All Entries in the "critique of the week" Category
Critique of the Week
EAT THE RUNT Review by Madeleine Shaner – Park La Brea News/Beverly Press (opens in pdf) The lapel pin that’s clipped to the Press Kit for Avery Crozier’s new (and first full length) play pictures a quartet of multi-colored shaggy dogs, semi-circled with the cryptic phrase ‘Anyone can dribble a Pollock’, seems to suggest that [...]
Critique of the Week
THE EXERCISE Review by Tony Frankel – Stage and Cinema Reviewer on the phone with his editor: “Listen, I got a problem. I just got out of The Exercise over at The Lounge Theatre. Listen, it’s not going to be a pretty review. I feel almost maligned. I’m so upset that I can’t – nor [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
MY PENIS – IN AND OUT OF TROUBLE Review by Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Let’s not mince words. Any man who devotes a show to the subject of his own penis has way too much time on his hands. Puppetry of the Penis would be Exhibit A were this theory ever to be [...]
Critique of the Week
[title of show] (Celebration Theatre) Review by Harvey Perr – Stage and Cinema Friend: Wasn’t that fabulous? I mean, what can you say? Didn’t you just love it to bits? Reviewer: What are you talking about? Friend: Hello. Where are you? The show we just saw. “[title of show].” Didn’t you think it was just [...]
Critique of the Week
40 IS THE NEW 15 Review by Tony Frankel – Stage and Cinema This is a difficult review to write: On one hand, 40 is the New 15 is a pleasant musical about forty year-olds who take a look at the choices they made in high school, going back and forth in time from 1983 [...]
Critique of the Week (another one on a Tuesday – It’s a tie!)
JEWTOPIA Review by Tony Frankel – Stage and Cinema Before Jewtopia at the Greenway Court Theatre starts, actors entered the audience and began interacting with theatergoers. I got schpilkas when one actress hovered above my seat and said (in a Brooklyn accent), “I just saved a marriage.” That’s when I knew – I felt it [...]
Critique of the Week (on a Tuesday)
CIRCLE OF WILL Review by Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA (first published) It’s a really, really bad sign when you start checking your watch 30 minutes into a ninety minute one act play, because those ninety minutes soon start to feel like nine hours… Jack Grapes’s play Circle of Will is an excruciating theatrical experience that [...]
Critique of the Week
PROCREATION Review by Charles McNulty – LA Times There’s something undecided about the tone of “Procreation,” the tiresomely outlandish family comedy by Justin Tanner that’s receiving its world premiere at the Odyssey Theatre under the direction of David Schweizer. With its grotesque caricatures and zingy retorts, the play aims for lowest-common-denominator laughs. Yet the cast [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
PROCREATION Review by Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly The plays of Justin Tanner are like Rice Krispies. They crackle when you pour in the right actors — and the actors here from his own company are just right — and then they kind of wash away. Maybe that doesn’t matter. That crackling is the [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Runner Up
KING LEAR Review by Madeline Shaner – Park La Brea News/Beverly Press (opens in pdf) Shakespeare’s “King Lear” is one of the plays everyone thinks they know, many say they have read or seen, but far more, in greater numbers, have made a greater effort to avoid at all costs. Making the effort to sit [...]
Critique of the Week
THE LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE Review by Georja Umano and Gerald Everett Jones - LASplash Bloody mayhem makes for dark Irish comedy in this play about contentious factions within a nasty group of remarkably stupid terrorists during the “Troubles.” Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore , features a young hothead Padraic ( Chris Pine) who has broken [...]
Critique of the Week
BEYOND Review by Tony Frankel – Stage and Cinema Hold on to your hats, kids. Beyond, part “Cirque” (the producers wisely omitted “du soleil”), part French Cabaret, part community theatre, partly thrilling, partly embarrassing, and partly ready, hit the stage running at The El Portal Theatre. The experience is akin to watching a gorgeous model [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
ALL MY SONS Review by Tony Frankel – Stage and Cinema All My Sons, now showing in a red-hot production at the Raven Playhouse, is Arthur Miller’s seminal 1946 work about a seemingly functional all-American family with secrets that threaten to crack its very foundation. The time may be WWII, but the themes are shockingly [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Runner Up
AMADEUS Review by Tony Frankel – Stage and Cinema “Oh, music is easy; it’s marriage that’s hard,” Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart plaintively states to 1780s court composer, Antonio Salieri. The same could be said of the staging of Peter Shaffer’s brilliant opus, Amadeus, by August Viverito at The Chandler Studio Theatre. Shaffer has tinkered with his [...]
