108 stories by "Harvey Perr"
DANSE MACABRE David J’s The Chanteuse and the Devil’s Muse is not so much a play as it is an art installation. But, as an art installation, it has a terrible beauty and some mome…
THE HAPPIEST CORPSE I’VE EVER SEEN How many reasons do you need to rush out and get tickets for the Reprise revival of Cabaret? Let me offer a few. First of all, this is 2011, and a be…
HIGH CULTURE UNDER A MALIBU SKY Anne Bogart is not one to shy away from her own directorial eccentricities. As the American Theater’s Queen of Deconstruction, she has had a formidable …
WHEN YOU USE MACE, USE WITH DISCRETION Playwright Kristoffer Diaz has an ear for unleashing the poetic possibilities in “street-smarts” vernacular; and director Edward Torres has…
THE ZOMBIE JOE AESTHETIC With each new production, inch by inch, layer by layer, we get closer and closer to tasting the artichoke heart of Zombie Joe. It is not a question anymore of which …
WHAT IS ART ANYWAY? What if you were an alcoholic ex-bartender who lived in a mobile home in a trailer park in Bakersfield that was furnished with junk bought from rummage sales and who foun…
OUR OWN PRIVATE GRAND GUIGNOL I hesitate to call anyone a genius on the basis of two productions, but if Sotto Voce alerted me to the unique talents of Zombie Joe, then Urban Death, the …
TOO MUCH SUGAR ON THE DONUTS If Superior Donuts had come to us as a new American play by an unknown writer, we might have said that, despite a certain soft-headedness and the feeling that it…
THE SCHEHERAZADE OF POP CULTURE There are a thousand and one ways to tell a story. In Margo Veil, Len Jenkin, one of our most intriguing and often exasperating playwrights, becomes a modern …
FLEUR ELISE NOBLE: 2 DIMENSIONAL LIFE OF HER This is to installation art what NEVA is to theater: a sublime illustration of the form. Noble’s collage (of projected images, cut-outs, dr…
When a festival opens on as brilliantly shattering a note as the RADAR L.A. FESTIVAL did on Tuesday night with Neva, expectations for the rest of the festival run very high indeed. From Chil…
Editor’s note: Brewsie and Willie is currently running as part of the Radar L.A. Theater Festival. This review is reprinted from an earlier production of the show in July 2010.…
LEARNING TO FLY WITH BROKEN WINGS “Blackbird singing in the dead of night/Take these broken wings and learn to fly/All your life/You were only waiting for this moment to arise.”Ã…
GOING, GOING…GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN One of the pitfalls of being a theater reviewer in Los Angeles is that it is impossible to see more than the smallest amount of the cascade of plays…
WE OF LITTLE FAITH Kate Fodor's 100 Saints You Should Know is a mildly interesting play, given heft by its author's obviously sincere attempt to deal seriously with the nature of faith, but,…
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING BRIAN BEDFORD Lady Bracknell (arguably the greatest creation of Oscar Wilde’s surpassingly fertile comic imagination) is the aristocratic and imperious dowager …
THE EPIPHANIES THAT COME TO US AFTER BEING HIT IN THE HEAD BY A BASEBALL BAT Among the happiest of theatergoing experiences is entering the theater, without any expectations whatsoever, and,…
ONCE-A-WEEK Monday nights at 8:00 p.m. at the L.A. Gay and Lebian Center's Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center (The Renberg Theatre): If you'd like to take a pleasant leisurely stro…
THE OBSESSIVE PURSUIT OF ARTISTS There are few things funnier than watching John Fleck, sweating and crazed, walk perilously close to the edge of a high cliff, teeter towards falling off, an…
RECIPE FOR SUCCESS Here's a mouth-watering recipe for making people happy: 1) Take a great musical. (Kiss Me, Kate will do. If you need to ask why, then I'll tell you: It's both a wonderful …
HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY AND BECOME A STAR If you lose your way trying to navigate the Kafkaesque journey Fin Kennedy wants to take us on in his startlingly original and thematically dens…
THE TALENTED MR. JACOBSON Tom Jacobson is nothing if not ambitious. He is not only the most prolific Los Angeles playwright of the moment, but he is the one, given the astonishing record of …
IN PRAISE OF ECCENTRICITIES It is not surprisng that Tennessee Williams preferred The Eccentricities of a Nightingale to Summer and Smoke. Freed of the conflict between Puritanism (repressed…
TIME SPENT WITH A MUSICAL GENIUS If ever a production fitted so perfectly within the walls of the elegant Pasadena Playhouse as George Gershwin Alone, I can't imagine what it may have been. …
A CONVERSATION between A REVIEWER WITH BATTLE FATIGUE and A REVIEWER WHO CONTINUES TO LOVE THE THEATER (A PLAYLET) BATTLE FATIGUE: I sometimes feel that I spend so much time in the theater t…
