Tuesday, April 30, 2013
LEAVE IT TO CHILDREN’S THEATER TO MAKE THE BIGGEST STATEMENT OF ALL The biggest opening in Chicago last week was the behemoth pre-Broadway spectacle Big Fish, but right across to…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:43PM[SHARE]Monday, April 29, 2013
BLIZZARD TALE In meteorology, the phenomena known as Lake Effect occurs when a cold system glides over the warmer water of a large lake and dumps huge amounts of precipitation, usually snow,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:30PM[SHARE]PLOUGHED UNDER BYÂ GOOD INTENTIONS AND BADÂ SONGWRITING What a great idea: Create modern folk songs to represent Americans whose voices have been given short shrift (or ploughed under) b…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:52PM[SHARE]Saturday, April 27, 2013
FAUST IN SPACE Just because I recommend Trap Door's latest production doesn't mean that I understand it. Core of the PUDEL (pronounced "poodle") is an Avant Garde/Experimental/Movement Theat…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:00AM[SHARE]Friday, April 26, 2013
ALMOST A FULL MOON The theater has been sorely affected by electronic communication. Since the advent of the internet, at least, the cumbersome amount of news bits and twittering has infecte…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:48AM[SHARE]Thursday, April 18, 2013
OH BROTHERS! Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: Talk about a musical with a strange history! It begins with the Ancient Roman legend "The Rape of the Sabine Women" " attributed to Plutarch " f…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:48AM[SHARE]Monday, April 15, 2013
THE MUSICAL WITH LEGS Musical Theatre West's (MTW) exuberant production of A Chorus Line proves that the musical is as fresh as the day it appeared almost forty years ago, when the standard …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:06PM[SHARE]Saturday, April 13, 2013
SO MANY ATROCITIES IN ONE EVENING When stories appear which elucidate the carnage during WWII, many look to heaven and ask, "Why?" But the script and execution of Our Class, about a true-lif…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:06PM[SHARE]Monday, April 8, 2013
NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED Henrik Ibsen stated that he had no conscious thought of making propaganda with A Doll's House (1879). Yet many productions have a feminist bent: Nora is the misu…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:26AM[SHARE]Saturday, April 6, 2013
BETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE A soldier named Mario returns from Iraq just in time for the 2005 New Year's celebration with his East Los Angeles family, friends and novia " but he also retur…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:13PM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 2, 2013
MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL Although he wrote at least 15 complete operas, Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968) is not a familiar name, even to many in the opera world. The first-generation modernist…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:25PM[SHARE]Sunday, March 31, 2013
FOOD FIGHT Using Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children (1939) as a template, writer Peter Howard has created a wartime tale about the need to survive in challenging times. But the war isn…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:56PM[SHARE]Wednesday, March 27, 2013
EVERYBODY HAS A BALL AT THIS CINDERELLA Gioachino Rossini's Cinderella (La Cenerentola) was written in 1817 during the bel canto era when operas were written to showcase beautiful singing, b…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:58PM[SHARE]Tuesday, March 26, 2013
NETHER NOR Reality is the state of things as they actually exist, right? Not anymore. It's fascinating that the World English Dictionary defines reality as "the state of things as they are o…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:40PM[SHARE]Monday, March 25, 2013
HAVING ISSUES WITH ISSUES Ken LaZebnik's On the Spectrum, which opened last week at the Fountain Theatre, belongs to a genre known as Theatre of Identity, aka Social Issues Theatre; the idea…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:50AM[SHARE]Friday, March 22, 2013
NOT WORTH THE WEIGHT The title of Samuel D. Hunter's The Whale refers to three things. The first is Charlie, a homebound, 600-pound tutor who instructs online classes in expository writing. …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:08PM[SHARE]Tuesday, March 12, 2013
L. A. THEATER RISES FROM THE DEAD With an assemblage of the bravest actors in Los Angeles, Zombie Joe returns with an all-new Urban Death, the naturalistic horror show in the style of Le Th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:46PM[SHARE]THE TROUBLE WITH THE TROUBLE WITH WORDS In 2011, I stumbled upon a refreshing new composer at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. The extraordinarily encouraging work in Gregory Nabours' song cyc…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:57AM[SHARE]Saturday, March 9, 2013
GAY ABSTRACTION For years, Ken Roht has proved himself to be one of the most inventive theater practitioners in Los Angeles. His avant garde works include the renown 99 Cent Only shows, whic…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:15PM[SHARE]Friday, March 8, 2013
WHAT WERE JEW THINKING? Baby boomers should recall the time when a great comedy album could be played with regularity. Some of my favorites were Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow…Right…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:11PM[SHARE]Friday, March 1, 2013
THE CORN IS HIGH INDEED Messrs. Rodgers and Hammerstein reinvented American Musical Theater for the ages when they created Oklahoma! in 1943, incorporating song and dance to tell their story…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:02AM[SHARE]Sunday, February 24, 2013
ON THE WAY TO PARADISE There is a telling item buried among the bric-a-brac of Stephanie Kerley Schwartz' detailed country set of an economically depressed, coal-mining, hillbilly burg named…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:53PM[SHARE]Wednesday, February 13, 2013
MUSICAL WITH A CHECKERED PAST GETS A CHECKERED PRODUCTION Chess, the musical about two chess tournaments between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War, is the 1979 brain child of lyr…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:09PM[SHARE]Sunday, February 10, 2013
A SIZE THAT DOES NOT FIT ALL Of the three plays which constitute Tarell Alvin McCraney's "The Brother/Sister Plays," The Brothers Size, now playing at The Old Globe, is the most intimate and…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:26PM[SHARE]Wednesday, February 6, 2013
THE DRAG QUEEN TO DRAG YOUR THOUGHTS AWAY FROM YOUR TROUBLES I first saw Coco Peru perform in a B movie sendup " a campy romp called Blood Orgy of the Carnival Queens! But at New York's O…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:31AM[SHARE]Saturday, February 2, 2013
THE RITE OF JOFFREY One hundred years ago, a new ballet took place in Paris’ Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. This highly controversial work " for both its music and choreography "…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:59AM[SHARE]Saturday, January 26, 2013
A CIRCUS BUT NO BREAD The theater space is a cavernous church gym with lousy acoustics. The intrepid thespians at Red Tape Theatre transform it into the title setting, an arena of death with…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:03PM[SHARE]Thursday, January 24, 2013
GOTHIC OPERA You will notice in the first five paragraphs of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" that the storyteller's description of an ancient decomposing castle, surrounde…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:02PM[SHARE]Tuesday, January 15, 2013
THE ACTORS’ GANG’S TARTUFFE RETURNS FOR THREE NIGHTS BEFORE NATIONAL TOUR The Actors' Gang, the critically acclaimed Los Angeles based ensemble theatre company, will present high…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:59AM[SHARE]Monday, January 14, 2013
PETER PAN AND CATHY RIGBY HAVE SOMETHING IN COMMON: THEY WON'T GROW UP When the musical fantasy adaptation of James M. Barrie's Peter Pan landed on Broadway in 1954, it received rave reviews…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:01PM[SHARE]Sunday, December 30, 2012
Sometimes in life, it's the last Christmas present we open that makes up for all the lousy ones we unwrapped before. In what is truly the most dismal season of holiday-themed shows, I…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:53PM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
