Wednesday, June 12, 2019
FOUL AND FAIR Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or The Tragedy of Macbeth, is typically dated to the years immediately following the coronation of James I as King of England in 1603. James, who was…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:04AMThursday, June 6, 2019
A PUNCH IN THE GUT Raw as realism requires, good plays about boxing are more than just Rocky slugfests. Like Clifford Odets’ seminal Golden Boy, they transform an atavistic popular distr…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:01PMTuesday, June 4, 2019
YOU’RE GETTING TO BE A RABBIT WITH ME Whatever happened to all the imaginary friends we had as kids? Did they all end up in some limbo where they started making friends with each other, or…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:02PMHAS TOLSTOY EVER BEEN SO HOT? In his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Anna in the Tropics, Nilo Cruz created the role of striking, velvet-voiced, Cuban Lothario Juan Julian, a lector who is hir…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:29AMMonday, June 3, 2019
A PERFECT FIT Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years is contextually brilliant: it is a two-character musical that starts at the end of a five-year relationship for the woman, Cathy, but…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:15PMBILLY BOY OH BOY Meet Billy, an ex-con sharpshooter who is living his American Dream in 1979. This optimistic showman, romantic, and visionary has encouraged a fraternity of castaways — a …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:40AMThursday, April 25, 2019
SHE’S BA-A-A-CK AND SHE’S FA-A-A-ABULOUS Charles Busch’s play Die, Mommie, Die! is equal parts Greek comic-tragedy and Hollywood kitsch — a melodramatic campy cult classic in the vei…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:53PMMonday, April 22, 2019
BEST WHEN IT’S GRIM GRIMM Born in Austin and now living in New York City, artist Natalie Frank created 75 works based on the stories of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Using gouache and chalk pas…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:42PMThursday, April 18, 2019
NOT ONE FALSE NOTE The musical masterpiece Falsettos follows Marvin, an appealing, brainy, anxious, obsessive, wealthy Jewish gay man who struggles to create a tight-knit family out of his …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:15PMTuesday, April 16, 2019
SOME, NOT ALL, IS ILLUMINATED Sadly, not everything is illuminated in British playwright Simon Block’s fascinating but problematic adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s best-selling novel…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:50PMMonday, April 15, 2019
CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE THEATER Well, there certainly is nothing wrong with good advice. And there’s plenty of that in the structurally unconventional Tiny Beautiful Things, Nia Vardalos’s …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:17PMWednesday, March 27, 2019
GRACE NOTES Now on the Kleberg Stage in Austin, TX, Anna Deavere Smith’s powerful, engrossing and resonant solo play — Notes from the Field — has been updated for four actors by ZACH�…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:13AMTuesday, March 26, 2019
A VAULTING MATILDA Imagine Annie with psychokinetic powers, Nancy Drew as a mind-reader, or Cinderella acting as her own fairy godmother. Self-empowerment fuels this upbeat, knock-down, pell…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:21AMThursday, March 21, 2019
photos by Little Fang Up Here La Jolla Playhouse 2910 La Jolla Village Dr in La Jolla ends on September 6, 2015 for tickets, call (858) 550-1010 or visit La Jolla Playhouse
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:53AMWednesday, March 20, 2019
BRAIN CRAMPS One of the brainiest plays since, well, British playwright Nick Payne’s other brainy play, Constellations, Incognito (2014) contains Payne’s usual assortment of short scenes…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:43PMTEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA I’m not really sure if director Alana Dietze could have done anything more with The Wolves, a dramatically inert slice-of-life one act that follows an …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:37PMTuesday, March 19, 2019
ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF A PLAY Anarchy is not chaos. The former means “without law” and the latter means “without form.” This is an important distinction to consider in a play that inten…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:55PMMonday, March 18, 2019
TOO BAD THEY DIDN’T RAISE THE RENT Rent has a romantic history: Jonathan Larson, its author and composer, died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm on Jan. 25, 1996, 10 days before his 36th birt…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:29PMKITTY LITTER If I had my way, the slogan for Cats would be changed from “Now and Forever” to “Not Now, Not Ever.” Even when I saw the show back in the early 80s and again in the earl…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:49PMSunday, March 17, 2019
HARRY POTTER AND THE RECYCLED RECORDING ENGINEER Jack Thorne’s immensely popular two-part play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, has taken up residence in London, New York, and Melbourne…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:25PMFriday, March 15, 2019
A YES AND NO NANETTE When the 1925 musical No, No, Nanette was revised and remounted in 1971, it was predicted to be a flop by folks in the Biz, but it was the buzz of the season with nostal…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:58AMTuesday, March 12, 2019
WE’RE STILL WAITING You’re watching a play but you have no idea what’s happening. There is no plot, the dialogue is gobbledygook, and characters are filled with despair, yet you are to…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:06PMThursday, March 7, 2019
LOVE CONQUERS COMMON SENSE My takeaway about Oscar Wilde in David Hare’s intellectually stimulating but overly static play of ideas, The Judas Kiss, now at Boston Court, is this: The liter…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:58AMThursday, February 28, 2019
CRIPPLE THE FUN Funny and heartbreaking, Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan is nothing less than a slalom run of emotional ups and downs and plot twists and turns. Antaeus Theatre�…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:12AMTuesday, February 26, 2019
WITNESSING UGANDA IS AMAZING, EVEN THOUGH THE SHOW NEEDS WORK Griffin is a young black New York actor in search of more than a career. When he is kicked out of his church choir because he’…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:36AMThursday, February 21, 2019
UNFORGETTABLE AND FORGETTABLE AT THE SAME TIME Well, here’s a show that, while it doesn’t defy description, is nonetheless perplexing. As with Matthew Borne’s Cinderella, now playing a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:16PMThursday, February 14, 2019
BOY OH BOYS With a fun and intermittently funny score by Hal Hackady (lyrics) and Larry Grossman (music), perky, adorable, enterprising direction by J. Scott Lapp, and some shining performan…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:12AMFriday, February 8, 2019
RUNNING ON FULL After producer Sophina Brown’s celebrated production last year of King Headly II — one of ten dramas of the late August Wilson’s 2oth-century chronicle The Pittsbur…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:37PMMonday, February 4, 2019
A MORE INTIMATE TITANIC MADE EPIC It’s telling that the 1997 musical Titanic won Tony Awards for each nomination — Best Musical, Peter Stone’s book, Maury Yeston’s sc…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:45AMThursday, January 31, 2019
BUCKLEY BUCKLES A BIT, BUT DOLLY DEFINITELY DELIVERS To start with, let’s agree to never say “Goodbye, Dolly.” Thornton Wilder’s genius for the common touch isn’t just a golden leg…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:37PMSunday, January 27, 2019
IT COULD HAVE BEEN MURDER Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a musical that never fails to impress, no matter how many times it’s been seen. It te…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:56PM 
