The Hollywood Reporter

Love, Noel: The Letters And Songs Of Noel Coward at the Lovelace Studio Theater, Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

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Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter The new intimate room at the old Beverly Hills post office has been nostalgically configured as a vintage supper club with alcohol and food service for this sentimental yet substantial cabaret performance of Noel Coward‘s words and music by a pair of genuine theatrical stars, John Glover and Judy Kuhn. In a satisfyingly … Read more

VILLON at the Odyssey Theatre

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Dany Margolies  –  Arts In LA This play is more about storytelling than story. It is about the way we make theater and observe theater. It is about words and how they are enhanced by a theatrical production. And yet, as the title character tells us in a surprisingly emotion-stirring moment at the play’s end, … Read more

THE WHIPPING MAN at the Pico Playhouse

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Dany Margolies  –  Arts In LA This Matthew Lopez play would have made a fascinating two-hander. But the playwright added a third character and ratcheted up the intrigue, conflict, and shaping, making it an even more fascinating play. Like a fine puppeteer, director Howard Teichman pulls strings to alter the balance among the characters, adding … Read more

VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE at the Mark Taper Forum

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Bob Verini –   Arts in LA So you’re a distinguished playwright in your early 60s: a very Chekhovian age; an age when the mind drifts toward dreams once grasped, then compromised, then lost, and fixates on memories of simpler, happier times. You look around your Bucks County farmhouse and think, “Gosh, this looks a lot … Read more

ABOVE THE FOLD at the Pasadena Playhouse

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Jonas Schwartz –  TheaterMania The model for Bernard Weinraub’s play Above the Fold, premiering at the Pasadena Playhouse, is Tom Wolfe’s Pulitzer Prize winner Bonfire of the Vanities. Though parallels can be seen between both works, the indictment of politicians, the press, and Caucasian and African-American leaders for instigating and celebritizing the racial divide, Weinraub’s work also maintains … Read more

PASSION PLAY at the Odyssey Theatre

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Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly A quartet of Big Idea plays has opened over the past two weeks, exploring the intersections of art, psychology and history. Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play, co-presented by the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble and Evidence Room, has been around since at least 2005, with productions at Arena Stage in Washington, Chicago’s … Read more

A WORD OR TWO at the Ahmanson Theatre

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Pauline Adamek  – ArtsBeatLA An exuberant celebration of language is the most apt description for actor Christopher Plummer’s self-created one-man show. A Word or Two is playing through February 9, 2014 at the Ahmanson Theatre, downtown LA. Early on in the show, Plummer selects a book from a heap and begins to read from a lectern. But this … Read more

An ILIAD at the Broad Stage

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Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter If war and conflict must be begrudgingly considered the natural condition of Mankind, then The Iliad of Homer, voiced and written some 2,800 years ago, remains the most profound exploration of these primal drives to domination and destruction. The act of combat has never been more piercingly described (not … Read more

FOXFINDER at the Pasadena Playhouse

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Dany Margolies – Arts In LA Dawn King’s play is set in Britain, in the near future. As with all good literature, it’s meant to represent the here and now. So when an inspector arrives at a struggling farm, interrogating the farmers too inappropriately and searching the home too thoroughly, a certain Notorious Safety Administration … Read more

PETER AND THE STARCATCHER at the Ahmanson Theatre

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Pauline Adamek – LA Weekly Much like the dastardly pirates terrorizing the high seas in his fun Peter and the Starcatcher, playwright Rick Elice has ransacked the best of British kids lit, giving us plucky, pint-sized sleuths fresh from the Boy’s Own adventures and larger-than-life characters straight out of rowdy pantomimes. Based on the 2006 … Read more