All Entries Tagged With: "reviewplays"
TITUS REDUX: 100% – Sweet
SWEET The minimalist settings are dynamic in their flexibility. Using two tables and a few other bits and pieces, the nearly two-hour narrative, unbroken by intermission and strewed with terrible soliloquies, create the pain, suffering and grief that few of us would dare even to imagine. Laurence Vittes – Hollywood Reporter SWEET The story’s pieces [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
DIALOGUE WITH A PROSTITUTE AND HER CLIENT: 100% Sweet
SWEET There is an unexpected twist near the end, but in spite of that, under Mark Kemble’s studied and sensitive direction, the actors convince us that this encounter was an exercise in unfulfilled expectations and that both parties end up as victims with each one experiencing a sense of loss deeper than the uncertainty they [...]
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 [...]
DON JUAN DISPENSO: 57% Bittersweet – UPDATED
BITTER If the smoky-eyed Enani rarely stokes the Don’s legendary libido with sufficient fire, blame Tanner; he transposes his characters to modern times (a period nicely suggested in designer Daniel Mahler’s ’20s gowns) without updating his antique, baroque archetypes with psychological nuances contemporary to his theme. The result is that the Don’s rascally seductive charms, [...]
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 [...]
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 – [...]
BROADS, THE MUSICAL: 50% Bittersweet – UPDATED
BITTER I loved the four gals playing the Broads – all talented – but the show needs a major overhaul. Too many jokes are tired old cliches – and singing about side effects from medications? Audiences do not find that entertaining as many experience these very problems on a daily basis. No one was laughing [...]
The “Stew Review” Becomes a Veritable Pasta Medley
See? I knew it. Don Shirley got the ball rolling with his Stew Review and now everybody wants a taste. The latest Stew Review comes from Cynthia Citron over at Reviewplays. In this particular concoction Cynthia reviews the two shows running at the Geffen, Wrecks and The Female of the Species. I don’t know what [...]
DITCH: 33% Bitter – UPDATED
BITTER But Coffman breaks our hearts by trying to be something he is not yet, and that is a playwright effectively dealing with searing emotional catharsis. Stories of Will’s best friend and Beth’s brother dying in a car crash or Will’s mother leaving him at an early age for no particular reason do not tonally [...]
DIGGING UP DAD: 100% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET “Digging Up Dad” may not have much in the way of shock value or serrated-edged satire, still, it has a lot of heart for a ‘tough guy’ who finds that forgiveness can be the toughest thing of all. Cris D’Annunzio was well advised by Kevin Spacey to see his monologue through and introduce us [...]
LOVE IN BLOOM: 100% Sweet
SWEET It was as if we were watching Shakespeare set to music with its Faerie King Orion (Chris DeCarlo) and Faerie Queen Talia (Evelyn Rudie) at the helm of Love in Bloom at the Santa Monica Playhouse. Written by these two brilliant and talented Co-Executive Directors of the Playhouse, they have, once again, created a [...]
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 [...]
A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER: 100% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Delasante derisively sings “You Are My Sunshine” at various points throughout the play, and that song along with a token prayer at play’s end cast a heavy cloud over our continually failing sense of duty to our fellow man and even worse to ourselves. We tend to take it all for granted, so Babe’s [...]
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 [...]
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 – [...]
WRECKS: 100% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Yet, thanks to Harris’ Herculean acting feat, the contrived ending almost becomes beside the point. Harris’ portrayal of Edward Carr, a grieving middle-aged Midwestern man at a funeral parlor, sorting through complex feelings following his wife’s death, works on basic human levels that stand apart from the tacked-on story twist. Never mind that the [...]
THE COLLECTOR: 100% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET After you’ve watched the subtle, nuanced performance of Dane Zinter as Fredrick, a pathetically lonely, obsessed madman in “The Collector,” you may be excused for concluding that the actor himself is more than a little deranged. His defensive smirk, his furrowed brow, his awkward gestures with his hands are so spot-on that you simply [...]
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 [...]
THE CITY: 33% Bitter – UPDATED
BITTERSWEET Director Stan Mazin’s adaptation and update of Clyde Fitch’s 1909 play has a lot going for it. That said, references to Lady Gaga and Desperate Housewives can’t disguise the fact that it’s an overly talky melodrama. Sandra Ross – LA Weekly BITTERSWEET The holes come in the staging and acting. Hector Hank plays his [...]
HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE: 100% Sweet
SWEET Paula Vogel tackles pedophilia in her 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned To Drive, and if the sexual abuse of an eleven-(to seventeen)-year-old sounds like unpleasant subject matter for an evening of theater, you’re absolutely right. Told by its heroine Li’l Bit as a series of flashbacks, How I Learn To Drive is a [...]
A SONG AT TWILIGHT: 100% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET In this age of Facebook, Twitter, and texting, where the English language has been reduced to grunts and groans and fractured grammar, Noel Coward has come to the rescue, at least for an extremely delicious few hours, in the form of the West Coast premiere of A Song at Twilight at the Odyssey Theatre [...]
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, [...]
IN THE COMPANY OF JANE DOE: 25% Bitter
SWEET When was the last time you saw a surreal screwball comedy about human cloning? Tiffany Antone’s In The Company Of Jane Doe is just that play, and as might be expected from the preceding description, quite a unique concoction it is. Though Antone’s decidedly unusual blend of the nutty and the bizarre does lose [...]
CAMELOT: 73% Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET In 1960 two legendary tuners bowed in Gotham exactly seven months apart: two-planks-and-a-passion romance “The Fantasticks” (May 3) and lavish spectacle “Camelot” (Dec. 3). Fifty years later at the Pasadena Playhouse, their destinies are again intertwined, after a fashion, as an expurgated “Camelot” receives a “Fantasticks”-like bare-bones staging with a mere eight thesps, minimalist [...]
11, SEPTEMBER: 0% Bittersweet – UPDATED
BITTERSWEET The play rides the line between exploring and exploiting coincidences, yet it gets bogged down in its own psychological realism. This raises questions that can’t be answered by chaos theory, or any other — such as why the characters sometimes blurt out incendiary details of their past, given how neither is particularly trustworthy, or [...]
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 [...]