Email Author Bill Raden

2011 Stories by Bill Raden

• Have You Seen Alice?

  published November 10, 2011

  Watching a Jacqueline Wright play is like biting into a cookie full of arsenic. Her subject is the paradoxical, near-poisonous nature of love. And... More >>

• Christmas 4 Bukowski

  published November 17, 2011

  At first blush, the notion of casting L.A.'s late poet laureate of the sordid in the role of Santa makes about as much sense as, say, erecting a... More >>

• A Christmas Carol, Again?! A Stage Scrooge Bids a Bah Humbug to the Season's Holiday Offerings

  published Dec 13, 2011

  A cursory glance at last week's L.A. Weekly theater reviews reveals a typical early-December harvest of local holiday-themed shows but without, shall we say, the typical level of enthusiasm for this... More >>

• Stephen Sondheim's New Book Look, I Made a Hat Unloads on Theater Critics With Both Barrels. Here's Where He's Wrong

  published Nov 23, 2011

  If you thought the week's top story had anything to do with mass protests on the streets of Cairo or the collapse of the deficit-reduction "super committee" in the halls of Congress, consider yoursel... More >>

• The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity

  published September 8, 2011

  Samuel Goldwyn is famously quoted as snarling, "If you want to send a message, use Western Union." As demonstrated by Kristoffer Diaz's vibrant... More >>

• Freak Machine

  published August 4, 2011

  What are the two most dangerous words in the theater? Anyone tempted to answer "performance art" may want to consider the peril and precarious... More >>

• Devils Love at Midnight

  published August 18, 2011

  As any longtime fan can testify, the Grand Guignol Gothicists of Zombie Joe's Underground could perform the phone book and make it look like a... More >>

• The Burning Opera: How to Survive the Apocalypse

  published July 7, 2011

  If art, as Josef Albers insisted, is concerned with the how, not the what, then Ghostlight Gypsies' musical art carnival ranks as an unqualified... More >>

• We'll Do Our Own Damn Theater Panel: 'Uninvited' 99-Seat Theaters Rebel Against Radar L.A. and TCG

  published Jun 20, 2011

  The first jolt of Los Angeles' big summer of theater came to its convulsive close yesterday with the final curtain of the Radar L.A. festival and the wrap of downtown's TCG National Theater Conferenc... More >>

• REDCAT Turns on the Radar: Will Anyone at the TCG Conference Leave the Downtown Bubble?

  published Jun 15, 2011

  As L.A.'s hipster-habitués of downtown's more prestigious performance-art dens can testify, nobody throws a party quite like REDCAT's genial artistic director, Mark Murphy. And last night's blowout... More >>

• Sotto Voce

  published June 2, 2011

  Words to the wise: Never, but never, take a vacation with playwright Robert Riemer and director Zombie Joe. In last year's A Memory of What... More >>

• Turbo Tartuffe!

  published May 12, 2011

  Director Denise Devin certainly wasn't kidding when she dropped "Turbo" into the title of her adaptation of Molière's timeless attack on... More >>

• Groundlings Singles Cruise

  published March 17, 2011

  Sketches by the Groundlings' "A" cast of master improv artists reliably fall into three categories: "inspired" — in which all the right notes... More >>

• The Fix-Up Show

  published March 3, 2011

  Although it's ostensibly a live-onstage dating game show, creator/host J. Keith van Straaten's comedy hybrid owes less of a debt to its venerable... More >>

• Theater Reviews: Salome

  published January 6, 2011

  SALOMÉ When presented with Aubrey Beardsley's Whistler-inspired illustrations for the first English edition of... More >>