AMERICAN NIGHT SUCKS, BUT IT SWALLOWS Juan José, a Mexican cop sick of being on-the-take, has crossed the border in search of citizenship, leaving his pregnant wife behind. Panicking over f…
HATE THE MUSICAL, BUT LOVE, LOVE, LOVE THE PRODUCTION Whether you love or hate the musical version of The Color Purple, no one, and I mean no one, can or will deny that this is one of the fi…
ALVIN AILEY " REMEMBER HIS NAME AIDS wreaked havoc on the theater world in all of its incarnations, and the crushing effects of its devastation remain with us today. So many ingenious cre…
THREE YEAR SWIM CLUB SWIMS UP STREAM Ever since mankind began telling tales, the "overcoming adversity" story has remained ever-popular. From cave wall pictures depicting a hunter's prowess …
A BLUEPRINT FOR ACTIVISM The Occupy Wall Street movement would do well to take a tip from the longest running show in Chicago, Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind (TML). The event may tak…
TO STAGE AN IMPOSSIBLE DREAM Now in its 60th season, Musical Theatre West (MTW)Â is currently reviving Man of La Mancha with the astronomical performance of Davis Gaines as its driving for…
3-D THEATRICALS MAKES QUITE A SOUND The 70MM, Panavision aerial shot of Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer and entourage trekking over the border into Switzerland in The Sound of Music (1965…
PLAYWRIGHT AWARENESS With three produced plays under her belt, Annie Baker is quickly becoming THE playwright to watch in the American Theatrical landscape. Her first play, Body Awareness (o…
THE GREATEST STORY NEVER TOLD 18 year-old Jesus of Nazareth has heard some distressing news from his sucky carpenter of a father, so he bails Galilee with his whiny, Girl, Interrupted-like f…
MIST OPPORTUNITY I was troubled after the opening of the West Coast Premiere of Chicago playwright Keith Huff's A Steady Rain at Marin Theatre Company. I couldn't shake the feeling that this…
ART OR NOT, IT'S A FUN PLAY Yasmina Reza's oft-produced Art (English translation by Christopher Hampton) may be singularly responsible for the current plethora of new plays today billed as "…
WHEN RECOMMENDATIONS DON’T TURN OUT AS HOPED FOR Aaron Feldman, the charismatic, bright, and privileged protagonist of Jonathan Caren's promising but highly unwieldy new play The Recom…
THE SHOW ABOUT THE HAND THAT GIVES YOU THE FINGER I get a thrill when I think of the tourists who are milling about Old Town in San Diego. Exhausted from tchotchke shopping and sugary treats…
THE FEATS OF THE FOOTES America is preoccupied with an unstable economy, tax increases, oil profiteering, cash deficiencies, and the plummeting worth of real estate. Yet history does indeed …
EXCELLENCE VS. HOKUM With Lonesome Traveler, a compendium of the golden years of American folk music, writer/director James O'Neil has developed a long-winded and incoherent revue that is mo…
HERE COMES MR. JORDAN Have you ever been to a sultry party that has the oppressive feel of a languid, humid day in the Deep South, only to have the energy shift dramatically when a raconteur…
THE VALUE IN SIMPLICITY The purposefully simplistic proceedings of David Cromer's production of Our Town may seem bold and innovative to some, especially to those weaned on Broadway spectacl…
OWNING HER INNER KVETCH In Michael Wex's treatise Born to Kvetch, he asserts that Kvetching (complaining) is not only a pastime for Jews " it's a way of life. Kvetching can be applied indiff…
BLACK COMEDY AND KITCHEN SINK DRAMA: AN IRISH STEW While the horror and suspense merely simmer in The Beauty Queen of Leenane " Martin McDonagh's 1996 black comedy " the dark humor, bleaknes…
GO TO THE DEVIL Within the manifesto of Kneehigh " an avant-garde, world-class theater company based in Cornwall, England " is a simple but mighty statement: Kneehigh tells stories. By r…
ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS A GOOD STORY After winning two Tony awards in 2007 for book and lyrics of Spring Awakening, Steven Sater teamed up with the one-and-only Burt Bacharach to write s…
SUITORS SUIT ILL-FITTING SUITS Enda Walsh, scribe of The Walworth Farce and The New Electric Ballroom, is one of the great polarizing writers in modern theater:Â his admirers love the Eng…
UNAPPRECIATED MASTERPIECE OR ABJECT FAILURE? Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein began the Golden Era of Broadway with two musicals that reimagined the previous form of musical comedies " …
AN ERROR IN COMEDY One of Shakespeare's earliest plays, The Comedy of Errors, is also his shortest and most farcical. In fact, while scholars argue over the classification of other Bard work…
QUEEN OF THE GYPSIES It's a relief that Chita Rivera, one of the last great holdovers from the Golden Age of Broadway still performing today, told the audience in Costa Mesa that she doesn't…