All Entries Tagged With: "bob verini"
FREE MAN OF COLOR: 100% – Sweet
SWEET Smith’s spare three-character study unfolds through intimate moments and intellectual discourse, powerfully examining the issues of its day, as well as questions surrounding citizenship and belonging, which continue to occupy us. The dialogue is especially refreshing for its crisp diction, for which the credit goes to both the cast and director Dan Bonnell. The [...]
THE GOOD BOOK OF PEDANTRY AND WONDER: 63% – Sweet – UPDATED
BITTER From such fascinating but dramatically unpromising ingredients Pomerance seeks to assemble a play. Given that Murray used the wealth of English literature to assemble his dictionary, one might have imagined a Stoppardesque approach where Murray’s painstaking effort is scrimmed through some well-known literary masterpiece providing a superstructure on which to hang the theatrically inert [...]
ROBIN AND THE 7 HOODS: 100% – Bittersweet
BITTERSWEET As an entertainment, “Robin and the 7 Hoods” succeeds only if you agree to accept it on its own harebrained terms. The film had the advantage of Ol’ Blue Eyes, Dino and Sammy, to get viewers over the hump of the screenplay. Here, Cahn and Van Heusen’s music is the secret weapon. That’s some [...]
BONES: 89% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET There’s a double-whammy irony about the power of the past to shape our lives: the more traumatic the event, the less reliable our ability to recall it accurately — and the more remote the possibility of moving past it becomes. Such is the equation of psychological paralysis that playwright Dael Orlandersmith charts with devastating [...]
PROCREATION: 33% – Bitter – UPDATED
BITTER My theater companion said afterward that he kept waiting for the large cast to break out into a musical number. I was just hoping that the humor would kick into a higher gear. But whatever the expectation, “Procreation” fails to deliver. Charles McNulty – LA Times SWEET Tanner’s satire of behaviors roasts not so [...]
![[title of show] (Celebration Theatre): 92% – Sweet – UPDATED](http://bitter-lemons.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/titleofshow-150x150.jpg)
[title of show] (Celebration Theatre): 92% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Now, mind you, the characters’ sexuality is never a hindrance to the evening, as it is all done in fun and in fairness to everyone. The American Theatre has not been particularly homophobic, or racist, or even sexist, for some decades. And as the show is playful in the extreme, running a tad over [...]
THE LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE: 100% – Sweet
SWEET This kind of theatrical blood sport won’t be for everyone. (Pity the crew assigned to clean up the mess after each performance.) But if a flincher like me found himself tittering with open eyes, maybe you’ll be tickled by McDonagh’s malign mirth as well. Charles McNulty – LA Times SWEET Playwright Martin McDonagh taps [...]
THURGOOD: 100% – Sweet
SWEET At the end, Marshall recites the following lines from a poem by his Lincoln University schoolmate Langston Hughes: “O, let America be America again./The Land that never has been yet — /And yet must be….” Fishburne allows the words to resonate with purpose, clarity and democratic feeling, and his performance is an opportunity for [...]
THE MADNESS OF GEORGE III: 100% – Sweet
BITTERSWEET The play is less about George III specifically as it is about the boundaries between order and chaos, sanity and madness, good government and bad, and about the general human inability to control ourselves. How can we control millions if we can’t control ourselves? It’s also a thought-provoking companion piece to another of the [...]
BEYOND: 75% – Sweet – UPDATED
BITTERSWEET Hankering for leggy showgirls, recorded New Age music and a vaguely pretentious storyline? Vegas too hot or expensive? Sashay over to the El Portal’s “Beyond,” a Frenchified revue hoping to become Cirque du Soleil when it grows up. An attraction of modest means, modest pleasures and inflated ambitions, this labor of love from quintuple [...]
IN THE HEIGHTS: 88% – Sweet
SWEET This Tony-winning musical makes its L.A. bow in an exhilarating touring edition that pulsates with showstopping song-and-dance numbers while raising one’s spirits with its funny and poignant characters, coping with the challenges of life in the barrio of New York’s Washington Heights. Les Spindle – Backstage BITTER The resolutions to almost all these tangles [...]
SURF REPORT: 0% – Bitter
BITTER I think the insinuation that the ever changing current in everyone’s life is akin to the unpredictability of the ocean is correct and worthy to be explored. However, this play is not the venue worth exploring it in. Or in surfer terms, Surf Report wishes it was an epic but instead is an example [...]
THE THREE MUSKETEERS: 83% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Ellen Geer, doyenne of the leafy Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon, employs some 50 thesps for almost three hours in Alexandre Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers,” adapted in the cram-it-all-in-there spirit of the RSC’s “Nicholas Nickleby” and Steppenwolf’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” Cinematic rather than theatrical — which is to say, played as straight naturalism [...]
THE JESUS HICKEY: 75% – Sweet
SWEET Yankee, also directing, keeps this Katselas Theatre Company production moving on Jeff McLaughlin’s set, a living room that goes from threadbare to posh as Agnes’ gift brings in the dough. Stylistically, the play — like its Irish accents — wanders a bit, starting out at the kitchen sink and spinning into broader comedy. TV [...]
ROAD TO SAIGON: 67% – Sweet
SWEET Besides being Filipino-American actresses, Joan Almedilla, Jennifer Paz and Jenni Selma all cut their musical-theater teeth playing Miss Saigon’s tragic heroine, Kim, on Broadway or in a national touring company. Their memories of winning the coveted role become the “book” for what Rivera clearly hoped would have the appeal of a real-life A Chorus [...]
