by Michael Van Duzer On the heels of its 25th Anniversary celebration, Playwrights' Arena has welcomed Adrian Centeno as the company's new Literary Manager. Centeno is a familiar face, havi…
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER "I've been to the zoo." startling announcement opens Edward Albee's seminal short drama, The Zoo Story. A menacingly loquacious Jerry hurls the words at Peter, a…
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER Disney was a visionary artist and a canny businessman. He was that rare dreamer who could defy the naysayers and shepherd his dreams into reality. He was a complex m…
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER recommend a gift of silver to commemorate a 25th anniversary, and they have a point beyond the pecuniary. Cultivating a relationship over a quarter century in today'…
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER approach of the holiday season brings the inevitable surrender of our local stages to the likes of Scrooge, Santa, the Grinch, George Bailey and those irrepressible …
interview by MICHAEL VAN DUZER and provocateur Robert O'Hara is known for his fearlessly subversive plays like Insurrection: Holding History and Bootycandy. His latest piece, Barbecue, i…
interview by MICHAEL VAN DUZER This season, Theatricum Botanicum presents a new production of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Ellen Geer, the company's Artistic Director and director of the…
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER house lights fade and a polite young man from the Odyssey Theatre's staff takes his place on a corner of Nina Caussa's set " a spare evocation of a Long Island summe…
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER Patterson's plays have been called dark, provocative, edgy, and disturbing. Though, typically not in the same sentence. All of these adjectives remain apt in describ…
he City of Conversation references political and cultural events that span three decades. Director Michael Wilson sought a device that would both ease the jolt of the time span between scene…
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER Early evening sunlight beats down with surprising strength as I pull into a parking space at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. May days are definitel…
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER Interpret: To give or provide the meaning of; explain; explicate; elucidate To translate what is said in a foreign language Although we rarely give it much though…
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER can opera be relevant? This is asked by a friend " an intelligent man, whose connection to the art form is derived from vague memories of women in bejeweled dresses …
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER I hurry down Lankershim Boulevard on yet another embarrassingly warm winter afternoon, I notice that I don't need to maneuver through the usual crowd of distracted, …
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER are relatively few musicals that spend much time on a construction site. There are fewer still that focus on the design, funding and fabrication of a building. Even …
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER days of rain in early January brought not the anticipated El Niño deluge, but a cleansing shower. By the afternoon of the third day, the threat had passed. The cl…
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER would you feel if, after Jiminy Cricket sang his falsetto paean to hope, the little wooden boy listening reached over, picked up a mallet, and smashed the cheery ins…
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER classic musical Guys and Dolls is making its way to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts for the holidays. The production is directed by Mary Zi…
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER about pop music and the recording industry are proven crowd-pleasers. Within the past decade, Broadway has happily hosted Jersey Boys, Memphis, Baby, It's You (which…
interview by MICHAEL VAN DUZER than 24 hours after the announcement that Steven Leigh Morris, the doyenne of Los Angeles critics, had been named as the new Executive Director of LA STAGE…
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER is a moment in 24th Street Theatre's production of Finegan Kruckemeyer's Man Covets Bird when the two performers execute an exuberant dance choreographed and scor…
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER most people, Grand Opera seems awfully... well, grand. The music, the commonly foreign language libretto, the plots"even the venues can feel intimidating to novices.…
by MICHAEL VAN DUZER Martin [Sherman] wrote this play, very, very, very few people knew about the Pink Triangle. And very, very few people knew or spoke of the persecution of homosexuals…
Waterfall aims to portray Asian cultures realistically, not stereotypically.
The ship ahoy at Eclectic Company Theatre is a revival of Michael Van Duzer's Posing Strip Pirates, a parody of the gay pulp novels of the '50s and '60s. Van Duzer writes about the liberatin…