All Entries Tagged With: "sunday"
Critique of the Week
THE CHAIRS F. Kathleen Foley – LA Times If you want to drive yourself a bit mad, try this exercise. Apply the “Five Ws” of journalism to “The Chairs,” Eugene Ionesco’s 1952 absurdist farce, now at A Noise Within. It’s easy enough to answer “Where?” –- in this case, a dilapidated grand salon completely surrounded [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
THE CRIPPLE OF INISHMAAN Frederik Sisa – The Front Page Online Although Tadhg Murphy offers as fine a performance as one could ask for, it’s telling that the titular character in The Cripple of Inishmaan is played by an able-bodied performer. The lazy interpretation of this would invoke political correctness, but it would be more [...]
Critique of the Week
CYCLOPS: A ROCK OPERA Tony Frankel – Stagehappenings MORE PHALLUS, PLEASE I don’t know about you, but if I were a 5th century Greek who had just witnessed three back-to-back tragedies at the Festival Dionysus, only one thing could lift my spirits: Party! The Greeks loved to party as much as they loved theatre, so [...]
Critique of the Week
WISH I HAD A SYLVIA PLATH Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Before getting to the crux of Edward Anthony’s comi-tragedy, Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath, being presented by Rogue Machine at Hollywood’s Lounge Theatre, it’s a good idea to start with a recent remark made by Olga Garay, who heads the City of [...]
Critique of the Week
LOCKED AND LOADED Tracy Lynn Schafer – ArtsBeatLA If you’re even slightly reluctant to travel for theatre in Los Angeles, for fear you’ll be wasting your time, I highly suggest you find the quickest way to the Santa Monica Playhouse. Playwright Todd Susman’s Locked and Loaded guarantees something original, hilarious, and well worth the mileage! [...]
Critique of the Week
RE-ANIMATOR: THE MUSICAL & ALCESTE Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly When Los Angeles theater is at its best, it’s usually at its best in the smaller theaters that have both the comparatively modest overhead and the guts to produce new works without looking over their shoulders to what London or New York thought of [...]
Critique of the Week
A HOUSE NOT MEANT TO STAND Clare Elfman – Buzzine When I heard that the Fountain, one of L.A.’s most prestigious theaters, was producing Tennessee Williams’ last play to honor his centennial birthday, I was excited. Tennessee Williams was a fixed spot in my literary heart–half-real, half-idealized since I was aware of the difficulties in [...]
Critique of the Week
NO. SAINTS LANE Erin Daley – LA Theatre Review Theater is so much more to me than just putting on plays. It’s the capital ‘T’ Theater, the cultural institution, the social force, the secular communion and the fullest way to tell a story. The work that I love, the work that really ignites me is [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
THE BERLIN DIG Joel Elkins – LA Theatre Review John Stuercke claims he wrote The Berlin Dig as a reaction to the recent rise in fundamentalism in the United States and even gives credit to Sarah Palin for inspiring it. We can now add this to the list of things she has inflicted us with. [...]
Critique of the Week
THE BERLIN DIG Eve Meadows – Stagehappenings The synopsis of the play seems interesting and significant. We are in present day Germany where three friends meet. One is a Turkish native who denies the Armenian holocaust. The two others are staunch German nationalists who condemn the Hitler era but disagree about current Turkish immigrants who [...]
Critique of the Week
THE BREAK OF NOON by Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly We come not to bury Neil LaBute, but to praise him. This may be the only positive review of his play The Break of Noon, currently at the Geffen Playhouse, that you’re likely to read. It’s been roasted by critics from coast to coast [...]
Critique of the Week
CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION Harvey Perr – Stage and Cinema Sometimes a play comes along that is so different from any play that has preceded it that, while it may have people scratching their heads, wondering what it is they have just seen – or even dismissing it out of hand because of its unfamiliarity – [...]
Critique of the Week
SMUDGE Steven Stanley – StageSceneLA How to review a show whose point you missed entirely? That’s the dilemma currently faced by this reviewer in writing about Rachel Axler’s Smudge, the latest offering by Burbank’s esteemed Syzygy Theatre Group. Having purchased a copy of Axler’s one-act and read the first half of it before seeing it [...]
Critique of the Week
HAIR Josh Moorhead – Buzzine (The Public Theater) It’s not that the hippies of the ’60s invented anything. Drugs, love, and good vibes have been around pretty much since before mankind even popped up on Earth. That is, if you believe in the loving, good-vibing creator thing. It’s just that maybe they did it better [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
HAIR Tony Frankel – Stage and Cinema When a 1977 revival of the “American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” Hair opened on Broadway, it received more pans than Julia Childs’ kitchen. The original 1968 Hair had taken the theatre world by storm because it had given a palatable, exuberant and tuneful voice to the contentious counter-culture revolution. [...]
Critique of the Week
HAIR Trevor Thomas – EdgeLosAngeles Everything about Hair, now enjoying a revival at the Pantages, was designed to stick it in the eye of the Greatest Generation, starting with the theater itself. The old Earl Carroll Theater was at 6230 Sunset Blvd. It started out as a burlesque house, then the home of television’s grisly [...]
