THE PRIDE
Sunday, April 8th, 2012
Playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell puts a personal face on Contemporary Gay History in his provocative, daringly constructed, thought-provoking, occasionally hilarious, and profoundly impactful The Pride, the latest offering by San Diego’s Diversionary Theatre, and one of its very best.
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LAURA
Friday, April 6th, 2012
“Laura is the face in the misty light, footsteps that you hear down the hall, the laugh that floats on a summer night that you can never quite recall…”
Anyone familiar with the mid-20th Century Hit Parade will surely recall the David Raskin/Johnny Mercer song standard “Laura” and its many covers by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, and the majority of film buffs will likely have seen the 1944 Otto Preminger film noir classic of the same name, starring Dana Andrews as a detective investigating the murder of a beautiful, successful ad executive (portrayed in flashbacks by Gene Tierney) and based on a novel by Vera Caspary.
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LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
Monday, April 2nd, 2012
The word dysfunctional may not have been bandied about in the early 1910s when Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night takes place, nor in the early ‘40s when it was completed, nor even in the middle of the Eisenhower ‘50s when it was published posthumously and made its Broadway debut. Still, if anyone understood dysfunctional families, or at least one dysfunctional family in particular, it was O’Neill, as Actors Co-op’s powerful 21st Century revival makes amply clear.
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SIGHT UNSEEN
Friday, March 23rd, 2012
There are times when the order in which a writer sequences the scenes of a play or musical can be as crucial to the work’s impact as the scenes themselves. As in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal or Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, the ordering of scenes in Donald Margulies’ Sight Unseen is of prime importance. Cleverly sequenced in a deliberately non-linear fashion, the eight scenes that make up Sight Unseen keep you thinking, keep you guessing, and may even provoke a gasp of surprise or recognition at key moments.
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ANNA CHRISTIE
Monday, March 19th, 2012NOT RECOMMENDED
There are times when a single performance can either salvage a play or sink it. In the case of The Old Globe’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, the latter is unfortunately true.
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CORONADO
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012
Wide shot of dive bar: A young man and woman are seated in a booth. An older couple sits at a nearby table. Two men, one older, one younger, are sitting at another table. An attractive young woman tends bar.
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ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
Monday, March 5th, 2012NOT RECOMMENDED
Antony and Cleopatra. For anyone around in the 1960s, those two names can’t help but conjure up memories of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, whose scandalous real-life love story mirrored that of the legendary historical couple they were playing on screen.
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THE FALL TO EARTH
Thursday, March 1st, 2012
There are times when a reviewer must decide that the less said, the better, and in this reviewer’s humble opinion, his colleagues have been giving away far too much about The Fall To Earth (recently opened at the Odyssey). Therefore, if this is the first time you’re reading about Joel Drake Johnson’s richly complex dramedy, read no further than this review. Trust me. This is one play you will want to be surprised by.
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