WHITE PEOPLE: 100% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Director Douglas Clayton and his cast elevate Rogers’ words, be they damning or mundane, to perfection. The actors handle Rogers’ format, a 95-minute one-act series of monologues, so expertly that the resulting stories seem to be uttered out loud for the very first time. Doerr’s delivery is astonishing in this regard, as his character [...]
MORE LIES ABOUT JERZY: 86% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Holmes’ journalist tries to psychoanalyze why Jerzy would make stuff up so habitually – perhaps a war trauma or something – and Jerzy ridicules that process as petty psychoanalysis. The degree to which Jerzy may be right is the degree to which this play gets very interesting, veering away from its dangerous trajectory of [...]
THE WHIPPING MAN: 100% – Sweet
SWEET This show is not for the faint of heart. History books tend do gloss over such details as urine filled battlefield trenches, but they are described in graphic detail, along with flogging and a violent murder. When a pant leg is ripped open, the gangrenous leg that appears is realistic enough to elicit a [...]
LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT I WORE: 90% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Sullivan has the cast occasionally act out bits of dialogue, which adds a sense of theatricality to the reading, and breaking up “Gingy’s Story” adds cohesion to the evening. Even the weakest stories have interesting elements, and performed by this cast, they are engaging and entertaining. Jeff Favre – Backstage SWEET “What I Wore” [...]
HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING: 86% – Sweet – UPDATED
BITTERSWEET The situation is winning, but if it weren’t for such standout numbers as “A Secretary Is Not a Toy,” “I Believe in You” and “Brotherhood of Man,” the plot — a succession of sketches, really — would seem interminable. Music director Darryl Archibald and his soaring orchestra are forever rescuing the work from its [...]
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAY: 100% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Though a bit long and unfocused at the end, The Twentieth Century Way is fascinating, insightful, and wonderfully free from cheap posturing. Jacobson’s sure-footed romp through the idiocies of public morals crusades and homophobic bigotry is free from the tiresome self-pitying anger that infests so much else in current gay-themed material. There is enormous [...]
TWO WRONGS: 100% – Sweet
SWEET In effective counterpoint to the sometimes ephemeral chitchat, director Missy Yager adopts a propulsively urgent tone that gives the humor added bite. The actors are uniformly charming, but Yager needs to address their tendency to overemphasize. One doesn’t always have to slap one’s thigh or an adjacent piece of furniture to make a point. [...]
BENGAL TIGER AT THE BAGHDAD ZOO (TAPER REVIVAL): 100% – Sweet
SWEET Derek McLane’s Middle Eastern sets are as spare as they are atmospherically rich. The scenic design may have worked better on a more compact stage, but the magical sense that anything can occur has been vitally left intact. David Lander’s pockets of lighting certainly enhance this quality, as do David Zinn’s simple yet transformative [...]
NIGHTMARE ALLEY: 27% – Bitter – UPDATED
BITTER Although Jonathan Brielle does a neat job of compressing the action into two hours onstage, he fails to capitalize on the terrible implications of falling from grace into a hell beyond the reaches of spirituality or religion, and neither his lyrics nor music is memorable. Laurence Vittes – Hollywood Reporter BITTER But mystery and [...]
DOCTOR CERBERUS: 80% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Yet there’s always a feeling that the playwright and director are holding back, erring on the safe side of comedy and short-shrifting the horror. One of Aguirre-Sacasa’s earlier efforts, “Mystery Plays,” was a chilling twilight zone where self-aware young people found themselves in uncanny dilemmas. One story featured a girl whose brother killed their [...]
THE LANGUAGE ARCHIVE: 88% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Director Mark Brokaw, an experienced hand with adventurous American playwrights (he’s had an especially fruitful history with Paula Vogel and Craig Lucas), stages the whimsy in an exaggerated manner that doesn’t diminish the work’s underlying streak of tragicomic tenderness. If the humor at times seems strained, that’s probably because Cho is better at imagining [...]
ALIVE AND WELL: 67% Sweet
SWEET Regional theaters across America are likely to take to Alive And Well as much as they have to Finkle’s Indoor/Outdoor. And that goes for those in the North as well as the South, as the playwright takes no sides in Carla and Zach’s battle between Yankee and Confederate. No raunchier than a PG movie [...]
LASCIVIOUS SOMETHING: 91% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Callaghan finds the madness in each of her characters. It’s not apparent but it’s there, as it is in each of us. This gives the play its strength, as each of the characters is strong, too, and the three of them stubbornly fight to defend their turf. August is weak and unlikeable and, as [...]
THE SECOND CITY: CAN YOU BE MORE PACIFIC?: 100% Sweet
SWEET To celebrate 50 years of renowned comedy, Chicago’s Second City has dispatched a talented troupe of seven to the Laguna Playhouse in order to transform Orange County tropes into a satirical revue entitled “Can You Be More Pacific?” Though overlong and somewhat toothless, the show is a sure mirth-maker for natives of all ages [...]
THE WAKE: 69% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET If “The Wake” succeeds more as a character study than as an assessment of the historical zeitgeist, it’s probably because Ellen is too much of an individual to bear the metaphorical burden placed on her. Those blind spots she’s begun to recognize don’t belong to her exclusively. But her journey into understanding the heartbreak [...]