All Entries Tagged With: "steven leigh morris"
NEIGHBORS: A PLAY WITH CARTOONS: 100% – Sweet
SWEET The Brooklyn-based playwright, precocious at 26, now works in Berlin on a project about black soldiers stationed in Germany. Every element of his vivacious play is fresh, alive, and communicates. It’s wildly intelligent, unafraid, and wickedly funny. Debra Levine – Arts Meme SWEET Jacobs-Jenkins has written a play that is heartfelt, ambitious, angry, outrageous [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
MY PENIS – IN AND OUT OF TROUBLE Review by Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Let’s not mince words. Any man who devotes a show to the subject of his own penis has way too much time on his hands. Puppetry of the Penis would be Exhibit A were this theory ever to be [...]
MY PENIS – IN AND OUT OF TROUBLE: 100% – Sweet
SWEET For fans of the one person memoir, MY PENIS – IN AND OUT OF TROUBLE is a breezy hour that touches on issues of import to us all- without getting preachy or mired in a self help, tell all, work through my issues trap that many solo performers face. Sacre has given himself the [...]
“A willing participant in the great chicanery that is LA theater criticism” – David Jette
Chicanery: The act of deceiving. This is the sad state within which David Jette, playwright/director and once-critic at LA Theatre Review has found himself. He has come to the conclusion that Los Angeles Theatre Criticism is an “act of deception”. In a recent post entitled Why I Stopped Writing Theatre Reviews David has – with [...]
Downer Don Still Arm Wrestling with the LA Times
Don Shirley continues to keep the LA Times on its toes in his latest offering What’ll the Times Think of Next?. His main beef here has become a continuous crusade for Don: Where’s the love for the mid-size theatres in Los Angeles? It’s a good question. The Times did a story earlier in the year [...]
Downer Don Continues to Turn the Screws on the Times’ Lack of Local Coverage
Where the McNulty/Morris “dialogue” in the Los Angeles Times was a veritable love-fest, Don Shirley keeps the pressure on the Los Angeles Times’ lack of theatre coverage in its own back yard. Especially of the Shakespearian variety. Check out his wee article over at LA Stage Watch here. This is my favorite snippet: So apparently [...]
McNulty vs. Morris aka “The Snore Fest”
C’mon, guys! This was the best you could do? I almost passed out while reading your “dialogue”. I kept picturing two guys in Tuxedos sipping wine from an Opera Hall veranda blessing us with a little banter between Acts. Snore! Chuck sounded about as out of touch with small theatre as Kim Jong Il is [...]
A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT: 100% – Sweet
SWEET Then I think of actor-based companies, such as Antaeus, people who do work in TV and film, who are committed to exploring classics; you saw their recent, very strong “King Lear” — not sure you could argue that the director was shunted to the margins. I just saw an adaptation of “Macbeth” by a [...]
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 [...]
Critique of the Week – Runner Up
PROCREATION Review by Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly The plays of Justin Tanner are like Rice Krispies. They crackle when you pour in the right actors — and the actors here from his own company are just right — and then they kind of wash away. Maybe that doesn’t matter. That crackling is the [...]
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 [...]
![[title of show] (Celebration Theatre): 92% – Sweet – UPDATED](http://bitter-lemons.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/titleofshow-150x150.jpg)
[title of show] (Celebration Theatre): 92% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Now, mind you, the characters’ sexuality is never a hindrance to the evening, as it is all done in fun and in fairness to everyone. The American Theatre has not been particularly homophobic, or racist, or even sexist, for some decades. And as the show is playful in the extreme, running a tad over [...]
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 [...]
SORORITY QUEEN IN A MOBILE HOME: 50% – Bitter
SWEET The play is not overly substantial, but director Paul Kampf makes it a funny, engaging diversion. Neal Weaver – Backstage BITTER Under Paul Kampf’s direction, the play accrues almost no momentum because of Weier’s show-and-tell interpretation. She broadcasts every attitude and opinion of this frustrated hausfrau, resulting in a parade of the obvious. Weier [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Critique of the Week
YELLOW Review by Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Writer-director Del Shores has been poking fun at the American South for decades on L.A. stages. His 1987 comedy, Daddy’s Dyin’ (Whose Got the Will?), played for months at Theatre/Theater, then on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood. A latter-day The Miser, Daddy’s Dyin’ established Shores as an [...]
YELLOW: 100% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET The seriousness bubbling under all of Del Shores’ campy southern Gothic farces takes center stage in his latest play “Yellow,” as personal catastrophe pulls a family out of its complacency. Shores might’ve been wiser to hand off helming chores to someone inclined to trim the fat and steer clear of bathos. Its roughness and [...]
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. [...]
Breaking News: LA Weekly and Backstage Critics to Cooperate on Coverage of Fringe Festival – Armageddon to Follow
Kidding! It’s actually a great idea, allows more shows to get covered. I know all you participants are out there whining, “Yeah, but we want reviews from BOTH papers! Waaa!” Let’s get real, folks. It’s a Fringe Festival, your run is limited, you’re lucky if you get ANY coverage. I wonder if the Times was [...]
LENNY BRUCE IS BACK (AND BOY IS HE PISSED): 67% – Sweet
BITTER Unfortunately, YouTube clips of Bruce’s act are far more compelling than Bobrick and Stein’s script, which is written largely in the past tense and concentrates on interpersonal relations with friends and family — including Bruce’s appreciation for his mother and annoyance with his father. Such domestic confession is not what made this comedian a [...]
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, [...]
U.S.S. PINAFORE: 100% – Sweet
BITTERSWEET The transference of Gilbert and Sullivan’s social satire into a few quips on our pop culture feels like a reduction of scale, but nothing compared to the reduction served up in the tinny soundtrack. Delivering the goods with confident glee, this excellent ensemble deserves better. In fact, this would be a sinking ship were [...]
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 [...]
1951-2006: 100% – Sweet
SWEET The nicely paced love story and history lesson dovetail in Freed’s sharp dialogue, though his staging overindulges cleverness. As the pair trade quotes from Shakespeare, Beckett and pop culture, they often seem to be performing for each other rather than conversing. There’s more poignant, natural chemistry in Meg’s occasional scenes with her other lover [...]
PALOMINO: 89% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET As it happens, Kieren tries to get Edward, who has a connection to Vallie, interested in publishing his tell-all diaries. This coincidence enables Cale to take his theme of the bartering of love in a more generous direction. The outcome is far from inevitable, but Cale’s initial conceit sparks enough fascination to sustain our [...]
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, [...]
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAY: 100% – Sweet – UPDATED
SWEET Though a bit long and unfocused at the end, The Twentieth Century Way is fascinating, insightful, and wonderfully free from cheap posturing. Jacobson’s sure-footed romp through the idiocies of public morals crusades and homophobic bigotry is free from the tiresome self-pitying anger that infests so much else in current gay-themed material. There is enormous [...]