San Diego Theater Reviews
David Ives’ clever, silly, fun-filled farce is hitting audiences over the head with its comic shtick at Scripps Ranch Theatre. The work is a “translaptation” — translation/adaptation — from the French original by Jean-Francois Regnard. …
The biggest problem with Indecent may be that there's too little of it.
In chapter one of his majestic In Exile from the Land of Snows, John F. Avedon must prove that a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, a thousand miles east of Lhasa, Tibet, is the reincarnation of the 13th …
You can almost hear Eliza Merrick sing, “why can’t a man, be more like my robot?” She worked on IBM’s famous WATSON, the supercomputer that beat two past champions on Jeopardy (before the first match, …
I’m asking veteran actors to name five dream roles and say why. The answers not only reveal aspirations, they may put an idea in the minds of artistic directors and producers — even choices that …
Tanya Barfield’s Bright Half Life revolves around the lives of Erica and Vicky, two women who meet at work and eventually begin dating. Over the course of the play they fall in love, get married, …
"You gotta see the whole picture,” Judy Garland tells fiancé Mickey Deans in Peter Quilter’s End of the Rainbow. “Everything just comes to me at once and crashes from one thing to another. I can’t …
Diversionary Theatre has converted its old rehearsal space into an intimate blackbox theater. There are still some bugs to work out, sightlines in particular. But hey: any new performing space in San Diego’s a cause …
By their pets, ye shall know them. If so, then Dan and Betty, in Christian O’Reilly’s Chapatti, are worlds apart. She’s a cat lover with “19 and counting.” Although her marriage was brutal, she somehow …
At 10 p.m., November 6, a filmed version of the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s Honky will air on PBS’s “OnStage in America.” This is a huge deal. In the new series, PBS will use inventive …
In the mid-to-late 19th century, touring theater companies had specific types. Along with the Leading Man and Woman — i.e. the headline performers — there were: First Old Man and Old Woman Juveniles: needed large …
Jack just picked a winner at the track. He and Jim meet up at Brendan’s pub on a desolate, Irish country road. Life’s a mite bleary for these lonely blokes. But as a westerly howls …
The Wizard of Oz may be one of the few things Americans have in common. Much more than the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards, or even “I cannot tell a lie.” “Auntie Em!!! Auntie Em!” …
In Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1900), Lieutenant Vershinin wonders what the world will be like in 200 years. I wonder if Chekhov could imagine that, 115 years after it opened, a company would mount his …
Cygnet Theatre offers a “double bill” of Noël Coward’s The Vortex (1924) and Hay Fever (1925). Staging his early plays in repertory has advantages. The dark, brittle Vortex is almost a photographic negative of the …
If the new manager of a posh, Madison Avenue restaurant could watch his busboys work in the “back of the house” he’d never cut their “shift pay.” Or would only do it to save his …