
CRITICISM VS CONFESSION When analysis starts to look like refusal Editor’s note: Jesse Green was reassigned from his role as chief theatre critic at The New York Times in 2025 and now serv…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:58PMA HUNGER THAT DOESN’T QUITE NAME ITSELF A sharp new play still discovering its center Lewis Carroll understood that eating is never just eating. When Alice stands before the small cake and…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:22AMTHE LAST FOOL A master’s final shrug lands with surprising weight Verdi was seventy-nine when Falstaff premiered at La Scala in 1893. He had not written a comic opera since Un giorno di re…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:24PMA HELL OF A MOUTHFUL A play where grief, faith, and ambition collide —and silence carries the weight Jacobson knows that the domestic and the exalted do not occupy different rooms. Hell Mo…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:51PMTWO VOICES, ONE VOLTAGE An evening of operatic power finds its charge in connection, not just scale BroadStage does not often present evenings of this ambition: a sold-out house, a freelance…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:57AMEVERYTHING'S COMING UP JULE Broadway's golden-age hits return in a world premiere revue that treats them as living drama Jule Styne's name tends to arrive attached to titles that feel immova…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:12AMDELIBES TAKES THE LEAD In ABT's return of Ashton's Sylvia, the best performance at Segerstrom wasn't onstage Frederic Ashton's Sylvia arrives at Segerstrom Center for the Arts after nine yea…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:50AMTHE RAIN IN SPAIN, UNRESTRAINED At full symphonic scale, My Fair Lady finally sounds the way it was written to be heard George Bernard Shaw got what he deserved. He spent decades refusing to…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:33PMTHE DREAM ON CREDIT A clear-eyed, unsentimental staging that lets Miller's argument land with full force Arthur Miller finished Act I of Death of a Salesman in a single day and the rest in s…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:02AMTHREE MEN IN A BOAT, WAITING FOR A FISH At Laguna Playhouse, the making of a blockbuster becomes a chamber piece about ego, craft, and survival Gildart Jackson, Will Block, and Adam Poole Th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:00AMINTIMACY AND ENORMITY: MOZART AND MAHLER IN COSTA MESA Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K. 488, is a peculiar piece to a classical program. It omits oboes entirely, replacing them …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:10PMSTILL THE PHARAOH-EST OF THEM ALL, AKHNATEN STUNS AT LA OPERA An intellectually rigorous, visually arresting production that embraces the opera's challenges rather than disguising them There…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:21PMOPERA RETURNS TO RIVERSIDE, AND IT'S BRINGING A 54-PIECE ORCHESTRA The Riverside Lyric Opera's gala concert on March 7 marks a rare moment for the Inland Empire: a full-scale operatic event …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:00AMTHREE SYLVIAS, ZERO THRILLS Beth Hyland's world premiere at the Geffen Playhouse arrives with the kind of literary bait that makes theater people clasp their reusable water bottles in deligh…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:56PMPATRON SAINT OF THE SECOND-RATE A rigorously intelligent and theatrically thrilling revival that restores Shaffer's parable to full force Schopenhauer once drew a distinction between talent,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:00AMTWO MONOLOGUES IN SEARCH OF A DIALOGUE Justin Tanner has spent decades making chaos look easy. Those early Cast Theatre productions like Pot Mom and Zombie Attack trafficked in a particular …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:28AMTHE ACTRESS WHO MADE THE RIDICULOUS PROFOUND Catherine O'Hara, who has died aged 71, could make you laugh and break your heart in the same scene. Most performers pick a lane; she moved betwe…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:04PMThree Couples, Zero Accumulation With a score that forgets to remember, The Notebook drowns in its own mawkish bathwater There's a musical version of The Notebook that might actually work. A…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:00AMTHE PLAYWRIGHT WHO CHOSE RADIO OVER JAWS Steven Spielberg had asked Tom Stoppard to write the screenplay for Jaws, and Tom said he couldn't as he was writing a play for the BBC. Spielberg sa…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:43PMA Night with a Gentleman Thief: Pacific Opera Project's Delightful Fra Diavolo Daniel Auber's Fra Diavolo amassed over 900 performances at the Opéra Comique during the 19th century before b…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:35PMAMAZING THEATER HERE AND NOW Kai A. Ealy stands in a doorway wearing a coat that looks like it weighs forty pounds. Maybe it does. His Herald Loomis has just walked off seven years of forced…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:51AMWHEN GRIEF MEETS THE ALGORITHM The terrible beauty of grief is that it makes us do irrational things with the most rational tools. In Lauren Gunderson's anthropology, now in its North Americ…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:58PMWhen creation becomes choreography in Frankenstein, the laboratory turns into a stage of desire Mary Shelley's creation continues to haunt not only literature but the stage, where movement a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:45AMHUZZAH AND HO-HUM The curtain speech at Huzzah! " which opened Thursday at The Old Globe " comes with bassoon and tambourine: silence thy phones, feed not ye actors. This bit of business tel…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:00AMA Town, a Tragedy, and the Triumph of Kindness The musical Come From Away " with book, music and lyrics by married couple Irene Sankoff and David Hein " tells the remarkable true st…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:00PMMURDER NEVER SOUNDED SO SWEET The gentleman killer returns to Southern California with a smile that could polish the silver. In a joint run between Laguna Playhouse and North Coast Repertory…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:06PMOUTBREAK OF MANNERS: WHEN POLITENESS TURNS CONTAGIOUS The play begins with a picture of composure. Five parents sit at a polished library table in a progressive private school in Berkeley. T…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:00AMTHEATRICAL ARRHYTHMIA La Jolla Playhouse has always been fairly adventurous in its programming, but its latest premiere chooses a subject that feels less like theatrical fodder than a medica…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:30AMOPERA WITHOUT WALLS: VERISMO IN THE PARK Pacific Opera Project opened Pagliacci into the open air of Heritage Square Park last night, and the result was a strangely festive collision of carn…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:58PMA FIELD OF PUNS IN FULL BLOOM Corn puns are like tequila shots. A few will make you smile and loosen you up, but by the time you are ten or twelve deep you start to wonder how you got here a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:25AMSHAKESPEARE, INTERRUPTED About five minutes into & Juliet, Juliet belts "…Baby One More Time" with such raw confusion you half-believe Britney's lyrics might hold the secrets of the un…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:59PM

