Steven Leigh Morris

Laughing in the Dark

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by Meg Henson From this spot on Tribeca’s Greenwich Street, you can look out across the Hudson River to New Jersey. At a quarter to 10 in the morning, there are few pedestrians about and not much traffic either, and the new sun fails to blunt the cold stab......
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French Toast

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by Craig SchwartzThe program to The Molière Comedies, a pair of the Frenchman’s one-acts, now at the Taper, contains a telling discussion between Brian Bedford, the director and lead performer of both plays, and Gordon Davidson, the theater’s artistic director and producer, who hired Bedford. Davidson speaks at length......
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Power Grabs

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by Marc PaschkeGood news: Circus Theatricals hasn’t turned Shakespeare’s hunchback toad, Richard III, into Osama bin Laden (though doubtless some genius will bring that concept to fruition in the next year or two). Rather, with the help of costume designer Emelle Holmes’ bowler hats, double-breasted suits and posh military......
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Finding Room in the New Century

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by John Nation Co-founder of New York’s SITI Company, Anne Bogart is among the most significant new American stage directors of the past decade. Now in its 10th year, SITI has toured nationally and internationally with an eclectic array of works delving into the psyches of pop icons Andy......

Call of the Wild

Steven Leigh Morris
ABOUT I5 YEARS AGO, WHEN he was turning 35, John Steppling was being touted by the local press as Los Angeles' most important homegrown playwright. Richard Stayton, writing for the Herald Examiner, went so far as to dub Steppling L.A.'s only playwright -- a reductive assessment, but also an indication......
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Waiting for the Cable Guy

Steven Leigh Morris
Illustration by Guy Burwell Starting in January, the Los Angeles Times’ ace drama critic Michael Phillips takes over as head theater critic for the Chicago Tribune — “a step up, given Chicago’s much more vibrant and satisfying theater scene,” reports Steve Rhodes in an article for Chicago magazine. In welcoming......
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Big Science, Little People

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by Joan Marcus Poor, possibly misunderstood Werner Heisenberg — the German nuclear physicist and the pivot of Michael Frayn’s riveting 1998 three-character play Copenhagen, a series of dramatic equations with poetical resonances. In 1941, Heisenberg (Hank Stratton), then head of Germany’s weapons-development program — his movements watched and his......

Rising After the Fall

Steven Leigh Morris
Moscow’s downtown Okhotny Ryad shopping mall is a bustling three-story glittering complex of faux-Greco design, dotted with cafes and video-game arcades, almost directly across the street from the Kremlin. With American and Russian pop music piped into the walkways and shops, the mall‘s atmosphere is similar to L.A.’s Beverly Center......

London Calling

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by Hugo Glendinning Although the West End’s heart, Piccadilly Circus, was certainly pulsing last Friday night, it was hardly host to the usual suffocating crush of humanity. Two months after 9/11, London is still experiencing a marked drop-off in tourism, and publicists are making it clear that Americans, more......
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Back to the Future

Steven Leigh Morris
Among the greatest challenges Los Angeles continues to face when it comes to building a culture is that of developing a public sense that the city has a time line, with origins that feed into its future. Aside from various noir potboilers (novels like Raymond Chandler‘s, movies like Chinatown and......