All Entries in the "Low Rated" Category
TRUE WEST (STAGES OF GRAY): 33% – BITTER
BITTER However, I felt this project was just too ambitious for this new theater company. I want a large stage for Shepard’s plays; there exhausting and I feel you need the space between the actors and the audience. Gray tried to use too different casts one with a traditional approach and one group more edgy. [...]
FLASHDANCE, THE MUSICAL (SEGERSTROM CENTER): 42% – SWEET
BITTER Most of the original score, though, is period-unspecific, ultra-low-grade, ingénue-with-a-dream stuff. Poor Alex has to sing what seem like thousands of lines about “knowing that this is my moment” and how leaping and falling is better than never leaping at all — generic, yearning ballads that Ariel, Beauty, and the heroine of “Tangled” all [...]
NEVERWHERE: 67% – BITTERSWEET
SWEET Under the resourceful leadership of director Scott Leggett, utilizing every inventive trick the creative nutjobs who populate Scared Fools have to conjure, “Neverwhere” goes everywhere the imagination can take it. Travis Michael Holder – Backstage SWEET Director Scott Leggett stages the play creatively, using projections and video to create whatever locations he needs, and [...]
ALABAMA BAGGAGE: 13% – BITTER
BITTER Taking aim at a topic as loaded as the revolver with which its characters take turns menacing one another, Buddy Farmer’s “Alabama Baggage” centers on the traumatic scars of childhood sexual abuse. The drama’s first full staging at Theatre Asylum falls short of its serious intentions, however, with the need for further development still [...]
THE GIFT: 55% – BITTERSWEET
BITTER An appealing and capable cast keeps the flicker of hope alive that Joanna Murray-Smith’s play “The Gift” will be worth our time despite the mounting evidence to the contrary. But by the end of this 90-minute comedy even the actors seem done in by the effort of sustaining the illusion that there’s something important [...]
THE GAMBLER’S DAUGHTER: 17% – BITTER
BITTER Brian E. Smith’s staging underserves North’s script. As a result, the conflicts are uninvolving and the sometimes sharp dialogue falls flat. You’re better off putting your money on a different horse. Philip Brandes – LA Times SWEET This was a fun production with some serious commentary on jobs, gambling issues and the idea that [...]
SLIPPED DISC: 0% – BITTER
BITTER Perhaps something is lost in the translation, but there are so many ideas tossed around—from the real to the imagined to the metaphysical to the philosophical—that nothing really sticks. The end result is a feeling of arbitrary inclusion with no real design on consistency of tone, style or message. Tom Chaits – Stage and [...]
SURVIVING MAMA: 28% – BITTER
BITTERSWEET The play has great potential and I would like to see it again if it was shortened and reworked a little. Rose Desena – The Los Angeles Post BITTER “Surviving Mama,” now in its world premiere at Edgemar Center for the Arts, is a frustratingly disjointed play that feels like a protracted examination of [...]
SWEET THURSDAY (PACIFIC RESIDENT): 29% – BITTER
BITTER What results is an attenuated hodge-podge with scene after scene — including several inadequately rendered musical numbers — that do little to further the action. F. Kathleen Foley – LA Times SWEET Robb Derringer and Matt McKenzie (who also directs) have beautifully adapted novelist John Steinbeck’s sequel to Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, into a [...]
ALL THE KING’S MEN (EL PORTAL): 49% – BITTER
BITTER The script spans a period of 15 years, from 1922 to 1937, but its nonlinear structure and frequent back-and-forth shifts in time make the narrative difficult to follow. The problem is compounded by director David Chrzanowski’s wildly uneven pacing, which turns this nearly three-hour production into something of an ordeal. Lovell Estell III – [...]
THE LITTLE DOG LAUGHED (SECRET ROSE/ZEPHYR): 49% – BITTER
BITTERSWEET The uneven revival at Secret Rose Theatre doesn’t quite do them justice — think of a crisp vodka tonic arriving watered down. Charlotte Stoudt – LA Times BITTER Douglas Carter Beane’s 2007 Tony-nominated play The Little Dog Laughed is a comedy. Apparently director Jon Cortez did not get that memo. Under his misguided, clueless [...]
I, CALIGULA: AN INSANITY MUSICAL: 46% – BITTER
BITTERSWEET A lot of hard work went into this production. Still, there’s room for improvement. Joe Straw – Joe Straw #9 BITTER Were this a spoof in the spirit of Waiting for Guffman, the agonizing, overwrought playing would begin to make sense, but by all accounts this is a serious outing. High production values are [...]
THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF SAVAGES (LATC): 38% – BITTER
BITTERSWEET Most of the actors on stage at the Los Angeles Theatre Center downtown gamely make a run at sustaining interest in the development of their characters and the shifting relations between them, but the self-indulgent crises and dilemmas of Freed’s poets aren’t compelling enough to justify two-plus hours of it all. Lyle Zimskind – [...]
THE EXORCIST (GEFFEN PLAYHOUSE): 46% – BITTER
BITTER The physical production is just so much more persuasive than the dramatic encounters contained within it. The casting of Brooke Shields, lovely as always to look at, doesn’t enhance the work’s credibility, although I think she would be terrific in an alternative camp version directed by John Waters. Playing actress Chris MacNeil, the bewildered [...]
THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR (PORTERS OF HELLSGATE): 50% – BITTER
BITTER And to play “Merry Wives” with so much extraneous business, winking self-delight and thunderous volume is, alas, to jettison the humor of it. My affection for this risk-taking troupe notwithstanding, I cannot tell what the Dickens they were thinking. David C. Nichols – LA Times SWEET The Merry Wives of Windsor is a fast, [...]
LOS OTROS: 46% – BITTER
BITTERSWEET “Los Otros” is curious about the manifold layers of personal identity, but in a desultory way that deprives the work of sufficient dramatic pressure. The Southern California lens adds local interest, but that and first-class underscoring aren’t enough to transform these essayistic compositions into riveting theater. Charles McNulty – LA Times BITTERSWEET While some [...]
SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD: 46% – BITTER
SWEET Each song is a stand alone experience that transports the audience to a realm of hope and guiding light. Serita Stevens – LASplash BITTERSWEET DOMA Theatre Company presents a mixed bag of vocal talents backed by a bang-up band in Tony Award-winning composer Jason Robert Brown’s “Songs for a New World,” an hour-and-45-minute theatrical [...]
MODIGLIANI (OPEN FIST): 46% – BITTER
BITTER Directed by Bjorn Johnson, the uneven cast, on a borrowed set, is unable to find the intimate realities of the broke and drunk artists who lived in Paris in 1916. Dale Reynolds – Stagehappenings BITTER McIntyre has chosen a rich subject but makes disappointingly little of it. Neal Weaver – LA Weekly SWEET What [...]
CLOUDLANDS: 50% – BITTER
SWEET The result is nothing short of a triumph for all concerned with this extraordinary new work. F. Kathleen Foley – LA Times BITTER Cloudlands does not elevate the storyline. It sinks it. The whole piece feels like a travelogue; the characters comment on their feelings, endlessly describing their unpleasant emotional experiences, yammering on and [...]
