Charles McNulty, Theater Critic
3:06 PM PDT, May 10, 2012
Critic's Choice
Review: 'Follies' is a source of heartache and razzmatazz
There's so much to praise in the blissful Broadway revival of "Follies," which opened Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre on the heels of its numerous Tony nominations, but let's pay homage first to the sheer sophistication of the show itself. After experiencing "Follies" again — an adult entertainment if ever there was one — I flat-out refuse to accept any more jukebox substitutes.
May 7, 2012
Critic’s Choice
Review: 'Scottsboro Boys' in search of the truth
SAN DIEGO — Musicals are supposed to raise your spirits and warm your heart, right? Not necessarily. And certainly not in the case of "The Scottsboro Boys," the fearlessly inventive show about one of the most notorious episodes of racial injustice in America. It disturbs audiences as much as it entertains them.
6:00 PM PDT, April 25, 2012
Theater Review: 'The Columnist' at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, New York
NEW YORK — Who was Joseph Alsop? This question, this mystery drives "The Columnist," a new drama by David Auburn,Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Proof," about a star journalist who was as clear cut in his political views as he was opaque in his private life.
April 18, 2012
Review: Chekhov's 'Ivanov' vividly brought to life
"Ivanov," the play in which Anton Chekhov was still testing the formula for his dramatic breakthrough, is usually revived in somberly autumnal shades. So the opportunity to see the play thrillingly brought to life in brazen color, courtesy of director Bart DeLorenzo, is one that no serious aficionado of modern classics should pass up.
April 30, 2012
'End of the Rainbow': magic, heartbreak in Judy Garland portrayal
NEW YORK — Judy Garland, often drunk and occasionally disheveled, in Peter Quilter's biographical drama "End of the Rainbow," is rummaging for booze in her suite at the Ritz hotel. She's wired, and not simply because of the pills she can't seem to wean herself off of.
9:50 AM PDT, April 16, 2012
Critic's Notebook: Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter share literary legacy
Sometimes you can't put your finger on what you've been missing until you encounter it again. After seeing two fine revivals of plays by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter — "Waiting for Godot" at the Mark Taper Forum and the British production of "The Caretaker" at San Francisco's Curran Theatre, respectively — I suddenly realized how ravenous I was for language in the theater with poetic density and grit.
April 15, 2012
Emily Mann a natural to direct 'Streetcar' and 'The Convert'
NEW YORK — New Yorker drama critic John Lahr set off a social media firestorm in December with a blog comment that called for a moratorium on those "infernal all-black productions of Tennessee Williams plays unless we can have their equal in folly: all-white productions of August Wilson."
February 26, 2012
Critic's Notebook: My Meryl Streep problem
A funny thing happened whenever I set out to see Meryl Streep in “The Iron Lady.” I'd invite one of my moviegoing pals to join me and then find myself later that evening at “Shame,” “My Week With Marilyn” or the glorious “Pina.”
September 24, 2008
THEATER REVIEW
Charles Busch's 'The Third Story' at LaJolla Playhouse
LA JOLLA -- Imagine Joan Crawford's stately glamour, Susan Hayward's tough-broad shtick and Carol Burnett's parodic flair all rolled into the same male actor. Yes, the one and only Charles Busch is back on stage, starring in your garden-variety science-fiction gangster melodrama meets Russian fairy tale.
December 18, 2011
Best of 2011 in Theater: Charles McNulty
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, bigger is still often mistaken for better in the theater. One would have thought that the colossal debacle known as "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark," which finally had its official opening in June, would have settled the matter, but the show continues to draw crowds even after all the bad press and withering pans.
November 8, 2010
Stephen Sondheim: Merrily he rolls along
Stately and rumpled, Stephen Sondheim descended from an upper floor of his elegant East Side townhouse and submitted to the interview as though it were a necessary barber shop shave. He's used to these intrusions — the artist obliged to natter on about his work was one of the themes of "Sunday in the Park With George" — but this year the distractions have gone to a harrying new extreme.
February 26, 2012
'The Fry Chronicles' review: Stephen Fry autobiography
"The Fry Chronicles -- An Autobiography"
January 1, 2012
Critic's Notebook: When going from stage to screen, things change in between
The art of adaptation, as the rash of movies derived from plays this season attests, is never easy. The best artistic looters of all time — Shakespeare, the Greek tragedians — recognized that independent vision is everything. Borrowing didn't inhibit them in least. Their goal, of course, wasn't to duplicate but to create something autonomous. Heck, Shakespeare wasn't beyond taking a freehand with history itself.
