All Entries Tagged With: "f. kathleen foley"
STREEP TEASE: 83%- Sweet
SWEET Of course, if you haven’t seen all of the films in question, some of the humor might whiz over your head. However, this brisk, hour-long sampling of Streep’s oeuvre, directed by Ezra Weisz, features a gamely goofy cast, including Drew Droege (“Cry in the Dark”), Ron Morehouse (“Death Becomes Her”), Steve Hasley (“The Bridges [...]
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 [...]
ALL MY SONS (RUSKIN GROUP THEATRE): 100% – Sweet
SWEET Director Edward Edwards does not attempt any revisionist flourishes in the current production of “Sons” at the Ruskin Group, but although his simple staging may seem somewhat tame at intervals, it has, on the whole, an emotional authenticity that honors the play’s timeless themes. F. Kathleen Foley – LA Times SWEET Trust me, there [...]
ENGAGEMENT: 50% – Bittersweet – UPDATED
BITTER Granted, Barton’s curiously unedited spate offers flashes of fresh and funny philosophical insight. However, like pyrite in a streambed, obscured by the rushing flow of verbiage, the occasional nugget is not worth the excavation. F. Kathleen Foley – LA Times BITTERSWEET Unhappily, she is, so the course of their love does not run smooth. [...]
ELEVATOR: 86% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET The comically existential set-up is hardly new, but despite a series of sit-com-simple resolutions, Leoni, who also directs, invests the production with ample wit and high-gloss style. The excellent cast includes Alex Rogers, Mikie Beatty, Karlee Rigby and Rachael Page. Erica Katzin shines as a plus-size temp who is trying to figure out her [...]
I AM A TREE: 100% – Bittersweet
SWEET It’s that “Rashomon”-like uncertainty that gives the play dramatic heft. Granted, Rogers’ brusque penultimate character blurs a bit with Claire’s wispier persona. The fact that Claire’ fears about generational insanity are never fully addressed mars the otherwise uplifting ending. However, under the direction of Bob Koherr, Rogers crafts lushly offbeat and ferociously intelligent characters [...]
CHIPS THE MUSICAL: 100% – Sweet
SWEET The 14 loony production numbers (under Eric Heinly’s musical direction), neatly skewer the original series’ generic, funk-flavored, adult-contemporary score along with its absurdly insipid storylines — talk about shooting fish in a barrel! — and even produce the occasional gem, like Caroline Gross’ hilarious, must-be-seen, aerial-birthing flashback dance. Bill Raden – LA Weekly SWEET [...]
GRACE & GLORIE: 100% – Bittersweet – UPDATED
BITTTERSWEET Unfortunately for this play, Grace is paired with Gloria—who seems to have been created with less forethought by Ziegler and who is portrayed confusingly by Melinda Page Hamilton. Deep down, what kind of person is Gloria, whom Grace calls “Glorie”? Hamilton and director Cameron Watson seem to have found no gist of the character, [...]
3 TRUTHS: 100% – Sweet
SWEET The result occasionally sprawls into incoherence. In contrast to the action-packed first act, the second-act characters “lecture” from behind podiums, augmenting the play’s innate didacticism. And a subplot about immigration rights seems shoehorned into the piece at the last moment. As is typical with Cornerstone productions, the enormous cast is comprised mostly of amateurs. [...]
THE CLEAN HOUSE: 50% – Bittersweet – UPDATED
BITTER One cannot blame the actors entirely for their sterile performances, enslaved as they are by Stefan Kruck’s anemic and unimaginative direction. But, then again, a theater does not put a play like The Clean House on its season’s schedule out of a passionate commitment to art, but rather out of an impassionate commitment to [...]
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 [...]
FULL DISCLOSURE: 33% – Bitter
BITTER Ultimately the evening is an exercise in Sunny’s self-pity, and audiences may feel that they’ve been trapped in an airplane with a seatmate who won’t stop talking about her problems, all of which so obviously stem from her self-absorption, and who fails to recognize how her poor judgment and faulty ethics have been the [...]
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. [...]
SICK: 100% – Sweet
SWEET Playwright Erik Patterson admits to personal hypochondria in the program notes for this resplendently twisted effort—yet another in his string of hilariously wicked and glaringly contemporary plays gloriously sending up the communal sickness that affects us all as our country becomes progressively more immune to wellness. Sandra Burns’ clever design uses every corner and [...]
