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Archive for Showmag

THESE PAPER BULLETS! at the Geffen Playhouse

Photo by Michael Lamont

Photo by Michael Lamont

Bob Verini -   Arts In LA

About the best way to communicate my absolute, unalloyed pleasure in These Paper Bullets!, Rolin Jones’s Much Ado About Nothing adaptation at the Geffen, is to report that the smile that came over my face in the first five minutes stayed with me through the intermission, which I couldn’t wait to have end so that I could return for Act Two, and hung on back to my car and beyond.

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Jonas Schwartz -  TheaterMania

Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing revolves around lies, exaggerated love, and the ramifications of gossip. What other modern group faces these issues on such an international public stage as much as celebrities do?

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Dany Margolies – ShowMag

Shall quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of enjoying this play?

At least subtitling this work “a modish ripoff” gives fair warning about playwright Rolin Jones’s script. It’s a rip-off, indeed, of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, in which the thirtysomething former flames Beatrice and Benedick forswear love, while the younger Hero and Claudio’s emotions catch fire before our eyes.

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Now running through October 18.

 

RACE at the Kirk Douglas Theatre

Photo by Craig Schwartz

Steven Leigh Morris  – LA Weekly

David Mamet’s play Race, about a rich, white guy seeking a law firm to defend him from accusations of raping a black woman, ought to feel ripped from the headlines — even though it premiered on Broadway nearly five years ago. Read more…

Melinda Schupmann – Showmag

A David Mamet play is always cerebral, generally provocative, and often leads one to debate issues raised in the storyline at the conclusion of the production. Moreover, its craftsmanship is to be admired. Read more…

Pauline Adamek  – ArtsBeatLA

A slight plot is merely a framework for David Mamet’s talky and sordid play Race. A partnership comprised of a paralegal assistant and two lawyers — one black, one white — discuss a case they reluctantly agree to defend whereby a wealthy white man has been accused of raping a black woman. Read more…

Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter

In David Mamet’s Race, two veteran criminal lawyers, the white Jack Lawson (Chris Bauer of True Blood and The Wire) and the black Henry Brown (Dominic Hoffman), banter and badger in the playwright’s patented patois. They show professional perspicacity about a legal process predicated not on justice, but on trial by combat between competing self-interests and prejudices.   Read more…

Now running through Sept. 28.