Critique of the Week
(This is actually a critique of the entire year of 2010. But it’s just so damn good I thought it’d be a nice kick-off for 2011. CM) L.A. THEATRE IN 2010 Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Top 10 list? No thanks. We already have the L.A. Weekly Theater Awards for that — details to [...]
Critique of the Week
BROADWAY HOLIDAY Jonas Schwartz – TheatrerMania A mostly light evening of song, Neil Berg’s Broadway Holiday, now at the Geffen Playhouse, is like wandering into a Manhattan watering hole and discovering some top-notch Broadway talent prattling away around the piano. The show’s concept is simple: five mainstays from the Great White Way, tenor Ivan Rutherford, [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
ISLAND OF BRILLIANCE Geoff Hoff- LA Theatre Review It is, perhaps, a little daunting to be given a press kit and seeing on the front a memo from producer Orson Bean, the Broadway, television and movie actor and mainstay of gameshows and talkshows from the sixties and seventies, rather than the usual picture from or [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
WEST SIDE STORY Kevin P. Taft – Frontiers The gang war goes to the mall in the National Touring Company’s Broadway revival of West Side Story. In what we can now call the “Glee Generation,” it seems it takes nothing more than a familiar song and a bunch of fresh-faced kids to make spectators swoon. [...]
Critique of the Week
WEST SIDE STORY Evan Henerson – LA Examiner It’s too pretty/ Far too pretty/ It’s so pretty, not gritty at all… A big splashy “Westside Story,” somewhat fresh from Broadway, is back in town. Sound the trumpets! No? Kazoos perhaps? As much as there is to be said for a musical whose songs you recognize [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
NEXT TO NORMAL Evan Henerson – LA Examiner “Next to Normal” leaves a viewer drained: emotionally, physically, psychologically. It’s a satisfying kind of exhaustion, the kind that only the most passionate and often unexpected plays can generate. And, really, it doesn’t get more off the charts than a musical – not a comedy – about [...]
Critique of the Week
HEAD, THE MUSICAL Tony Frankel – Stage and Cinema FEAR OF RETRIBUTION CAUSES CRITIC TO GO INTO HIDING AFTER HIS REVIEW OF HEAD IS PUBLISHED Head: ‘The Brain That Wouldn’t Die’ Musical (based on the B Horror Movie The Brain That Wouldn’t Die) felt as if a high-school garage-band got stoned, watched the movie, got [...]
Critique of the Week
LAUGHING WITH MY MOUTH WIDE OPEN Andrea Kittelson – LA Examiner Why do people put on solo shows? I can think of a myriad of reasons, and I write about them in my book How to Put On Your Own One Person Show. Why did Gwendoline Yeo put on her solo show “Laughing With My [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
HARPS & ANGELS Harvey Perr – Stage and Cinema Dear Michael McKean, I hereby declare that I am unashamedly besotted with love for you. Why? Because last night, I saw you take a handful of songs by Randy Newman and watched you become a different character with every song, turning each into an exquisitely dimensional [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Runner Up
NIGHTSONG FOR THE BOATMAN David C. Nichols – LA Times “Nightsong for the Boatman” at the Odyssey is by the late Jovanka Bach, a full-time physician whose canon includes “Chekhov & Maria” and “O’Neill’s Ghosts.” Produced and directed by Bach’s husband, John Stark, “Nightsong” modernizes the sacrificial switch-off familiar from the Old Testament’s Jephthah, Euripides’ [...]
Critique of the Week
HYPERBOLE: ORIGINS M.R. Hunter – EyeSpyLA Hyperbole—noun, Rhetoric. 1. Obvious and intentional exaggeration. 2. An extravagant statement or figure of speech not intended to be taken literally. “hyperbole.” Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 08 Nov. 2010. Origin—noun. 1. Beginning. 2. Parentage. 3. Source. “origin” Webster’s New Pocket Dictionary. Wiley Publishing, Inc. 2000 It helps to [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
INTRINGULIS Tony Frankel – Stage and Cinema Intríngulis is Carlo Albán’s true-life solo show about his family’s move from Ecuador to the U.S. and his life growing up as an illegal alien, even while starring in Sesame Street as a kid. The intrigue regarding an illegal on a children’s show is enough to get us [...]
Critique of the Week
SUGAR DADDY Laurel Belgreen – Socal.com Fielding Edlow is on a wild sugar high in “Sugar Daddy” at the Lounge 2 in Hollywood. Like a child who ate her entire bag of trick-or-treat candy on Halloween night, she talks fast, spins around the room, and suddenly leaps from one place to land in a different [...]
Critique of the Week
PHANTOM LUCK Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly I can’t read Samuel Beckett’s works about aging and mortality — even those written when the man wasn’t yet 40 — without thinking about the old joke about the hypochondriac’s epitaph, which reads, “See.” How sage is it to devote an entire oeuvre to our ending. Hardly [...]