CANNIBALS: 100% – Sweet
SWEET The toxic admixture of personalities is good for laughs but doesn’t quite offset the play’s lack of action, leading to tedious stretches. A ray of light emerges when a “notable” director (Ray Abruzzo) taps the gals for a documentary, but the project is threatened when he brings his accomplished wife (the stellar Robin Riker) [...]
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 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 – [...]
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, [...]
INFLUENCE: 100% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Sometimes, Bitterman’s internecine politics are so abstruse, they should be accompanied by Wikipedia supertitles. Yet director Steve Zuckerman’s staccato, Mamet-esque pacing keeps things lively, and his actors attack their material like junkyard dogs set loose in a meat packing plant. Simultaneously charming and repugnant, Bitterman’s characters are so daringly dislikable, you have to love [...]
BACKWARDS IN HIGH HEELS: 86% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET “Backwards in High Heels” has no great plot or momentum, but if you happen to be in the vicinity of Long Beach you might want to give this slight, modestly entertaining diversion a whirl. Cynthia Citron – Reviewplays SWEET Just as intricate as the dancing are the multi-voiced songs, of which this work had [...]
LOBBY HERO: 100% Bittersweet – UPDATED
BITTERSWEET There are no real heroes here, and no true villains either, just nimble moral equivocators who tap-dance their way through the ever-shifting rationales of Lonergan’s keenly observed social satire. Unfortunately, in his staging at Pacific Stages – the first full-scale production in this new El Segundo venue – director Robert Bailey short-changes his material, [...]
THE BALLAD OF EMMETT TILL: 89% Sweet – UPDATED
BITTERSWEET The problem may be one of taste, but it ties directly back to the compulsion to spill the guts theatrically. Finney’s staging of the abduction starts brilliantly, with a pair of headlights appearing behind a translucent scrim. The production then devolves into a graphic, extended and emotionally exploitative depiction of the fatal beating – [...]
SIDHE: 83% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Full of dark turns, Noble’s story is so packed with tension and conflict that at times it’s hard to believe only four characters are taking part. Not every twist is credible, even given the play’s supernatural standards. And sometimes the heavy Irish brogue makes essential details difficult to grasp. These qualifications notwithstanding, the production [...]
Are Avant-Garde and a Good Story Mutually Exclusive?
I kinda know the answer to this already, sorta, but this fantastic dual-review by my current-most-favorite-Los-Angeles-critic Harvey Perr over at the Stage and Cinema site brought it back for me like no one else has in a long, long while. Harvey, in his review – SIMULTANEOUSLY – goes after two currently-playing Los Angeles productions – [...]
WHO IS CURTIS LEE?: 100% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Once again the MET, known for discovering brilliant African-American playwrights, often in the early stages of promising, distinguished careers, has set before us a compelling and consequential production. Ashford J. Thomas, (credits also include the web series Howton U, which is scheduled to premiere in the winter of 2010) has written a terrific play, [...]
SPIKE HEELS: 100% Sweet
SWEET Rebeck’s comical archetypes – the siren, the bookworm, the prude and the rogue – are cleverly inverted, and the cast, particularly the effectively charming bad boy Dunne, imbue their characters with a raw believability throughout. Never descending to male-bashing, “Spike Heels” remains a witty and well-balanced treatment of the male-female dynamic, in all its [...]
CONFUSIONS: 100% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET The Lost Studio, a beautiful and warm, wooden-beamed structure hiding above La Brea also plays host to a small faux art exhibit. The theatre’s anteroom displayed a series of matching prints, each labeled with decreasing “prices,” and encouraging more than a few bemused faces during intermission. The black and white print featured disparate characters, [...]
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 [...]
LIFE COULD BE A DREAM: 89% Sweet (Run Extended)
SWEET If you’re in the mood for Eugene O’Neill, give this show a pass. However, if you want unapologetically escapist entertainment, superbly rendered in every particular, this is your ticket. “Dream” is so frothy, it floats. Like “Wonderettes,” “Dream” features a small cast of lovable characters who group together under a flimsy but serviceable pretext [...]
SOUTHERN COMFORTS: 67% Sweet
BITTER Clarke’s characters can be warm and interesting, but there were a few problems in the play itself. Scott is a seasoned actress, but I was not struck by her performance as Amanda. Carol Kaufman Segal – Stagehappenings SWEET Paul Millet’s restrained staging is wisely unsentimental, as are the unfailingly entertaining performers. A veteran of [...]