have seemed to become more aggressively stylized in their work.Read more… Now running … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Set in 1986, Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yohen depicts the unraveling of a 37-year marriage. Although it tumbles off-track in its final third, the play to that point is an astute portrayal of the dynamics of a failed intimacy.Read more… Neal Weaver – Stage Raw The title of Philip Kan Gotanda’s play, Yohen, refers … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw Playwright Tania Wisbar is the daughter of a German father and a Jewish mother, both of whom were prominent members of the German film world in the 1930s. But when she was just six months old, her parents divorced, and she and her mother fled German to escape the growing … Read more