Katie Buenneke – Stage Raw By now, Kander and Ebb’s 1966 musical Cabaret is as much a part of the American musical theater canon as Oklahoma. While it’s much darker than most of its Rodgers and Hammerstein counterparts (save, perhaps, for Carousel), it now feels like an old standby, performed by regional theaters and colleges nationwide. Read more… Rob Stevens … Read more
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw James Joyce in his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man famously wrote, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” That sentiment describes a lot of historical fiction, in which the sins of the past reverberate endlessly down decades or centuries into the present. Read more… … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw The world of super heroes can be fun to satirize, and Greg Kalleres’ Meanwhile, Back at the Super Lair, directed by Jack Stehlin, is a potentially entertaining spoof, with enough irony and character-driven humor for an adept actor to play with. Read more… Now running through June 23
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw It’s hard to think of a timelier play than Jennifer Barclay’s Ripe Frenzy, about a shooting and mass murder that takes place in a high school in a small town in upstate New York. A rolling premiere from the National New Play Network, it opened here in Los Angeles the day … Read more
Ellen Dostal – BroadwayWorld A gaunt Leon Russom conjures up more pathos than normal as the aged Prospero in the Porters of Hellsgate’s production of THE TEMPEST. Whether it is due to the fact that the actor has been battling pneumonia, which took him out of the show opening weekend mid-performance, or that his interpretation of the … Read more
Lovell Estell III — Stage Raw The legendary Vince Lombardi once declared that, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” (Actually the slogan was first voiced by UCLA Bruins football coach Henry Russell “Red” Sanders in 1950; Lombardi probably got it from him). It has now become a venerated mantra, a toxic call to action willingly embraced … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw We don’t think of Mae West as a literary figure, but she wrote three plays — Sex, The Drag, and Pleasure Man. All were produced on Broadway, and all were closed by the police on grounds of obscenity. This seems hard to fathom, since nowadays they seem no more obscene (or even risqué) … Read more
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw Steve Apostolina’s Forever Bound is an uncommon play that begins in one genre and ends in another. It’s always difficult to market something that doesn’t fit neatly into one category, so writers are often encouraged not to create anything like that. However, the results of such experiments are usually intriguing artistically. Such … Read more
Jonas Schwartz – TheaterMania Farce is a science, a series of actions and reactions. People slam and swing open doors, they race up and down stairs, they misplace their clothing. If farce is a science, Noises Off deserves a Nobel Prize for physics.Read more… Rob Stevens – Haines His Way What has eight doors and … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw Playwright Laureen Vonnegut’s dark comedy tackles a range of issues, from life and death to sexual identity, sexual confusion, and snarled emotional entanglements. It’s set in a Palm Springs cocktail lounge called, with heavy symbolism, The Last Stop.Read more… Now running through May 13