PhotosSan Diego really is a great theater town. If it weren’t, a community theater like Coronado Playhouse would be a little bit nuts to put on a show like Kander and Ebb's Curtains, the title …
March 21, 2025
As an undergraduate at Thomas Aquinas College near Ojai, California, Matthew Lickona co-founded and ran The Hype, a college lit-mag printed on the school's copier and sold at a dollar a copy to pay off speeding tickets acquired while trying to make movie times in Los Angeles. This may or may not have helped him to land a job at the Reader upon graduation in 1995, but the paper did reprint some of his collegiate Easter Island-based cartoons, and later, his Mudflap Girls series. He has been at the paper ever since, in a variety of capacities: feature writer, wine columnist, church reviewer, restaurant critic, television columnist, editor at large, and now, film critic. Plus some other stuff under various pseudonyms.
He is the author of a couple of books (Swimming with Scapulars, Surfing with Mel), and his essays have appeared in places like The Awl, FirstThings.com, and Doublethink. In his spare time, he likes to write movie pitches and country songs.
Articles by Matthew Lickona
Theater review: Curtains at Coronado Playhouse
Theater review: 3 Summers of Lincoln
Full disclosure: your humble correspondent has never seen Hamilton. So I can’t make any sort of informed judgment about whether or not La Jolla Playhouse has succeeded in Hamiltoning Lincoln with its new musical. (And …
March 15, 2025
Theater review: What the Constitution Means to Me at North Coast Rep
Playwright Heidi Schreck’s interrogation of our nation’s founding document is just about as clever and engaging a way as I can imagine to get theater audiences to reconsider its worth — or even just consider …
March 7, 2025
Theater review: The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens
Dooley Stevens is a big man with a violent past, fresh out of the joint on a cycle that’s running on empty as he searches in the desert for something that he’s lost — or …
March 6, 2025
What's going on: the Reader heads online
On February 5th, I posted on X, "After 30 years of working at the San Diego Reader, I went and bought the thing. Looking forward to seeing what's possible."Welp.Video:San Diego Reader ends print edition after …
February 28, 2025
Lamb's Players Theater: Once more, with feeling
Lamb’s Players Theater scored a hit in 2018 with its production of Once, and has brought nearly the entire cast back for another run at it, lo these seven years later. Let’s take a gander …
February 18, 2025
Appropriate: a Southern family drama about Southern family dramas
The words at the top of the poster for Appropriate at The Old Globe caught my eye as I headed to Will Call: “Ferociously Theatrical.” Theatrical? Don’t most plays take place in a theater, ferociously or otherwise? But by …
February 17, 2025
Marilyn Monroe will always be in Coronado
At the turn of the millennium, the American Film Institute named Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy Some Like it Hot the number one funny movie in American cinema. One of the criteria for inclusion on the list …
February 12, 2025
Born & Raised offers a less decadent Holiday Punch
The news of late has been full of stories about the price of eggs; some pundits have gone so far as to suggest that it tipped the recent Presidential election. It’s not just a lot …
December 13, 2024