All Entries Tagged With: "madeleine shaner"
Critique of the Week
EAT THE RUNT Review by Madeleine Shaner – Park La Brea News/Beverly Press (opens in pdf) The lapel pin that’s clipped to the Press Kit for Avery Crozier’s new (and first full length) play pictures a quartet of multi-colored shaggy dogs, semi-circled with the cryptic phrase ‘Anyone can dribble a Pollock’, seems to suggest that [...]
EAT THE RUNT (Theatre of NOTE): 80% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Written by Avery Crozier with mind-boggling brilliance… This one will twist your brain! One of the most innovative, funny, wildly creative, ingenious, and theatrically challenging staged concepts I’ve ever seen! Pat Taylor – Tolucan Times SWEET As to whether this reviewer will be back for more runt eating, the answer is yes indeed. Stay [...]
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 [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Runner Up
KING LEAR Review by Madeline Shaner – Park La Brea News/Beverly Press (opens in pdf) Shakespeare’s “King Lear” is one of the plays everyone thinks they know, many say they have read or seen, but far more, in greater numbers, have made a greater effort to avoid at all costs. Making the effort to sit [...]
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 [...]
CIRCLE OF WILL: 33% – Bitter – UPDATED
BITTER A stumbling attempt at satire, the piece portrays Shakespeare as a lesser literary light and Burbage as a cretinous narcissist, fed up with dramas about death and threatening to walk unless he gets to be a hero in a play with a positive ending. The problem lies not in the lampoon of the theater [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
OPUS: 80% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Levy and his accomplished cast almost manage to sell Hollinger’s unnecessary excursions into overwrought soap, particularly in the final scene. It’s the smaller moments that compel, creating an intimacy that make “Opus” a stylish midsummer date night. Charlotte Stoudt – LA Times SWEET The world of classical chamber music easily evokes images of grace [...]
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 [...]
SUPERNOVA: 100% – Sweet
SWEET Director Lindsay Allbaugh’s fantastic ensemble sells us on each individual scene, even if the play as a whole doesn’t add up to more then some well-acted catharses. Kelly Elizabeth and Joe Wiebe join in for the furious climax as two fellow high schoolers who bear witness to what even the adamantly optimistic Mabel admits [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
HOLY GHOST: 100% – Bittersweet
BITTERSWEET Tuttle has a much stronger second act here and is to be commended for the complexity of his storytelling. Alas, Michael Rothhaar, faced with numerous short scenes and set changes that slow an already long play, is hamstrung as director. Tuttle does not explain the context of American POW camps on this country’s soil, [...]
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. [...]
ALTAR EGO: 50% – Bitter – UPDATED
BITTER James Lyons’ world premiere, directed by Audrey Moore and Leila Vatan, is a series of monologues parceled out to eight wannabe actors performing, it would seem, for their peers in an acting-class environment. As such, it might be acceptable, though undeniably coarse and beyond vulgar, as a hypersexual statement of “Who I am: the [...]
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 BOYS IN THE BAND: 80% Sweet – UPDATED
BITTER What a shame that in this play’s first revival in L.A. in many years, its incisive themes—and its all-important time setting—are clumsily obscured. Director Jason Crain’s nebulously depicted milieu robs this seminal work of its intrinsic historical context. Adding to the disappointments is an uneven ensemble effort. The subtext of Crowley’s dialogue is frequently [...]
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 [...]
PLAYING JORDAN GOLDMAN: 0% Bitter
BITTER There is a germ of a dramatic concept here in the lightweight play, and a lesson, even a message about what it takes to become a man, but it can be learned without the ill-fitting ’frills’ of over-production. There’s no need to spell it out, as this production, and these players seem to have [...]
THE BLUE ROOM: 22% Bitter – UPDATED
SWEET With carefully choreographed direction by acclaimed director Elina de Santos, the action takes place on a minimal set, with excellent and evocative lighting, set design, musical segues and costuming to buoy the exploration of sex and the sense of existential meaninglessness that accompanies it here. Bea Wolff – Tolucan Times BITTER In director Elina [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
WIT: 100% Sweet
SWEET Edson’s commentary on American medical practice, however salient, merely lays the groundwork for the play’s most compelling and universal theme: the human struggle not only with mortality’s looming oblivion but with the unfamiliar and sometimes humiliating infirmity that precedes it. That Bearing’s lifelong subject of scholarly study – the poet Donne — was himself [...]
CAVE QUEST: 100% Sweet
SWEET Diane Rodriguez’s direction is enhancing yet controlled, allowing both performances to be interesting while maintaining excellent contact with the main theme—which is enlightenment of a kind and, of course, justifiable excuse for its rather lightweight but fun philosophy. John Iacovelli’s terrific ice cave is the pièce de résistance, with great snowstorm sound swirling around [...]
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 – [...]
THE SUBJECT WAS ROSES: 70% Sweet – UPDATED
BITTERSWEET All right, given this impressive pedigree, what’s my beef? Well, beyond the play’s passé style, I have trouble with the workmanlike use of the symbolic roses that inspire the title and even more with scenes that sometimes seem like acting workshop exercises. Charles McNulty – LA Times SWEET Yet traditional dramatic styles needn’t be [...]
THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES: 89% Sweet – UPDATED
BITTERSWEET The script has an unending flow of verbal and physical high jinks but too many sitcom-quality one-liners and a lazy reliance on popular culture for easy laughs. There also is too much insincere rattling on about the sexual issues that Bening’s character has made her career by exploiting. And there’s no pretense at character [...]
COUSIN BETTE: 100% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET At least one key performance is over laden with shtick, and some fine-tuning of others is in order. Still, Doukas is terrific, delivering a consummate performance that arouses, for her long-suffering deceitful character , pity, disdain — and admiration. Tony Amendola’s licentious merchant is also top-notch. And alongside the story’s bathos is its salient [...]
To Madeleine Shaner
Hi Madeleine, One of our Lemon Heads, Giselle Wolf, also a working theatre artist here in town wanted to send you a message. She originally posted it in our comment section under “Our Writers” here, but I wasn’t sure you would see it. So I’ve recycled it for ALL to see! We encourage this kind [...]