Theater antireviews
The Old Globe Theatre should probably be called the Old Globe Theatres. Three different venues make up the complex, two of them indoor. It’s the outdoor stage, the Lowell Davies Festival Theatre, that hosts the …
“Creative accounting” sets up the premise of the Mel Brooks movie turned musical The Producers, the story of two men who stage a Broadway musical designed to fail. The parodic idea is that the risk-reward …
Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is an American masterpiece of the musical theater. The show debuted in 1979 and was based on a 1973 play by Christopher Bond.However, the story …
Like the undercard of a title fight, a B Movie in the 1930s was the show nobody had come to see, but watched anyway because it was included with the price of the ticket. Thus, …
Things just aren’t the way they used to be. At least they’re not for Don, the aging protagonist in this Old Globe-commissioned world-premiere play by JC Lee. Don can’t quite keep up with technology, or …
Jane Austen published Pride & Prejudice in 1813, and two centuries hence, its story of sisters seeking eligible husbands in the genteel English countryside has been retold ad nauseum. Many plays, movies, and television series …
When Princeton professor of classics Daphne beseeches the Grecian deities in a moment of despair, her prayer is heard and answered by the gods — the gods of comedy, that is. Who are the gods …
“Facts are the enemy of truth!” says Don Quixote in the musical Man of La Mancha. Soon after, he adds, “I think reality is in the eye of the beholder.” Perhaps that’s why the 1965 …
The format of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown is to string together some of the classic cartoon frames from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip and then add original music which isn’t, by any stretch …
Sweat is a great example of a play written for people who go to the theater but about people who would never go to the theater. In other words, this is a “blue-state” playwright writing …
The touring Cirque du Soleil show Volta performs at the Del Mar Fairgrounds until May 5. Coloring a loose, dystopian future narrative with ballet, aerial acrobatics, and freestyle bicycle stunts, the show presents a bit …
Jerrie Cobb was an exceptional human being. So exceptional that her stress test scores exceeded those of the astronauts in the Mercury 7 Project. She is the “her” in They Promised Her the Moon. The …
In the musical Life After, a teenager coping with the loss of her father struggles with the limitations of conventional speech for expressing the complex emotions that surge through the mourning process. “I’ve never been …
“Ladies and gentlemen, and everyone in between,” says the titular character in the Diversionary Theatre staging of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which runs through April 28. It’s been 20 years since the off-Broadway sensation …
Many years ago, in London’s West End, I saw a play called Art. The plot centered on the rather dysfunctional friendship among three male friends, one of whom — the most successful and ambitious — …
Playing at Lamb’s Player’s Theatre until April 20, the musical comedy Chaps! mines most of its humor from a goofy, fish-out-of-water premise. Specifically, an American troupe of singing cowboys has failed to show up for …