July 2, 2010
Critic's notebook: National Theatre's NT Live season screens big
Late spring, give or take a couple of weeks, traditionally marks the end of the theater season. And while taking stock of the last year, I'd like to make note of a group of plays I caught in Hollywood — Helen Mirren in "Phèdre," Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour in the world premiere production of Alan Bennett's "The Habit of Art" and, on Monday night in the program's ecstatic capper, Simon Russell Beale and Fiona Shaw in a revival of Dion Boucicault's " London Assurance."
April 29, 2011
Movie review: 'Making the Boys'
It may be hard for those who grew up watching "Will & Grace" to imagine the shock and excitement when Mart Crowley's "The Boys in the Band" caught fire off-Broadway in 1968, becoming one of the most discussed, derided and defended dramas of its era.
November 7, 2010
The Actor's Craft: The Eli Wallach method
The moment one enters the gracious Upper West Side apartment of Eli Wallach, the home he has shared for decades with his wife and fellow actress, Anne Jackson, there is an unmistakable sense of life being well lived. Smiling and curious about his guest, he sits down for the scheduled chat about himself, but he'd much rather offer a tour of the place, pointing out the photos of his daughters, the artworks of his son, the stage and screen memorabilia extending back more than half a century, and — oh, what's this? — a framed marriage certificate from 1948.
May 2, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
‘The American Stage: Writing on Theater From Washington Irving to Tony Kushner’
The American Stage
August 9, 2009
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Did the show change, or did I?
In these cash-strapped days, people are lucky to get to see a show once, never mind a second or third time. But with "Spamalot" now playing at the Ahmanson Theatre more than four years after it opened on Broadway and a couple of years after it premiered in Las Vegas, there are a number of returning customers, Monty Python addicts chief among them.
June 14, 2010
Critic's Notebook: Tonys celebrate commerce, not art
Awards should be aspirational, validating excellence and originality even though each and every one of us knows that commercialism rules the day. But far be it from the ever-insecure Tonys — the geeky glee club representative of the major entertainment awards — to bite the hand that feeds it.
December 20, 2009
NOTES ON THE DECADE
Theater: Amid the many bloated musicals, originality sneaks in
Millennial anxieties ushered in the new decade with Y2K panic, 9/11 made it seem as if the paranoid were on to something, two quagmire wars were launched and the Great Recession left everyone wondering about the prognosis of the American economy as it enters its 21st century teens on life support. Yet if the theater, perpetually on the brink of extinction, taught us anything during this unenviable era, it's that apocalyptic fantasies are just that -- the wishful fears that somehow the chaotic slate will be wiped clean.
August 22, 2010
Patti Smith's memoir of a rock-poet
Nostalgia is never more suspect than when the person romantically harking back is too young to have experienced the era firsthand. But reading Patti Smith's memoir "Just Kids," a tender recollection of her coming of age as a singer-songwriter alongside her artistic soul mate, the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, I couldn't help envying the cultural ferment of the late '60s, early '70s and wondering how we could recapture some of the dirty magic.
March 28, 2010
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Southern California's big theaters need fresh, dramatic thinking
Southern California is famous for being ahead of the national curve -- in styles, fads and unenviable crises. And right now, the region's largest institutional theaters are serving as a crystal ball for leadership concerns affecting nonprofit theaters throughout the country. ¶ I'm referring, of course, to Center Theatre Group, the Geffen Playhouse, South Coast Repertory, La Jolla Playhouse and the Old Globe, all of which are at crucial crossroads. The founders or guiding spirits of these prestigious theaters have left, are on the verge of leaving or are in a quandary about whether to make an exit at such a precarious historical moment. Meanwhile, their successors, caught between an economic rock and a cultural hard place, seem increasingly ready to give away the store to lure former subscribers from their Netflix queues. ¶ This transitional anxiety, dating to Center Theatre Group founder Gordon Davidson's passing of the torch to Michael Ritchie in 2005, has only magnified worrisome developments that have intensified since the recession. Perhaps the most insidious among them is the blurring of commercial and nonprofit values. ¶ Some explanatory back story: The regional (sometimes known as resident) theater movement, which resulted in the proliferation of nonprofit stages from coast to coast, was designed not simply to decentralize theater -- road shows had long been bringing live performance to the provinces -- but to allow it to flourish as an art form throughout the country.
June 20, 2010
The Kushner effect, an angel in American playwriting
Few plays have affected me as viscerally as "Angels in America." I can still recall my state of mind in the theater, having traveled to New York from New Haven, where I was in graduate school, to see both parts ("Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika") in a single marathon day in the late fall of 1993. To put the matter clinically, I was overwhelmed.
