In this over-wrought moment in American life so full of bushwa about immigrants, it is great to have a playwright like Qui Nguyen (author of the hit play Viet Gone) to entertain audiences with an epic, serio-comic play like Poor Yella Rednecks, all juiced up with great characters and theatrical whizbang. It takes a protean … Continue reading “Poor Yella Rednecks” at South Coast Repertory
Culture Clash, the brilliant Chicano theatre troupe consisting of Richard Montoya, Ricardo Salinas and Herbert Siguenza, has been around a long, long time and shows no sign of letting up. Their current sharp-edged social satire, Culture Clash (Still) in America, now in production at South Coast Rep, is unabashedly and satisfyingly rude as they demolish … Continue reading “Culture Clash (Still) in America” at South Coast Repertory
I have a vision of an idealized universe that I hold deeply inside me, a time far in the future when the United Federation of Planets battles evil with crews of people that are respected for their abilities and the content of their characters. They are not despised for their outward appearance or judged by … Continue reading “Little Black Shadows” at South Coast Repertory
It is fairly common for a book to migrate to a screenplay that becomes a movie and ultimately a musical. There are lots of examples—E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime fits that progression. More common these days is the reverse trajectory of a film that is turned into a musical, like Amélie or Billy Elliot. Shakespeare in … Continue reading “Shakespeare in Love” at South Coast Repertory
It is a blessing to be able to see one of August Wilson’s plays from his Century Cycle, a magnum opus of ten plays each one set in a decade of the Twentieth Century. It is especially fine when it is performed by a first class cast at a premiere theatre company. I saw his … Continue reading “Gem of the Ocean” at South Coast Repertory
Rachel Bonds’ new play, Curve of Departure, now in its world premiere run at South Coast Rep, deals with the intimate adjustments any family goes through when the trajectory of the individuals lurches off course in unexpected ways. There is nothing really new here. Robert Burns said it best, “The best laid schemes o’ mice … Continue reading “Curve of Departure” at South Coast Repertory
The musical Once (book by Enda Walsh, music and lyrics by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová) sweeps into South Coast Repertory trailing clouds of glory, first as a film that earned the 2007 Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film, the Oscar for Best Original Song (“Falling Slowly), and a Grammy nomination for the film’s … Continue reading “Once” at South Coast Repertory
The title of Amy Freed’s The Monster Builder conjures up some classical allusions, certainly to Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder with its ego driven Solness, an architect who builds high and falls low, as well as, perhaps, to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with another driven genius whose creation goes awry. The Monster Builder, however, is a … Continue reading “The Monster Builder” at South Coast Repertory
When Nora Helmer walks out of her marriage at the end of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, shocking the audiences of 1879, she leaves not only her husband Torvald, a banker who condescends to his wife to the point of suffocation, but she also abandons her three young children and a life of relative comfort. … Continue reading “A Doll’s House, Part 2” at South Coast Repertory
Leela is a seventeen-year-old South Asian girl from Calcutta. She looks out on the world with a thoughtful mien and speaks in an assured forthright tone. She knows a lot of things. She knows that the black box that records the last few minutes of an airplane’s descent to disaster is really orange. She likes … Continue reading “Orange’” at South Coast Repertory
