All Entries Tagged With: "evan henerson"
A WITHER’S TALE: 91% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET A Withers Tale is a nice change of pace for the Troubadour Company but as they are so cosmically gifted at side-splitting silly stuff, let’s hope that their next production is more seriously funny. Lynne Bronstein – Santa Monica Mirror SWEET The somber saga builds to Walker’s showstopping rendition of “Ain’t No Sunshine,” enhanced [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
KING LEAR (ANTAEUS PRODUCTION): 100% – Sweet
SWEET The Matthews team, featuring Morlan Higgins’ stalwart Kent, Kirsten Potter’s villainous Goneril, Francia DiMase’s vindictive Regan and Drew Doyle’s sly Oswald, ultimately had a larger intellectual impact on me — the play administering a lesson on the dangers of dividing language from truth. The Groener crew, with Allegra Fulton’s sinister Goneril and Jen Dede’s [...]
SOUTH PACIFIC: 100% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET But this “South Pacific” is to be treasured above all for Cusack, whose interpretation of her character’s embarrassment of Rodgers & Hammerstein riches is so stunningly suffused with heart that it was as if I were hearing the songs for the first time. Nellie vainly tries to “wash that man right outta” her hair, [...]
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 [...]
LONDON’S SCARS: 100% – Sweet
SWEET Hirsch’s ear for the British idiom, especially London slang, is undeniable, and his characters are fascinating — especially the tortured souls of Mary and Habib. However the simmering tension Hirsch strives to build into “explosive” (sorry) moments unfortunately lacks the requisite danger and menace to keep us in anticipation. Director Darin Anthony employs creative [...]
JAWBONE OF AN ASS: 50% – Bitter
BITTER The production’s most amusing elements are Steve Johnson’s set (the wallpaper in Paige Marie’s lost-in-time kitchen deserves a final bow of its own) and Tim Labor’s sound design. Pretty much everything else is excruciating, even though many of these otherwise talented people have been involved with L.A.’s adventuresome Circle X company, and Circle X [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
MEN OF TORTUGA: 60% 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 over the production. Whatever the reason, when what’s billed as a “comedic thriller” offers few laughs and even less suspense, there’s a lot more [...]
WHY TORTURE IS WRONG, AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM: 100% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Durang is getting a lot off his chest, and off ours. The laughter he generates is from nonsense about nonsense, unnervingly true and cathartic, and beautifully performed. Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly SWEET At this point the play takes a surprising twist and justifies your having sat for nearly two hours wondering where [...]
BOBRAUSCHENBERGAMERICA: 78% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Bart DeLorenzo’s staging preserves the tone, inherent the text, that’s both wry and frivolous, abstract and pop, with one breakout poetical excursion into Walt Whitmanesque grandeur, delivered by a hobo (Brett Hren) and accompanied by Dvorak’s Symphony from The New World. Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly SWEET In viewing the show at Inside [...]
ORDINARY DAYS: 83% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET The lesson: Simple joys have a way of secretly expanding. If you go into “Ordinary Days” with reasonable expectations, you’ll likely come out feeling as if you’ve just had an experience that was more than a little special. Charles McNulty – LA Times BITTERSWEET Though meant to be ironic because it is a story [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Runner Up
AN OAK TREE by Evan Henerson – CurtainUp (Los Angeles) Clancy Brown is a strong and versatile think-on-your-feet performer. As, no doubt, was Peter Gallagher the previous evening and Meagan English the night before that — and on and on through the hundreds of actors who have shuffled through the tricked-out revolving door that is [...]
AN OAK TREE: 89% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET On opening night, Gallagher’s grief-stricken father produced an atmosphere of anguish that cast light on some of Crouch’s impenetrable themes. Of course, the tone will necessarily change with each new performer, but the final point, one suspects, will remain elusive. What is clear is that Crouch is an assured puppet master who inspires trust [...]
BONNIE & CLYDE: 50% Bitter
BITTER It’s theoretically possible to turn the “Bonnie & Clyde” saga into a conventional musical play, but the eponymous tuner at La Jolla Playhouse hasn’t found the magic formula. Flummoxed by the challenge of creating likable, sympathetic protagonists while remaining truthful to the facts of their vain, pointless Depression-era death spree, the creative team falls [...]
BABY, IT’S YOU!: 57% Bittersweet
BITTER Serious book problems hamper a strong catalog of early 1960s tunes and the efforts of a talented cast in Baby It’s You!, now at the Pasadena Playhouse. The result is a surprisingly uninvolving biography of Florence Greenberg, the Jewish housewife who discovered and fostered the doo-wop group The Shirelles. Jonas Schwartz – Theatremania BITTER [...]
“Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”: 100% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET An ebullient synthesizer of world data, Joseph is not just alert to the fevered geopolitical madness surrounding us, he’s also endlessly inventive in finding bold theatrical metaphors to depict the extent of the depravity. “Bengal Tiger” marks the breakthrough of a major new playwriting talent. Attending the opening gave me a sense of what [...]