Dana Martin – Stage Raw There’s something shady going on at The Foundation. The top-secret, seemingly organized corporate hierarchy has something sinister contained within its walls. Signals, the latest innovation from Last Call Theatre, is a delicious sci- fi, choose-your-own-adventure for theater nerds. Read more… Now through June 26
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw Playwright Richard Willett has interesting things to say about the current state of the medical industry, though the difficulty inherent in writing a “message play,” such as this one – a world premiere production at the Victory Theatre Center — is that of balance. Can an author’s polemic sustain as … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw Ben Moroski won a Best of Fringe award in 2012 for The Vicious Minute and a Top of the Fringe award in 2014 for his solo performance of The Wake. This year he’s back at The Fringe with his latest solo piece, Dog— a downer of a tale nonetheless presented with the same singular, mesmerizing … Read more
Terry Morgan – ArtsBeat LA As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Technology zooms forward, but human nature remains stubbornly persistent. Thus a play such as Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, which premiered in 1899, can still speak to us today, can still cause us to laugh or cry at its … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw In Sleep With the Angels, directed by Jose Luis Valenzuela, playwright Evelina Fernandez portrays a fragmented family of Latinx extraction — but the truths she seeks to convey might resonate anywhere. Read more… Now through June 26
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw Beloved, a world premiere play by Canadian playwright Arthur Holden, opens in a waiting room outside a counsellor’s office at a posh school, where an affluent upper-middle-aged couple await news of their son. Thirty minutes have gone by since they’ve arrived, and no one has summoned them in, or explained why … Read more
Dana Martin – Stage Raw Nina Braddock’s new work, Untitled Baby Play, is a whole pandemic in the making. The play seeks to address the question every reproductively abled person is confronted with: “Are you going to have a baby?” IAMA Theatre Company’s world premiere production bravely confronts the subject of whether or not to reproduce, but too … Read more
Dana Martin – Stage Raw It may seem like nothing much happens in Thornton Wilder’s most important work, Our Town. It is a play, after all, about ordinary people living ordinary lives. But the 1938 Pulitzer Prize winner is quietly deep and profoundly moving. Edward Albee once described Wilder’s play as “the greatest American play ever written.” Read … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – Stage Raw Originally conceived and directed by James Lapine for a brief Broadway stint in 2010, this revue of Stephen Sondheim’s life and work received a new charge of pertinence in the wake of Sondheim’s death in November at the age of 91. The show includes a strong video presence of … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – Stage Raw Shakespeare’s play gets a Wooster Group-ish makeover in John Gould Rubin’s modern dress staging for the Wallis. Tech is omnipresent, almost omniscient. Narrow, vertical panels on both sides of the stage provide screens for Keith Skretch’s projection design, featuring striking images of fires and floods now generally associated with … Read more