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Each play asks: Is this love, or a con?
By Steven Leigh Morris
In Henry James' short novel Washington Square, set in 1850 New York, when a homely, awkward and guileless young heiress named Catherine Sloper... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
Terry Tocantins and Alex Zola's The Magic Bullet Theory, closing this weekend at Sacred Fools Theater Company in Hollywood, is the second play to... More >>
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Dancing off the blues
By Steven Leigh Morris
Every once in a while, a stage production comes along that simply stops you in your tracks. Such a production usually is of the kind of play that... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
The constellations appeared as projected images in two productions last weekend. One was a workshop of a play-in-development, closing the day... More >>
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By Pauline Adamek
Employing playful and inventive staging, director Julia Rodriguez-Elliott maximizes the Italian commedia dell'arte roots of 17th-century French... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
A row of actors sitting side by side in chairs, collectively unrolling a ball of string. The character of Death stands with a pair of scissors,... More >>
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By Bill Raden
A cacophony of feedback howls, odd keyboard blasts and tasty-lick guitar noodles of every conceivable rock genre echoes through the halls of... More >>
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By Rebecca Haithcoat
A switch flicks and spotlights softly bathe South Coast Rep's studio theater stage during a tech run-through. Jesse Bonnell stands up, shaking... More >>
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By Bill Raden
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 >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
Viola Pettus was a self-trained black nurse who, with the help of her husband, Ben, set up an encampment/tent hospital in the West Texas outback... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
The Russian master playwright, Anton Chekhov, who wrote short stories and plays around the turn of the last century, seems to have a particular... More >>
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Clooney, Pitt, Kevin Bacon and Martin Sheen power a fundraiser reading
By Steven Leigh Morris
On Saturday night, there were approximately seven men in the audience of some 1,300 at Los Angeles' Wilshire Ebell Theatre who weren't wearing... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
Ian MacKinnon is a pleasant, bearded guy in his mid-30s, whose relentlessly vivacious, salacious one-man lecture/carny act, Ian MacKinnon's Gay... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
The news last week that Reprise Theatre Company is suspending operations brought into stark focus the economics of a midsize theater attempting... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
In dramas, as in life, perspective is the key to sustaining mental equilibrium when dealing with anguish. In the theater, what exactly does it... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
"There was no script," explains director-playwright Nancy Keystone, when she and her company, Critical Mass Performance Group, showed up at the... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
At the top of the stairs leading up to the Hollywood Dance Center on Highland Avenue, the first sight that comes into view is mirrors lining the... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
Film footage of Jacqueline Kennedy cradling the head of husband John F. Kennedy in an open limousine in Dallas after he'd been felled by rifle... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
Karl Linder is the representative of the neighbors association "welcoming committee" over in Clybourne Park — an all-white suburb in... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
Over at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, the schoolkids of Grover's Corners in Thornton Wilder's Our Town pour off the stage, like water from a... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
It's probably dangerous to subtitle a biographical play "The Kick-Ass Wit," as twin-sister journalist-playwrights Margaret and Allison Engel do... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
Are we insects or are we dancers?
"I was always fascinated by insects since I was a child. I would go into my backyard and look under rocks, to... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
How often, in the pantheon of literature and drama, do you find a guy performing an homage to his mom? Far more common in the annals of pop... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
In a silvery-blue jacket and slacks, lithe British actor Julian Sands presented 90 minutes of readings from the poetry of and speeches by Harold... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
There's a reason that John Patrick Shanley's two-character, 75-minute "apache dance" from 1984, set in the Bronx, is one of the most-produced... More >>
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The life of a Nigerian Afrobeat legend
By Steven Leigh Morris
The band and the actors are already warming up as the audience trickles into the Ahmanson Theatre for Fela!, Jim Lewis and Bill T. Jones'... More >>
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By L.A. Weekly Theater Critics
Lighting Design by Mother Nature
Playwright-director Sharon Yablon toured local stages in September with 24 Hours on Sunset, a collection of... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
This past June witnessed the week that was, with the nationwide theater organization Theatre Communications Group celebrating its 50th... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
There's an imposing bed at the center of the stage. Colin (Troy Blendell) has such a typically English, genial disposition, you have to wonder... More >>
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By Steven Leigh Morris
If you visit New York this winter, you'll find on Broadway a playwright oft-produced in L.A. (Theresa Rebeck) and a pair of Hollywood stars... More >>
