Terry Morgan – Artsbeat LA It’s 1998 in midwestern U.S.A, and three rap-loving teens live in a suburb of The City called The Hill. Hank (E.E. Williams) wants to be a rapper but maybe doesn’t have the performance chops, and so he studies the production side. Read more… Now running through February 20
Terry Morgan – Artsbeat LA It’s a Wonderful Life is now an undisputed holiday classic, but its road to perennial status was as long and difficult as its hero’s journey to happiness. Read more… Tracey Paleo – Gia on the Move “It is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your … Read more
Terry Morgan – Artsbeat LA Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children was written before the pandemic, and it’s about the aftermath of a nuclear accident and not a virus, but its vibe of looming doom and concern over what can actually be done to fix things seems very appropriate to our present-day circumstances.Read more… Now running through January 23, … Read more
Terry Morgan – Arts Beat L.A. In 1970, journalist Studs Terkel released his book, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, in which he interviewed people about living through that desperate time and how they made it through. There are certainly parallels between that time and our own, from the existential terrors of the … Read more
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw Poverty and homelessness and what to do about them are hardly new matters of concern. King Lear berates his newly-found conscience thus: “Poor naked wretches…how shall your houseless heads and unfed sides…defend you from seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en too little care of this!”Read more… Margaret Gray … Read more
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen Perspective is crucial to the understanding of both life and theater, and in the Pasadena Playhouse production of The Father, which opened this week, an intentionally disorienting point-of-view offers a dramatic and moving look at late-stage dementia. Written by Florian Zeller, the play premiered in 2014 and many consider … Read more
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw The phrase, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned” is used to describe doing something trivial when serious action is desperately required. It’s an apt epigram for humanity today — fully aware of the worsening disasters brought on by climate change but content to focus on acquiring more money and power, even … Read more
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw The adage, “Youth is wasted on the young,” is generally attributed to George Bernard Shaw, a man who didn’t lack for adages. The idea that youth can also be wasted on the old is one of the undercurrents that powers ’s play, Disposable Necessities, a science fiction comedy/drama that posits a … Read more
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw Placing a disparate group of characters in a location they can’t leave and forcing them to deal with each other has been a tried and true source of dramatic conflict since Sartre’s No Exit. The claustrophobia and stress of interacting with new people ratchets up the tension swiftly. So it … Read more
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw Watching A Noise Within’s new production of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, I was struck by how closely the first act resembles Pinter’s The Homecoming. A man who’s been away from his family for some time returns, accompanied by a woman whom he brings into a group of strange, violent men. But whereas … Read more