All Entries Tagged With: "la examiner"
TOPDOG/UNDERDOG (FREMONT PRODUCTION): 100% – Sweet
BITTERSWEET As Booth, Rider has an appealing intensity that bounces nicely off of Jed Reynolds’ low-key Lincoln. James Reynolds’ simple staging is clear and clean, and the young actors own the play’s many comic moments. They have more difficulty mining the complexity of the material—reaching the depths it demands—and at times handling the heightened language. [...]
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 [...]
PARASITE DRAG: 100% – Sweet
SWEET The final plot turn is raw and dirty. Notwithstanding the play’s bleak tapestry, Roberts instills plenty of comic relief into his writing. The characters are well sketched and without a trace or urbanity. David Fofi delivers spot-on direction and draws very good performances from his cast, particularly Nowicki, who artfully blends Southern charm and [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
BEDROOM FARCE: 67% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Director Ron Bottitta wisely keeps this soufflé in period, abetted by designers Kathi O’Donohue (lighting), Kathryn Poppen (costumes) and Bill Froggatt (sound). His players form a first-rate ensemble, the odd dialect glitch or overstressed beat trivial when set beside such unified light-comic style. The play remains middlebrow boulevard fare, albeit written by a master [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES: 78% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET I try never to miss either an Ayckbourn farce or an ICT production or anything directed by Todd Nielsen. When the three intersect, as in How The Other Half Loves, I know I will be treated to an evening of laughter and fun. My advice to you: Sit back, relax, and enjoy the mayhem. [...]
ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S THE 39 STEPS: 85% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Tony Award nominated Director Maria Aitken has successfully transplanted the brilliance of the Broadway production to the incarnation currently running at the Ahmanson Theater in downtown Los Angeles. The production utilizes a sparse collection of set pieces and then challenges the imagination to engage in the world created by the quartet’s tireless Pantomime, a [...]
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 [...]
L.A. NOIR UNSCRIPTED: 100% – Sweet
SWEET Imagine walking on stage facing an audience full of people that you don’t know, taking on the character of another person, turning it into a performance with six other actors that are as equally unprepared without embarrassing yourself should you fail and you have Impro Theatre and Combined Artform presentation of L.A. Noir UnScripted. [...]
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 [...]
SEE WHAT I WANNA SEE: 80% Sweet – UPDATED
BITTER You might wanna see something else. Cynthia Citron – LA Examiner SWEET Exciting, imaginative, gripping, and musically adventurous—See What I Wanna See is all this and more. With Henning at the helm and a cast and band more than up to the task, this is innovative, modern musical theater at its best. Steven Stanley [...]
THE DRAWER BOY: 100% Sweet
SWEET You have to see Michael Healey’s finely written and acted play at Theatre 40 which gives us a thoughtful and insightful look into friendship. Audrey Linden – LA Examiner BITTERSWEET When a production leaves you not once, but twice, surreptitiously wiping tears from the corners of your eyes, it’s difficult to speak against it. [...]
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 [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
THE WAKE Review by Jana J. Monji – LA Examiner Lisa Kron’s new play, making its world premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, is about a female writer who talks a lot and yet doesn’t really listen. I wished to flee her company to a cozy bed or the local dance floors, [...]
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 – [...]
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 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 [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
THE BLUE ROOM Review by Cynthia Citron – LA Examiner Who knew sex could be so tedious? In David Hare’s The Blue Room 11 acts of intercourse are conducted without heat, or charm, or intimacy, or humor, or foreplay. It’s just “wham, bam, thank you, ma’am” and “Where are my shoes?” Moreover, if a cardinal [...]
AWAKE AND SING!: 92% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Long before feminism made it a catchphrase, “Awake and Sing!” revealed just how political the personal can be. And though its language often sounds dated, the play’s discordant notes continue to speak to the turbulent longing in our national soul. Charles McNulty – LA Times SWEET Director Andrew J. Traister captures the play’s potent [...]
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 [...]