Wednesday, November 2, 2011
TENNESSEE W’S MASTER CLASS FOR ACTORS The New American Theatre production of Five Beauties (or, as it turned out to be at the performance I attended, Four Beauties) is not like going t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:28AMTuesday, November 1, 2011
DANCE MACABRE The Zombie Joe’s Underground production of The Cask of Amontillado: Although there are only two performances left of this show, this is a piece that should be extended; if it…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:43PMSunday, September 25, 2011
ON ONE’S VERY BEST POOR BEHAVIOR Ian is a monster. Oh, not your fire-eating dragon sort of monster. Quite possibly you’ve met this kind of monster yourself. He’s British; h…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:59AMFriday, September 23, 2011
PROSPERO IS UP TO HIS OLD TRICKS There seems to be a plan afoot at Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group to give us The Complete Abridged Works of William Shakespeare, a project that …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:20AMDANSE MACABRE David J’s The Chanteuse and the Devil’s Muse is not so much a play as it is an art installation. But, as an art installation, it has a terrible beauty and some mome…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:51AMFriday, September 16, 2011
THE HAPPIEST CORPSE I’VE EVER SEEN How many reasons do you need to rush out and get tickets for the Reprise revival of Cabaret? Let me offer a few. First of all, this is 2011, and a be…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:13PMHIGH CULTURE UNDER A MALIBU SKY Anne Bogart is not one to shy away from her own directorial eccentricities. As the American Theater’s Queen of Deconstruction, she has had a formidable …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:00PMThursday, September 15, 2011
WHEN YOU USE MACE, USE WITH DISCRETION Playwright Kristoffer Diaz has an ear for unleashing the poetic possibilities in “street-smarts” vernacular; and director Edward Torres has…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:22AMSaturday, August 27, 2011
THE ZOMBIE JOE AESTHETIC With each new production, inch by inch, layer by layer, we get closer and closer to tasting the artichoke heart of Zombie Joe. It is not a question anymore of which …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:36PMSaturday, June 25, 2011
WHAT IS ART ANYWAY? What if you were an alcoholic ex-bartender who lived in a mobile home in a trailer park in Bakersfield that was furnished with junk bought from rummage sales and who foun…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:59AMOUR OWN PRIVATE GRAND GUIGNOL I hesitate to call anyone a genius on the basis of two productions, but if Sotto Voce alerted me to the unique talents of Zombie Joe, then Urban Death, the be…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:57AMFriday, June 17, 2011
TOO MUCH SUGAR ON THE DONUTS If Superior Donuts had come to us as a new American play by an unknown writer, we might have said that, despite a certain soft-headedness and the feeling that it…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:28AMTHE SCHEHERAZADE OF POP CULTURE There are a thousand and one ways to tell a story. In Margo Veil, Len Jenkin, one of our most intriguing and often exasperating playwrights, becomes a modern …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:54AMFLEUR ELISE NOBLE: 2 DIMENSIONAL LIFE OF HER This is to installation art what NEVA is to theater: a sublime illustration of the form. Noble’s collage (of projected images, cut-outs, dr…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:34AMThursday, June 16, 2011
When a festival opens on as brilliantly shattering a note as the RADAR L.A. FESTIVAL did on Tuesday night with Neva, expectations for the rest of the festival run very high indeed. From Chil…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:44AMEditor’s note: Brewsie and Willie is currently running as part of the Radar L.A. Theater Festival. This review is reprinted from an earlier production of the show in July 2010. We …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:38AMSunday, June 12, 2011
LEARNING TO FLY WITH BROKEN WINGS “Blackbird singing in the dead of night/Take these broken wings and learn to fly/All your life/You were only waiting for this moment to arise.”�…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:41AMSaturday, June 11, 2011
GOING, GOING…GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN One of the pitfalls of being a theater reviewer in Los Angeles is that it is impossible to see more than the smallest amount of the cascade of plays…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:50PMFriday, June 10, 2011
WE OF LITTLE FAITH Kate Fodor’s 100 Saints You Should Know is a mildly interesting play, given heft by its author’s obviously sincere attempt to deal seriously with the nature of faith, …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:05AMTHE IMPORTANCE OF BEING BRIAN BEDFORD Lady Bracknell (arguably the greatest creation of Oscar Wilde’s surpassingly fertile comic imagination) is the aristocratic and imperious dowager …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:45AMSunday, May 22, 2011
THE EPIPHANIES THAT COME TO US AFTER BEING HIT IN THE HEAD BY A BASEBALL BAT Among the happiest of theatergoing experiences is entering the theater, without any expectations whatsoever, and,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:12AMFriday, May 20, 2011
ONCE-A-WEEK Monday nights at 8:00 p.m. at the L.A. Gay and Lebian Center’s Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center (The Renberg Theatre): If you’d like to take a pleasant leisurely …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:14PMSaturday, May 14, 2011
THE OBSESSIVE PURSUIT OF ARTISTS There are few things funnier than watching John Fleck, sweating and crazed, walk perilously close to the edge of a high cliff, teeter towards falling off, an…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:30PMThursday, May 12, 2011
RECIPE FOR SUCCESS Here’s a mouth-watering recipe for making people happy: 1) Take a great musical. (Kiss Me, Kate will do. If you need to ask why, then I’ll tell you: It’s both a wond…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:06PMSunday, May 8, 2011
HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY AND BECOME A STAR If you lose your way trying to navigate the Kafkaesque journey Fin Kennedy wants to take us on in his startlingly original and thematically dens…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:26PMSaturday, April 30, 2011
THE TALENTED MR. JACOBSON Tom Jacobson is nothing if not ambitious. He is not only the most prolific Los Angeles playwright of the moment, but he is the one, given the astonishing record of …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:43PMIN PRAISE OF ECCENTRICITIES It is not surprisng that Tennessee Williams preferred The Eccentricities of a Nightingale to Summer and Smoke. Freed of the conflict between Puritanism (repressed…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:23AMTIME SPENT WITH A MUSICAL GENIUS If ever a production fitted so perfectly within the walls of the elegant Pasadena Playhouse as George Gershwin Alone, I can’t imagine what it may have been…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:06AMSunday, April 17, 2011
A CONVERSATION between A REVIEWER WITH BATTLE FATIGUE and A REVIEWER WHO CONTINUES TO LOVE THE THEATER (A PLAYLET) BATTLE FATIGUE: I sometimes feel that I spend so much time in the theater t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:48AMSunday, April 10, 2011
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO LANFORD WILSON? The beautifully detailed lower Manhattan loft that Ralph Funicello has created – complete with fire escape and skylight, unfinished walls daubed w…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:18AMWHERE’S A TOUGH-MINDED AND PROLETARIAN WHORE WHEN YOU NEED ONE? The most interesting thing about Jane Anderson’s The Escort is the revelation that a Cadillac call girl takes on the attit…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:55AM 
