What do you write about a play that has been so written about, talked about, dissected, analyzed and been christened as the Big Theatrical Thing? We’re talking, of course, about Hamilton, the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical that is an international sensation. It entered the American political conversation after Vice President Mike Pence attended a show in […]
Theater
A Diverse Lineup Takes Center Stage at South Coast Rep’s Pacific Playwrights Festival
Twenty-one years ago, the following names graced the inaugural Pacific Playwrights Festival (PPF), South Coast Repertory’s foray into the mostly uncharted (at least on the Left Coast) waters of new plays: Richard Greenberg, Anthony Clarvoe, Cusi Cram, John Glore, Jessica Hagedorn, Howard Korder, Chris Van Groningen, Karen Zacarias. Okay, okay, that was supposed to be […]
SanTana Art Walk Finally Gets Some Theater
Bob Tully is a well-paid, well-traveled middle-aged white man living in Orange County. Definitely the kind of authority qualified to mansplain about abortion, #metoo and police shootings of black people, right? But though Tully, who has launched an innovative theater company called Playhouse, which will stage its second production Saturday amid the Santa Ana Art […]
Amy Freed’s Shrew! Reshuffles the Bard for South Coast Repertory
If awards were given to program notes, then the odds on South Coast Repertory’s Shrew! would be even money. Among the insightful reads is SCR dramaturg John Glore’s two-page treatment of the history of Shakespeare’s popular but problematic The Taming of the Shrew and Amy Freed’s process in writing her new, imaginative, reshuffling. None of […]
Going to Tennessee Without a Net
Last year, an august publication devoted to truth, justice and cold beer at a reasonable price awarded the coveted honor of best theatrical production to a show that lasted one night: Awkward Party, a longform improv piece that illustrated the incredible storytelling potential of throwing a cast on stage, giving them loosely defined characters in […]
The Mormons are Coming! (Again…)
As a young girl, Kayla Pecchioni never dreamed she’d be one of the main leads for a national touring production of the ridiculously popular and successful musical The Book of Mormon (How popular? By one account, in 2013, its various productions around the country, and world, were raking in $20 million a month). Pecchioni wanted to be a […]
Though Bumpy at Times, Cambodian Rock Band Is an Exhilarating Ride
Part play, part rock concert, part eccentric comedy set against the backdrop of the Cambodian genocide, Lauren Yee’s new play, Cambodian Rock Band, is many things stuffed into one undeniably entertaining package—stuffed being the operative term. Commissioned by South Coast Repertory (SCR), it’s now receiving its world-premiere production, and the play’s relative newness shows. While […]
Crimes of the Heart Is a Southern Gothic With Legs, But It Lags
Beth Henley won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1981 for Crimes of the Heart. What made it surprising wasn’t so much that the play wasn’t great (it was one of the more competent ones amid a meager lot of plays during a period of commercial transition in mainstream American theater), but her gender. She […]
Our Man In Malta on His Semi-Annual Theatrical Pilgrimage
Every two and a half years over the past decade, I’ve had the opportunity to go to Malta and direct a play. After more than 25 years in the business, I rarely direct locally because most local theaters don’t pay; they’re too busy chasing audiences to do anything adventurous, so there isn’t much opportunity to […]
The Most Important Play You’ll Ever See Is at Cal State Long Beach
The most important play you will ever see is currently in production at Cal State Long Beach (CSULB). Okay, that’s a bit hyperbolic, but after experiencing Dreamers: Aquí y Allá, a living piece of theater ripped from the proverbial headlines that directly addresses the uneasy, uncertain status of nearly a million people living in the […]
Chance Theater’s Violet Exposes America’s Cultural Fault Lines via a Mid-1960s Road Trip
An actor playing a character saddled with a physical impairment is no easy feat, Daniel Day-Lewis be damned. For every one that transforms the limitation into a second skin, there are many who use it like a prop. Rather than incorporating it into the character, it becomes the character, rendering the performance more gimmicky than […]
The Hendrix Project Delivers an Experience at Off Center Fest
Up-ending expectations of how storytelling should unfold onstage is one of the fascinating ways the spirit of the 1960s is infused into The Hendrix Project. Conceived and directed by the creatively fierce Roger Guenveur Smith with students at Cal Arts, the show has the audience watching spectators at Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsys […]
The Gods of Found VHS Footage Created a Show Called The Great Satan
What do most of us think of when we hear the name Satan? A guy in a red suit and pitchfork might come to mind. However, Satan means different things to different people, especially the masterminds behind Everything is Terrible, a loose collective of producers known for making hilarious VHS video collages out of bizarre […]
Harriet Whitmyer Is OC’s Sister of the Stage
Performing more than 80 roles since 1980 on Orange County’s community-theater stages has done absolutely nothing to diminish Harriet Whitmyer’s exuberance. “I’ve come to realize how important this level of theater is. It’s a training ground for a lot of people,” says the retired MBA. “I think we old-timers have a responsibility to make sure […]
Off Center Fest Brings Ministry of Counterculture to OC via Belarus Free Theatre
On Inauguration night, the curtain speech given by a member of the Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) ended with the wish that U.S. theater artists would never have to create plays against totalitarian rule from exile. The chilling statement, delivered with such kindness, elicited a burst of applause. The audience had gathered at Segerstrom Center in a […]
Cure For Inaugural Hangover Is Equal-Opportunity Skewering By Play A Dolt’s Only
The Reverend Slappy White and his Comic Cavalcade of Comic All-Stars take over the Maverick Theater on Thurs. Jan. 26 with A Dolt’s Only Post-Inauguration Hangover Political Satire Pageant. That’s right: When Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal and The Daily Show are the only widespread antidotes to hysteria over the coming plunder, OC is lucky to have live, real time, we-are-all-in-the-same-room-within-the-same-boat-rushing-down-the-same-shit-creek solidarity. […]
OC Theaters Take on Inauguration Day with Ghostlight Vigils and Dark Comedy
Playwright and filmmaker Lauren Velasco’s activism woke up on Nov. 8, 2016, and she got to work shedding any suffer-in-silence mentality. “I was a Hillary supporter straight from the beginning and I knew that’s an unpopular stance for someone my age,” says the 23-year-old. “Then after the election, I felt so guilty for being too […]
Rash of Lockbox Thefts Plague South County Theater Spaces
Within 12 hours of installing a lockbox on the theater's back door on Saturday, Ovations Performing Arts on Forbes Road in Laguna Niguel was burglarized. “Using the lockbox key, they got in here,” says Ovations founder and director Charla Moore. “They took all of our microphones; they took all of our laptop computers, the projector […]
OC School of the Arts' PlayFest is Professional AF
Playwrights at Orange County School of the Arts who hoped to see their short plays onstage in a full production this spring all faced the same challenge: their play had to be set in a waiting room. “Lights up on a waiting room. There are two doors—one leading in from an exterior hallway or sidewalk/street, […]
Monuments at STAGES Is Built to Laugh … and Blow Your Mind
There is so much to adore about this smart, savage and hilarious play. Like a kaleidoscope, it kept clicking into place, but then one of its never-ending supply of surprises would twist the kaleidoscope yet again, usually accompanied by a big outburst of laughter from the audience. I kept waiting for the play-within-the-play to start […]
OG Zorro Set to Return to Old San Juan in Premiere of The Curse of Capistrano
The legend of the dashing, swashbuckling hero that is Zorro has entranced the world since he first donned a black mask in a 1919 pulp novel, through his chandelier-swinging incarnations on film with Douglas Fairbanks (swoon!) and George Hamilton and two by the team of Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, to countless TV and radio serials, comics […]