All Entries Tagged With: "carol kaufman segal"
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 [...]
JEWTOPIA: 75% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Amusingly cheesy production values honor the show’s seat-of-the-pants theater origins, and for those seeking a deeper probing of the Jewish experience, the authors cheerfully suggest you look elsewhere. Meaning, shmeaning — this one is strictly for laughs. Philip Brandes – LA Times BITTERSWEET That is the basis of the story and throughout the production, [...]
BECKY’S NEW CAR: 100% – Sweet
SWEET The play’s genesis is worthy of some note: The work was a personal commission by a Seattle arts patron as a gift for his wife. As such, the material occasionally tries a little too hard to please, with a narrative that occasionally emulates the mood of 1930s screwball comedies — a style that is [...]
BLACK COFFEE: 100% – Sweet
SWEET Agatha Christie and Hercule Poirot give Theatre 40 one of its best productions with the Queen Of Crime’s classic mystery thriller Black Coffee, one which delivers at least as many laughs as thrills, the entire cast delivering sparkling performances with just the right amount of tongue in cheek. Steven Stanley – StageSceneLA SWEET Agatha [...]
YELLOW: 100% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET The seriousness bubbling under all of Del Shores’ campy southern Gothic farces takes center stage in his latest play “Yellow,” as personal catastrophe pulls a family out of its complacency. Shores might’ve been wiser to hand off helming chores to someone inclined to trim the fat and steer clear of bathos. Its roughness and [...]
THE SOCIALIZATION OF RUTHIE SHAPIRO: 50% – Bittersweet – UPDATED
SWEET This is an endearingly wonderful and “emotion stirring” play. It will take you back to your own “growing pains” at age 12, time and time again. We enjoy every moment of Ruthie’s search for acceptance! Beautifully written with a feast of “food for thought” by Barbara Nell Beery, it is billed as a memory [...]
FOUR PLACES: 100% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET The manner in which Drake tells this story — blending humor and stark ugliness, while exploring themes of sibling rivalry, marital infidelity and even euthanasia — is thoroughly engaging and held in sharp balance by director Robin Larsen. The characters are fully fleshed out, both in the writing and the performances, as disturbing for [...]
IT AIN’T ALL CONFETTI!: 100% – Sweet
SWEET Many of Taylor’s revelations are fairly surface level, dealing with his interactions with the stars he’s come across – and he often seems so in control over what he’s saying, you could starve to death waiting for any “behind the mask” information about the performer. Yet, the show is ultimately a compelling presentation of [...]
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 [...]
BOOM: 100% – Sweet
SWEET Apocalypse comes with a personals-ad twist in “boom.” Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s dark satire about sex, fish and the end of the world gets a valiant Los Angeles premiere by Furious Theatre Company. David C. Nichols – LA Times SWEET The mood and situation quickly darken, as the nonsexual relationship deteriorates, but there is always [...]
BACKSTREET: 60% – Sweet – UPDATED
BITTER This musical—with a book by Evelyn Rudie, Matthew Wrather, and director Chris DeCarlo—has an engaging premise but was much more effective when originally produced at the Santa Monica Playhouse in 1998. During the first act of the current revival, the music so overpowers the singers that their voices are virtually inaudible, while most of [...]
SARAH, SARAH: 80% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Goldfarb’s play is mainly set dressing for David’s splendid tour de force twin performances as the steely matriarch and her neurotic, insecure granddaughter, turns which are beautifully nuanced and complex. As Sarah, David depicts an immediately familiar type, who’s as much a creature of her era as is the more immature-seeming, emotionally drifting Jennifer. [...]
BEHIND THE GATES: 70% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Played out on Stephanie Kerley Schwartz’s set of stone columns and sheer curtains, David Gautreaux’s staging has a minimalist elegance occasionally at odds with the style of the play, which mixes the tropes of a Lifetime movie with journalistic clarity. What ultimately resonates in this Hatikva Productions drama is the fierce hunger of an [...]
THE ICE BREAKER: 100% – Bittersweet
SWEET Act I is infiltrated with too much scientific gibberish and tends not to keep its audience’s interest. There also was a discrepancy in the personality of Sonia, who in the beginning of the play seems bubbly, over zealous and flighty and, as the play progresses, her manner becomes more mature, which may be according [...]
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 [...]
MY SISTER IN THIS HOUSE: 100% – Sweet
SWEET “My Sister” is an absorbing, often oppressive study of class and codependency. Or, as an audience member put it as we filed out of the theater, “Too much estrogen under one roof.” Charlotte Stoudt – LA Times SWEET Bray and Zion are lovely and expressive in communicating the sisters’ bond, forged ever more tightly [...]
THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD: 88% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Elliot’s pacing is just right, gentle enough to catch the emotion and the beauty of the language yet brisk and smart enough to serve the comedy. Among the lovely performances are Jill Hill’s Widow Quinn (who shares the dainty, word-wise qualities of Mance’s Countess in Figaro); the eccentric and idiosyncratic William Dennis Hunt’s Philly [...]
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 [...]
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A. EINSTEIN: 88% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET A veteran of stage and screen, Mersky nails both the Germanic tongue and dry sense of humor, and in weaving her self-admittedly simplistic interpretation of Einstein’s theories into her storytelling, she makes us forget that we are waiting for the man himself. Director Paul Gersten keeps Mersky moving about the stage with an industry [...]
JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS: 86% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living Paris” is an action-packed, two-hour musical featuring world-class songs from celebrated singer and songwriter Jacques Brel. It allows audiences to fully experience the incredible range of emotion onstage while sitting in their seats. Liana Aghajanian – Glendale News Press SWEET With master director Jon Lawrence Rivera [...]
ACTING: THE FIRST SIX LESSONS: 100% Sweet
SWEET The production is dedicated to Betty Garrett, a founding member of Theatre West, whom I was fortunate to sit beside and hear stories of Beau’s early days with the company. Initially, Beau was rejected for membership because he was so young! This, his first effort on the main stage of Theatre West ably directed [...]
THE ARSONISTS: 100% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET The performances, as well as the flames, crackle in Ron Sossi’s slyly sardonic staging — performances that combine perfect comic timing with dense, rich personalities. Weisser’s nervous (and increasingly delusional) Biedermann and Hogan’s uptight wife are hilarious — but the true scene-stealers are Achorn’s rubber-faced, diabolical Schmitz and Bottitta’s ghoulish Eisenring, who are simultaneously [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Runner Up
SWEET SUE Review by Carol Kaufman Segal – Stagehappenings Gurney has been a popular playwright for over thirty years. Some of his popular and memorable plays include The Dining Room, The Cocktail Hour, Love Letters and Sylvia. And then there is Sweet Sue, a play that offers a different perspective in the creation of only [...]
THE PSYCHIC: 100% Sweet – UPDATED
BITTERSWEET Bobrick’s latest farce seems a perfect complement to roast beef or lasagna, perhaps followed by a slice of cheesecake topped with berries. Offering a hint of whodunit halfway through, then abandoning that gambit in favor of predictable sitcom banter, Bobrick feeds us mildly entertaining fodder—nothing to challenge the mental digestive process. Les Spindle – [...]
SWEET SUE: 75% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET The quality of the acting is good. The women are pert and spunky, the men are big and obliging. Susan takes pills while Susan Too drinks wine. She’s constantly looking for her kids’ approval. Jake is waffling between romance with Susan and love with an unseen woman his own age. Dichotomy abounds. Susan Too [...]
THROUGH THE NIGHT: 100% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Beaty’s language is realistic and lyrical. The situations he creates are true-to-life and dreamlike. The story is spiritual and earthy. But there is nothing ambiguous in the aftereffects of this enthralling 80 minutes of storytelling. May “Through the Night” continue to reverberate through the years. Dany Margolies – Backstage BITTERSWEET Although crisply directed by [...]
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM: 100% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET This presentation may not be a buzz-builder, in the way that the Nathan Lane-led 1996 Broadway revival was, but as directed by David Lee, it is reliably entertaining and is populated with solid singers who, along with conductor Steve Orich and a 22-player orchestra, put the music’s crackling artistry on full display. Daryl H. [...]
LIBERTY INN: THE MUSICAL: 100% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET The impeccable set is changed by Faber and the Captain’s Aide (Mark Doerr) in choreographed perfection. Dean Cameron, who designed the set, also did the costumes, particularly outdoing himself in the Revolutionary War uniforms. Ryback plays his own score with dashing brilliance, including an overture and scintillating arpeggios. May and Snow have outstanding voices, [...]
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING: 92% – Sweet – UPDATED
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 would make a good introduction to Shakespeare or theater for older children. Jana J. Monji – LA Examiner SWEET With regard to Much Ado [...]
CELADINE: 60% Sweet – UPDATED
BITTERSWEET Evered apparently set out to write a modern Restoration comedy, but his play is too pale, genteel, and bloodless to qualify. It’s all pleasant enough, and it’s not without charm, but it’s too loosely plotted, thinly written, and dependent on offstage action to generate theatrical excitement. A bit of swordplay toward the end perks [...]