Critique of the Week
YELLOW Review by Harvey Perr – Stage and Cinema The Westmorelands of Vicksburg, Mississippi, are, on the surface – at least when one first encounters them – just too perfect for words. Bobby and Kate have been married for nineteen years and are still in a state of wedded bliss, he still romantic with her, [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
LEIRIS/PICASSO Review by Mayank Keshaviah – LA Weekly “We try not to have so many guests. It disturbs what’s left of the neighbors,” says Michel as he stumbles around his Paris home in the dark, falling down stairs, knocking over crudités, and scalding himself on a teakettle. It’s all rather amusing … until you realize [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Runner Up
LEIRIS/PICASSO Review by Thomas Hampton – Thomas Hampton Reviews Brimmer Street Theatre Company, a local troupe consisting of Emerson graduates, has focused its attention on a little known meeting between Pablo Picasso and leading French existentialists in Vichy France. They gathered in secret, past curfew, to stage a reading of a new play Picasso had [...]
Critique of the Week
HOLLYWOOD FRINGE FESTIVAL by Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly The first Hollywood Fringe Festival is still in full swing and its initial weekend portended the best news in a theater season of dreary setbacks. Three years in the planning, Hollywood Fringe is modeled after the grandfather of fringe festivals, the Edinburgh Fringe. That Scottish [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
HOLLYWOOD FRINGE FESTIVAL As written and heard by Bill Raden – LA Weekly FRINGE CITATIONS FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF GOSSIP AND HEARSAY The following anecdote was experienced and written by critic Bill Raden: “At a performance of Elevator (Hudson Theatres), about an hour into the show — and eight hours in story time of the [...]
Critique of the Week
YELLOW Review by Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Writer-director Del Shores has been poking fun at the American South for decades on L.A. stages. His 1987 comedy, Daddy’s Dyin’ (Whose Got the Will?), played for months at Theatre/Theater, then on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood. A latter-day The Miser, Daddy’s Dyin’ established Shores as an [...]
Critique of the Week
SOUTH PACIFIC Review by Trevor Thomas – EdgeLosAngeles The terrible wounds which had scorched the lush jungles of Guadalcanal, Tawara and Peleliu had barely begun to heal when Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific opened on Broadway in April, 1949. Based on short stories by James A. Michener, South Pacific took the militarized racism that had [...]
Critique of the Week
SUPERNOVA Review by Eve Meadows – Stagehappenings How often does one go the theatre to discover that he/she has fallen in love with the script, actors, set, direction, and all aspects of a production? How often is one deeply moved and satisfied in our 99-seat world existing only here in Los Angeles? Rarely do I [...]
Critique of the Week
THE CLEAN HOUSE Review by Harvey Perr – Stage and Cinema Lane is a doctor who likes her house to be as clean and as antiseptic as a, well, as a hospital room. But Lane doesn’t want to clean it herself. She can, in fact, afford to pay others to do so. But her new [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
U.S.S PINAFORE Review by Joel Elkins – LA Theatre Review I was curious to find out if a takeoff on Gilbert & Sullivan set in outer space dubbed U.S.S. Pinafore could ever be as clever as its premise or its title. The adaptation by Jon Mullich (who also directed) is indeed clever, although admittedly, the [...]
Critique of the Week
LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT I WORE Review by Clare Elfman – Buzzine If you just love Sex and the City, and if you just love boots and clothes and girly stuff, and suffer when there is nothing — absolutely nothing — in your closet, then you will absolutely love the new, shall I call it, [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAY Review by Frances Baum Nicholson – Pasadena Star News Few joys are more long-lasting than seeing a theatrical work that contains enough complexity to make one ponder. An intricate piece written and produced well will leave one peeling layers away for days. One gradually comes to full understanding of something which was, [...]
Critique of the Week
THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO Review by Don Shirley – LA Stage Watch But class distinctions just aren’t what they used to be, as indicated by Frederique Michel’s and Charles Duncombe’s new adaptation of The Marriage of Figaro, at City Garage. Class in the 18th century was much more rigorously defined than it was in the [...]
Critique of the Week
THE WOMEN OF BREWSTER PLACE & NIGHTMARE ALLEY Review by Harvey Perr – Stage and Cinema How thrilling it is to see a small space – and they don’t come much smaller than the Celebration Theatre – transformed into an opera house. By the time The Women Of Brewster Place sings its final notes, one [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S “THE 39 STEPS” Review by Harvey Perr – Stage and Cinema If it insists on calling itself Alfred Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps,” then, damn it, I’d rather review Hitchcock’s masterpiece, because the opening of that film – hundreds of small electrical bulbs spelling out MUSIC HALL – is the closest the madly successful [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Runner Up
THE ARSONISTS Review by Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Swiss scholar Max Frisch first wrote The Arsonists (also known as The Firebugs) as a radio play in 1953, and it was developed into a stage play in 1958. Like Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (written one year later), it’s a cautionary tale about the complacency and blindness [...]