Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter A Delicate Balance (1967) won the Pulitzer Prize shamefully denied Edward Albee for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Spiky, stilted and maybe maddening to many, it was probably the most abstruse honoree at that point in the award’s history. Albee managed the difficult feat of being muskily dated and vanguardishly visionary … 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
Les Spindle – Edge on the Net Gracefully segueing from what initially seems like a breezy romantic comedy to a thoughtful and heart-wrenching portrait of grief, family dynamics, and life’s unpredictable twists and turns, Bekah Brunstetter’s 2011 Off-Off-Broadway play “Be a Good Little Widow” shines in its L.A. debut. The West Coast premiere of this absorbing 90-minute … Read more
Pauline Adamek – ArtsbeatLA Four monologues written by diseuse Ruth Draper are brilliantly performed by Annette Bening as a 90-minute one act evening of entertainment. This new show at the Geffen begins nicely enough, with a couple of odd character pieces. The first is a slightly bizarre speech and movement class and lesson “in Greek … Read more
Margaret Gray – LA Times You may have seen your share of makeovers, but nothing like the one Sheila Callaghan inflicts on her heroine in “Everything You Touch,” her lushly written dark comedy world-premiering at Boston Court Performing Arts Center. Read more… Pauline Adamek – Stage Raw Sheila Callaghan’s compelling play examines the dysfunctional dynamic between … 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
Pauline Adamek – Stage Raw That director Ron Sossi decided to remount White Marriage might be an attempt to recapture the hit production for the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble that Sossi almost 40 years ago. In the here and now, however, the urgency of the play’s point is muted largely by Sossi’s own re-staging. Read more… Neal Weaver – … Read more
Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA Four Larks’ production of Orpheus made its premier last night in Downtown Los Angeles. Previously developed and presented at the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Getty Villa as part of their Theater Lab Series (March 2014), the workshopped production then moved to a Downtown warehouse, where audiences had to traverse a fabric maze before they entered the performance space. … Read more
Pauline Adamek – Stage Raw Playwright-director Jeff Gould has found a formula that works. Several years ago he had a huge hit with his play It’s Just Sex!, which played off-Broadway and all over the world and enjoyed a two-year run at Studio City’s tiny Two Roads Theatre. Gould has returned to the 56-seat house with … 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