Theater antireviews
One of my biggest fears in life is to wake up someday in more or less the same circumstances as Margie Walsh from David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People (now playing at Scripps Ranch Theatre through February …
If I were a member of the Feygenbaum/Haber extended family circle that figures so prominently in Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews, I would dread get-togethers (funereal or otherwise) at least as much as Daphna (Danielle Frimer) …
Not a lot of people know this, but I wasn’t actually around in the 1940s. It’s true! I was still waiting for my parents to get born so that I could get born; but I’ve …
As the redemption of Scrooge drew nigh, I realized that there could be a better application of these characters. What if all the characters in A Christmas Carol are aspects of each of us? What …
The playwright Bash Doran has come right out and said in interviews that The Mystery of Love and Sex is a play partly about race, partly family, and mostly sexuality; but that doesn’t mean we …
At some point in American history, somewhere between Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Sarah Gubbins’s The Kid Thing (playing at Moxie Theatre through December 11), parenthood became both super public and super discretionary. Back …
Watching Measure for Measure — performed as part of the Old Globe’s “Globe for All” program, which injects free productions into unconventional venues all over town — I got deja vu listening to Angelo, the …
I found myself perplexed by the way the characters analyzed every single nuance of their interactions in Interepid Theatre’s ART [run ended November 6]. As a straight white male — as are all three characters …
Lately, I’ve waded into murky, nostalgic waters more than I prefer. I blame the dwindling sunlight of the waning summer, something about the way the shorter days call out the ephemeral and fleeting nature of …
The Lion plays at the Old Globe through October 30. I saw it on Sunday, October 16. In the finest tradition of song cycles such as Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Schubert’s Winterreise, The Lion, by Benjamin …
Trump Card at The La Jolla Playhouse is a monologue show by Mike Daisey. It is, as one might guess, about Donald Trump. I saw the show on Friday, October 7, two days before it …
Based on the movie of the same title, October Sky, a new musical at The Old Globe runs through October 23. The story follows a group of high school students who become immersed in rocketry …
Why do we say what we say? It’s not always a clear choice. Sometimes we just say stuff. Where do the words come from? Who’s in there calling the shots? It could be a single …
Mike Lew’s Tiger Style! is a kind of 21st-century bildungsroman for sibling protagonists, Jennifer (Jackie Chung) and Albert Chen (Raymond J. Lee), and it tells its story largely by holding popular stereotypes up to the …
I saw a Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof on Thursday, August 18. The set and lighting were perfect. The orchestra glimmered with the polish of a thousand and one performances. Dancers executed modern …
If you have half a heart, you’ll leave New Village Arts’ Oklahoma! happily humming “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’” while visions of scurrying chicks and ducks paint a picture of pastoral grandeur second to none. …