Take the intense drama of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest," add the unique unmelody of a Stephen Sondheim-ish score, and set it in a jazzed-up version of the three-story house in “August-Osage County,” and you have a semblance of the excruciatingly moving madness of “Next to Normal,” the Tony Award
“I am not an émigré, I am an exile,” playwright Bertolt Brecht insisted, and he proved his point by returning to Germany soon after the end of World War II.
The upper-class voice of Lillian Hellman rings across the elegantly furnished living room of a summer hotel on the Gulf Coast. She’s not there, of course, but the 12-person ensemble presenting her play ”The Autumn Garden” echoes the attitudes and mannerisms that one often sees in her award-winning d
Everybody loves Therese Marie, the sweet little old lady who is “The Little Flower of East Orange.” So how come her kids are so screwed up? Therese Marie, a vibrantly kvetchy Melanie Jones, is the narcissistic center of her own world in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ eponymous play now having its West Coast
“War,” according to its hype, is a feisty comedy about war, but it’s no “M*A*S*H.” And it isn’t about war. In fact, it isn’t even a comedy. It’s a series of angry tirades set in an Irish pub.
There are certain witches that everyone remembers. The trio in “Macbeth" brewed toil and trouble in a steaming cauldron. Elizabeth Montgomery from “Bewitched" did the dishes by twitching her nose.
Imagine being stranded with a broken leg on the narrow ledge of a 600-foot ice wall, in minus 50-degree weather, just 1,000 feet from the summit of the second highest mountain in the world.
Cecil B. DeMille once waited five months for his peacocks to shed so that Edith Head could use their feathers in the spectacular cape that she designed for Hedy Lamarr to wear in “Samson and Delilah.
Barney Cashman is frumpy, lumpy, and awkward with women. And so is John Combs, the actor who plays him in “Last of the Red Hot Lovers.” Coincidence? I think not.
Becky sells expensive cars. Her husband Joe is a roofer. They have been married for 28 years. Their 26-year-old son Chris is still in school and lives in their basement.
“Neighbors,” a play now having its West Coast premiere at The Matrix Theatre, is an angry, nasty, hateful, and thoroughly mean-spirited take on the “black experience” in America.
Sometimes a book of short stories is a welcome diversion from the usual industrial-strength novels. Just as an evening of short one-acts can provide a satisfying evening at the theater.
