NEW JERUSALEM: 57% – BITTERSWEET

Richard Fancy and Marco Naggar i "New Jerusalem" at the Pico Playhouse. Credit: Hope Burleigh.

BITTER
Breathing life into those ideas, however, requires performers who understand them. Setting aside flubbed lines, cadences and delivery frequently do not reflect a good handle on their meaning. Instead, emotional peaks arrive at arbitrary overacted moments, with insignificant sound and fury.
Philip Brandes – LA Times

BITTERSWEET
Ives strives to make the theological debate as compelling dramatically as it is intellectually, but the attempt tends to fall flat, the result of overwritten dialogue and characters who represent philosophical points of view rather than people. Still, Fancy’s ‘s towering turn as the rabbi who finds himself challenging his own tightly held beliefs is powerful.
Paul Birchall – LA Weekly

SWEET
This imaginative play of ideas receives a striking West Coast premiere that may leave its audiences reeling, thanks to director Elina de Santos and a dream cast.
David C. Nichols – Backstage

BITTER
Set and costume designer Stephanie Kerley Schwartz, Lighting Designer Leigh Allen, and Sound Designer Bill Froggatt have enhanced the production as much as is possible in a single setting, but Elina de Santos, a much-acclaimed director, has faltered a bit here because the very nature of the play virtually ensures that it will come off as static and overly complicated. And that’s a hard act to overcome.
Cynthia Citron – LA Examiner

SWEET
West Coast Jewish Theatre’s production of David Ives’ brilliant, exquisitely written “New Jerusalem,” on stage at the Pico Playhouse, is pure theatrical and intellectual magic.
Beverly Cohn – LASplash

SWEET
This is “historic” drama I highly recommend.
Carol Kaufman Segal – Reviewplays

BITTERSWEET
The play is directed by Elina De Santos, and while she keeps it going at a fast clip, the play becomes an intellectual exercise and is ponderous in places.
Audrey Linden – LA Examiner

BITTER
And while the bulk of the play is taken up by good actors speaking intelligent dialogue about weighty matters, this production is content to let that be that. It is as if the director said, “A good play is its own reward.” Well, it is, when you read it. When you stage it, though, you have responsibilities, such as framing the important instants that make up a story; otherwise your audience would be better served by a trip to the library than to the theater.
Jason Rohrer – Stage and Cinema

SWEET
The ensemble acting is adroitly, tautly directed by Elina de Santos. The sparring between the philosopher and his interrogators, especially the rabbi, is electric.
Ed Rampell – Jesther Entertainment

NEW JERUSALEM
Pico Playhouse
10508 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles
8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays; Ends April 1, 2012
Tickets: $28; (323) 821-2449
Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes