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The Darkness: Goddess Revealed Reviewed by F. Kathleen FoleyThe Actors’ GangThrough June 17It’s not a good sign when a critic has to read and reread the advance press materials in an anxious but sincere effort to understand a play.After viewing The Darkness: Goddess Revealed at the Actors’ Gang, I felt as if I had witnessed something […]
A Soldier’s PlayReviewed by G. Bruce SmithAhmanson TheatreThrough June 25RECOMMENDEDA Black sergeant is killed, shot to death with two bullets. His body is found in the woods near the Louisiana army base where, in 1944, a company of Black soldiers is stationed. Yes, Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play, winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for […]
Ain’t Misbehavin’Reviewed by Martίn HernándezNate Holden Performing Arts CenterThrough May 28RECOMMENDEDAh, they don’t write them like that anymore, and if jazz composer and pianist Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller had not passed away in 1943 at the all too early age of thirty-nine, there would be more than the four hundred copyrighted songs in his repertoire […]
The Bottoming ProcessReviewed by Deborah KlugmanIAMA Theatre Company and the Los Angeles LGBT CenterThrough June 12RECOMMENDED What happens when ethnic identity stops being a gift and starts being a curse? In Nicholas Pilapil’s The Bottoming Process, a gay Filipino American man becomes so obsessed with how his Asian-ness —and his sexuality — is perceived that […]
No Place Like Gandersheim Reviewed by Terry MorganSkylight TheatreThrough June 25RECOMMENDED There have already been films and other works of art concerning the “Me Too” movement, but No Place Like Gandersheim is the first play I can think of that talks about its aftermath. That isn’t even the main subject of the piece, which concerns the plight […]
The Revolutionists Reviewed by Julyza CommodoreTheatre FortyThrough June 18RECOMMENDED Lauren Gunderson’s The Revolutionists focuses on four women during the French Revolution: playwright Olympe De Gouges (Kat Kemmet), most famously known for being an assassin; Charlotte Corday (Sami Stumman), the last Queen of France before the Revolution; Marie Antoinette (Meghan Lloyd); and a passionate Haitian rebel, […]
The Book of Will Reviewed by F. Kathleen FoleyA Noise WithinThrough June 7RECOMMENDEDEven though we are well aware that Shakespeare’s First Folio was successfully published, The Book of Will, Lauren Gunderson’s play about the Herculean effort to compile the plays into that folio, is surprisingly suspenseful — a gripping, edge of your seat yarn with enough […]
SIXReviewed by Julia StierPantages TheatreThrough June 10RECOMMENDED “Divorced, beheaded died; divorced, beheaded, survived.”What started as a cheeky rhyme to remember the fates of the six wives of Henry VIII is now the opening line of SIX — the hit musical by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, and directed by Lucy Moss and Jamie Armitage and […]
