Tuesday, April 9, 2024
According to the great sages of the internet, Hamlet is the most produced play in world history, and whether or not that claim is true, the indecisive Dane is certainly ubiquitous. And if it…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 04:42PMTuesday, February 20, 2024
Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd is my favorite musical. Its combination of a beautiful score, clever lyrics and unusually gruesome subject matter is sui generis. When it�…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 09:48PMWednesday, February 14, 2024
“A sad tale’s best for winter,” Shakespeare has one of his characters opine in his penultimate work, The Winter’s Tale, an odd duck of a play that’s mostly been overshadowed by his…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 01:32AMFriday, January 26, 2024
I find one-person shows one of the most difficult types of theatre to review, for several reasons. If the quality of the writing or performance isn’t good, there may be nothing but negativ…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 11:18PMThursday, December 21, 2023
Although no year in which the Mark Taper Forum is at least temporarily shuttered and the Kirk Douglas Theatre’s programming is reduced can be said to be an entirely positive year for Los A…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 07:42PMThursday, November 9, 2023
One of the great pleasures of theater is seeing a revival of a classic play not only succeed on its own merits but also be relevant to modern times. Certain works such as The Crucible or Ene…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 12:18AMTuesday, October 24, 2023
Sometimes great actors can save a bad play. The sheer strength of their talent or the brilliance of their star power dazzles us into not noticing or caring that the vehicle they’re in is l…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 05:07PMThursday, October 5, 2023
The first time I encountered Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, I identified strongly with the title character, both with his frustrations and what he thought of as the tragedy of his life. As I got o…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 01:49PMSunday, September 17, 2023
Measure for Measure has been referred to as Shakespeare’s “#MeToo play,” a story in which a man in power uses his clout to try and sexually abuse a woman, except that she stands up to …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 06:03PMThursday, August 31, 2023
In a world in which a repulsive con man can get elected president and turn the entire Republican party into a credulous and insane mob, it’s to be expected that somebody would try to write…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 07:04PMWednesday, August 16, 2023
For better or worse, it’s human nature to find the misfortune of others amusing. YouTube is filled with videos of people making mistakes or getting hit somewhere unpleasant by a stray ball…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 10:13PMThursday, July 20, 2023
When I got to my seat at the Atwater Village Theatre, I saw a note. It informed me that this seat was in “the Crabby Zone,” and that performers in crab costumes with outsized claws would…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 02:49PMWednesday, July 5, 2023
I have seen a fair number of Shakespeare plays altered by directors in my day, from modernizations to setting/era changes, and the main thing is that the alterations have to successfully ill…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 04:19PMTuesday, June 27, 2023
The subject of unlikely friendships is always intriguing (however will this cat and dog get along?), and none seems more unlikely than the friendship between boxing legend Muhammad Ali and e…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 09:19PMThursday, April 27, 2023
Laguna Playhouse, in association with Gare St. Lazare, Ireland and the Rubicon Theatre Company, presents the rolling Southern California premiere of The Realistic Joneses by Will Eno.
Th…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 03:06PMTuesday, April 11, 2023
The reasons that a piece of art works in one format but not so well in another are many and varied. In a time in which seemingly everything is being turned into a musical, and every animated…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 06:36PMFriday, March 24, 2023
The 1992 Los Angeles Uprising, known more colloquially as the “L.A. riots,” happened almost 31 years ago. Anna Deavere Smith’s play about it, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, premiered in …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 10:32PMWednesday, March 22, 2023
Plays concerning the supernatural or people attempting to communicate with the departed have been with us for a while, from Noël Coward’s comical Blithe Spirit to Prince Gomolvilas’ exc…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 12:00PMWednesday, February 22, 2023
Stephen Sondheim revolutionized musical theater. He took his initial mastery of the classic tuner (from shows such as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, West Side Story and Gyps…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 12:00PMMonday, February 13, 2023
Plays in which family secrets are tragically revealed are nothing new – Oedipus and his mom were shocking audiences back as far as 429 BCE. In the U.S., the 500 lb. gorilla of this genre w…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 12:00PMTuesday, January 31, 2023
The first time I saw a play by Will Eno was about 15 years ago, by Circle X Theatre Company of The Flu Season. It was an excellent production in many ways, but there was one scene in which a…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 12:00PMWednesday, December 14, 2022
Production photos by Jeff Lorch.
Memory plays are a tricky proposition. Hew strictly to the truth and the story may not be dramatic enough; indulge in creative license and literal-minded …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 11:24PMWednesday, November 23, 2022
According to a survey conducted by American Theater magazine, Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s is currently the most produced play in the U.S. It’s not surprising that Nottage’s work is being …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 05:32PMWednesday, November 9, 2022
I’m a horror film fan. I probably see 75-100 horror movies a year, and have done so for a long, long time. So I can state with certain knowledge that the cheapest of all scares is the jump…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 06:42PMMonday, October 31, 2022
When Harper Lee wrote her novel To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, she didn’t think it would be a big success. Sixty-two years later, the book has been taught to millions of students in school…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 07:18PMFriday, October 21, 2022
The epigraph of E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel, Howards End, is “Only connect…” This motto mainly referred to opening oneself up to the world and other people for greater understanding a…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 02:19PMMonday, September 26, 2022
In my experience, ninety percent of the time that there’s an issue with a theatrical production, the problem is the play itself. It’s surprisingly rare for the main trouble to be with th…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 09:07PMThursday, July 28, 2022
Religion is ever with us, for good or ill. We humans seem to be hardwired with a need for the numinous. Steven Levenson’s play, If I Forget, begins with a psalm and ends with a vision, the…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 06:48PMTuesday, June 28, 2022
Mere days after the abomination of the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade, discussing a play about toxic masculinity seems almost too topical. Cisgender white men are running amok waging…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 08:33PMMonday, June 6, 2022
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…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 08:07PMFriday, May 27, 2022
At this point, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a theatrical peak so frequently attempted that you can see, as on Everest, the frozen bodies of thespians who chanced and failed the perilous ascent …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 07:24PM 
