Email Author Bill Raden

2012 Stories by Bill Raden

• What Are Those Weird Ads for the Broad Stage All About?

  published Dec 28, 2012

  In recent weeks, a baffling teaser ad that has been running in print and on the sides of Metro buses around town has been provoking "Wtf!?" bewilderment from readers of the Los Angeles Times and tra... More >>

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  FEATURED STORY

  An L.A. Theater Company Moves Into...a Retirement Community?

  published Dec 21, 2012

  See also: *Our Latest Theater Reviews *5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week Whatever else it might entail, making live theater begins with real estate -- a plot of land and a building to accommodat... More >>

• Bad Apples

  published October 18, 2012

  Anybody concerned that Circle X's new musical about America's most notorious prisoner-torture atrocity was going to be some sort of Abu Ghraib:... More >>

• A Renowned Cardiologist Never Dreamed of Being an Actor...Until His Son Joined the Eight-Hour Play Gatz

  published Nov 30, 2012

  See also: *An interview with Gatz star Scott Shepherd *Our Latest Theater Reviews When the actor Jim Fletcher talks about F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, it is with the same mixture of fami... More >>

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  FEATURED STORY

  A Look Inside Blackout, L.A.'s Most Extreme Haunted House

  published Oct 30, 2012

  Imagine (1) somehow finding yourself among a group of apprehensive "fresh fish" being badgered and browbeaten by a brutal prison guard as he processes you through a penitentiary populated by Hanniba... More >>

• How a Tiny L.A. Theater Succeeded by Focusing on Local Playwrights -- Leading to a New Stage Version of King Kong

  published Oct 19, 2012

  Whether or not Los Angeles is a "theater town," it is certainly a town filled with theaters -- and actors. Small stages and itinerant acting companies are as ubiquitous here as car dealerships, and ... More >>

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  FEATURED STORY

  Theatre in the Dark Is Exactly That. Dark. Blackness. No Lights. Got It?

  published Oct 15, 2012

  It's the kind of what-if that gives lighting designers the night sweats: What if the artistic director at one of L.A.'s premier stages got it into his head to produce theater without any lights at a... More >>

• Down & Dirty

  published August 9, 2012

  With its 10-person, almost-all-female troupe of beautiful, corseted dancers stripping and singing to a selection of bawdy American songbook... More >>

• 'No, I Don't Pee on the Audience': NEA 4 Artists Discuss Their Legendary '90s Culture War and Upcoming Reunion

  published Sep 26, 2012

  How do you gag an artist? Way back in the George H.W. Bush years, it was believed by certain members of the Christian right that you could silence provocative and seemingly outré cultural expressio... More >>

• Magnum Opus Theatre Presents: Surf Dogs Unite

  published August 2, 2012

  As with most strokes of genius, the sheer comic brilliance of Joe Jordan and Vanessa Claire Stewart's tour de force of malicious movie-biz mockery... More >>

• Measure for Measure

  published June 28, 2012

  Much has been made of the difficulty in classifying the Bard's notoriously challenging send-up of moral absolutism and hypocrisy. When the laughs... More >>

• Silence of the Lambs Becomes a Musical, With the Most Gynecologically Explicit Love Ballad Ever

  published Sep 06, 2012

  Whatever else it might be -- "exuberantly gross" (New York Times), "not exactly the height of satirical sophistication" (Hollywood Reporter), "a lot funnier than it has a right to be" (New York Post)... More >>

• Kata-Na

  published August 23, 2012

  Anybody looking for deep characterizations or philosophic, literary inquiry need read no further: "Katana" translates as "sword," and that's... More >>

• Ethan Lipton Got Fired From His Publishing Job. His Solution? Old-Timey Jazz Songs

  published Aug 13, 2012

  A job means different things to different people. To the employed, it is what we must do in order to pay for what we want to do. To the employer, it is too often something that can almost always be ... More >>

• Cloud 9

  published August 2, 2012

  The world is a far different place from 1979, when playwright Caryl Churchill's postmodernist blast at frustrated sexual desire and Western... More >>

• Marilyn Monroe: 50th Anniversary of Her Death Commemorated at Her Westwood Cemetery

  published Aug 06, 2012

  See also: *Marilyn Monroe's Sexual Abuse, Secret Life Revealed in New Bio *Marilyn Monroe's Pharmacist, Samuel Bazrod, Was My Father *New Marilyn Monroe Bio: Her Death Was an Accident, JFK Was a One-... More >>

• Diary of a Madman

  published July 12, 2012

  A lacerating satire of the self-abnegating and dog-whipped Russian soul under the Czarist boot heel, Nikolai Gogol's 1834 short-prose masterpiece... More >>

• Summer Shakespeare Smackdown in NoHo: Respectable vs. Radical

  published Jul 13, 2012

  Why the works of William Shakespeare should be associated with the summer months is anyone's guess. Beyond having written A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale, there is scant evidence to ... More >>

• pool (no water)

  published June 14, 2012

  It has been said that the true measure of any drama is the degree to which it implicates its audience. If so, British playwright Mark Ravenhill's... More >>

• French Stewart on Playing Buster Keaton in a New Bio-Play

  published May 28, 2012

  By the end of his five-year run on the hit screwball sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun, French Stewart found himself at a career crossroads. The problem was that his success as the series' hilariously har... More >>

• What's a Hyperopera? Avant-Garde Director Yuval Sharon Shows Us

  published May 04, 2012

  A funny thing happened to Yuval Sharon on his way to a planned career as a film director. While studying at UC Berkeley, he decided to go to the opera. The production was Wozzeck by Alban Berg. To pr... More >>

• Diary of a Madman

  published March 22, 2012

  A lacerating satire of the self-abnegating and dog-whipped Russian soul under the Czarist boot heel, Nikolai Gogol's 1834 short-prose masterpiece... More >>

• USC Changes 'School of Theater' to 'School of Dramatic Arts.' So What's the Difference?

  published Apr 24, 2012

  What's in a name? Would that which we call the USC School of Theatre by any other name smell as sweet? Sweeter, apparently, or so it might seem from the announcement this week by the esteemed acting... More >>

• The Treatment

  published March 1, 2012

  The late Martha Graham liked to say that the body does not lie, that movement does not lie. With writer-partner Richard Alger,... More >>

• Theatre Movement Bazaar: I Wanna Dance WIth Somebody

  published March 29, 2012

  It's a little more than an hour before curtain and the actors are splayed across the Boston Court Theatre's main stage in Pasadena, squatting,... More >>