Archive for the ‘review’ Category:

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING: 100% Sweet

SWEET
A Noise Within’s “Much Ado About Nothing” is nothing but well done and well-deserving of praise. See it before it closes on 21 May 2010. The production is family-friendly and [...]

WIT: 100% Sweet

SWEET
Edson’s commentary on American medical practice, however salient, merely lays the groundwork for the play’s most compelling and universal theme: the human struggle not only with mortality’s looming oblivion [...]

DON JUAN DISPENSO: 50% Bitter – UPDATED

BITTER
If the smoky-eyed Enani rarely stokes the Don’s legendary libido with sufficient fire, blame Tanner; he transposes his characters to modern times (a period nicely suggested in designer Daniel Mahler’s [...]

THE UNEXPECTED MAN: 67% Sweet – UPDATED

BITTER
I wish I could say that the play’s culmination is worth the investment of the slow buildup or that the enjoyment of art, as life, is in the journey, [...]

THE STORY OF MY LIFE: 100% Sweet

SWEET
Neil Bartram and Brian Hill’s 2009 chamber musical is a poignant two-hander exploring the joys and disappointments of a long-term friendship. Simplicity is the hallmark of this delicate gem, which [...]

MEN OF TORTUGA: 67% Sweet – UPDATED

BITTER
The loss of its host company with the closing of the Pasadena Playhouse threatened the show’s very opening, let alone Furious’ future, and seems to have cast a listless gloom [...]

Critique of the Week

CAVE QUEST
by Steven Stanley – StageSceneLA
Did you ever see that Coca Cola commercial from 1970s, the one that had a couple thousand peace-seeking grownups and kids warbling “I’d like [...]

Critique of the Week – Runner Up

DUAL CITIZENS
by Robert Machray – Stagehappenings
If you like your theatre with a European feel then Dual Citizens currently playing at the Odyssey Theatre. Ron Sossi the Artistic Director [...]

SLAUGHTER CITY: 50% Bitter

SWEET
Director Barbara Kallir has a tall order here—working with rich language, singing, and choreographed meat-cutting, much knife-handling, and, at its core, a dual love story that competes with Wallace’s sometimes [...]

OEDIPUS EL REY: 100% Sweet – UPDATED

SWEET
Alfaro spins much of this in a colloquial lexicon that makes it all the more forceful. Some of his passages — Tiresias’ musings on what a father really is, after [...]

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