David C. Nichols – LA Times Mikhail Bulgakov meets Sergei Eisenstein at Andy Warhol’s Factory in “Moskva.” This ornate take on Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” is a nobly ambitious, surreally unhinged deep-dish bowl of dramaturgical borscht.Read more… Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA City Garage is known for staging edgy and provocative avant garde theater and … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Among people of a certain age I’ve spoken with recently, let’s say 45 and older, there’s this sense — not so much a perception or even an intuition, rather a more vague tingle — that something is going numb.This is not a physical sensation but a spiritual one. It … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Tami and Bill Martin love their son Josh. Call it a difficult love. Josh is 18 and severely autistic. When Josh gets upset, which he does unpredictably, he can turn violent, pulling his mother’s hair and choking her. Soon after, he lies on the living room floor in a … Read more
Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA Legendary comedy writer Neil Simon’s 1972 play The Sunshine Boys has an excellent premise: two old vaudevillian stars who worked together for over 40 years, but who haven’t spoken in over a decade, are reunited for a TV spot. (In fact, it was a good enough premise for Fellini to copy for Ginger e … Read more
Neal Weaver – LA Weekly Breaking up is hard to do, particularly if you’re embedded in a 20-year marriage. That’s the not terribly surprising message of Paul Coates’ play, illustrated by three couples: one straight (Kelly Coffield Park and playwright Coates), one gay (David Youse and William Franklin Barker) and one lesbian (Ferrell Marshall and … Read more
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA For R II, Jessica Kubzansky’s adaptation currently being performed at the Theater @ Boston Court, Shakespeare’s Richard II has lost not just six letters from its title but also about 25 percent of its text and upwards of 90 percent of the ensemble usually assembled to perform it. In R II, John Sloan portrays the … Read more
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA As Greek tragedies go, Prometheus Bound poses something of a staging nightmare. There’s no betrayed wife out to murder her own children and her rival, no king brought to understand the truth about the older woman he married. Instead, it’s a solemn religioso pageant in which the god who created mortal … Read more
Dany Margolies – Arts In LA Coyotes don’t play fetch and greet us at the door and guard us in our homes. Coyotes are the predator version of our snuggly pups. They are the canines with the need to kill, excused—but not usually forgiven—because they’re programmed that way. Do we know of people like that?Read … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day was first presented as a workshop in 1985 at New York’s Theatre 22, before receiving its premiere at San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre in 1987, directed by Oskar Eustis — who runs New York’s Public Theater. It’s no coincidence that in 1990, Eustis … Read more
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn is a report from the feminist front. Folded within a thin narrative is a lot of intriguing conversation, which in the course of two acts brings out numerous perspectives on what women do (and should) need and what they do (and should) want. The talk is … Read more