May 2, 2010
Armistead Maupin, Olympia Dukakis discuss ‘Tales of the City’
"Tales of the City" may have introduced author Armistead Maupin and Olympia Dukakis, the most memorable face from the three television miniseries adapted from the books. But American Conservatory Theater, the venerable resident theater on Geary Street led by artistic director Carey Perloff, is what keeps bringing them back together.
November 22, 2009
THEATER
Domestic drama: Lee Strasberg's family continues the legacy of instruction, despite some friction
The Method is dead. Long live the Method. ¶ Spend an afternoon with David Lee Strasberg, the ambitious 38-year-old son of legendary acting guru Lee Strasberg, and you just might walk away with the idea that something revolutionary is going on at the Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. That would be overstating matters. This family-run school with flagships in West Hollywood and New York still finds its raison d'être in what Strasberg himself identified as the training of the actor's internal skills. But the vision of the Method being articulated at the institute, observing its 40th anniversary this year, seems to have little to do with the stereotype of sweaty, mumbling actors wallowing in the muck of unhappy childhoods. ¶ Dressed in preppy clothes that hint at his undergraduate days at Brown, Strasberg fils, the institute's CEO and creative director (whom I'll refer to as DLS), says that the Strasberg approach -- the best known of the American adaptations of the Stanislavsky "system" commonly grouped together as the Method -- is less reliant on psychobabble than most people believe. The words "Oedipal Complex" never pass his lips. But more interesting is the way developments in neuroscience keep cropping up in his conversation. Don't bother telling him about the toy your parents didn't buy you, but do engage him on the subject of conditioned reflexes and the neuropsychology of smells.
August 23, 2009
THEATER
Oregon Shakespeare Festival offers much to build upon
If the Oregon Shakespeare Festival doesn't have the most enthusiastic audience of any regional theater in the country, there must be some performing arts center out there with quite a rabid cult.
March 5, 2009
AN APPRECIATION
Remembering Horton Foote
If one were to choose a single phrase to distill the essence of Horton Foote's distinctive literary grace, the title of the 1983 film for which he won an Academy Award for screenwriting, "Tender Mercies," could hardly be bettered. For it is this quality of loving forbearance that characterizes his relationship to all those everyday eccentrics from Texas backwaters he introduced us to -- that colorful, twangy crew who wear their hearts as well as their foibles on their sleeves.
November 1, 2008
THEATER REVIEW
'Spring Awakening' is all about the strife
Morality evolves and musical styles change, but there's something constant about sex, teenagers and rock 'n' roll. Oops, almost left out the emotional glue holding together this perennial pubescent compound -- angst.
May 3, 2009
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Hey, Hollywood: Why not work on the L.A. stage?
There are precious few guarantees in the theater anymore. Boffo playwrights went out with the Neil Simon dinosaurs. A new show by Stephen Sondheim, hands down the greatest living musical theater composer, can't even count on a Broadway booking. The only thing producers can bank on are stars. Celebrities still sell, which is why so many of them are working these days on the Great White Way.
September 23, 2008
THEATER REVIEW
'9 to 5: The Musical'
NOTHING gets the comic juices flowing like a workplace revenge fantasy. In "9 to 5: The Musical," an eager-to-please adaptation of the fizzy 1980 pop-feminist film, three female employees, tired of banging their heads against a low-hanging glass ceiling, team up against the sort of sexist boss who deserves to run into Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer and Billie Jean King in a dark alley.
October 16, 2008
THEATER REVIEW
Druid Theatre draws peasant life in the raw at UCLA Live
The plays of John Millington Synge may have more rustic charm than a bed-and-breakfast brochure from the Irish tourist board, but don't be fooled by their picturesque settings and lyrical lilt. Tragic, comic or some blithe hybrid, they have a way of telling audiences uncomfortable truths -- usually about the raging cowardice of ordinary men and the strong, sex-starved women who are stuck with them.
October 11, 2008
THEATER REVIEW
'The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928)' at REDCAT
The first section of William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" is such a notorious brain twister that any attempt at straightforward dramatization would be almost as foolhardy as trying to resurrect the Old South. Told from the point of view of Benjy, the Compsons' mentally challenged adult son, the narrative hopscotches with such retrospective insouciance that Faulkner was tempted to color-code passages to clarify shifts in time.
Mark Taper Forum makeover freshens up L.A. theater scene
Touring the newly renovated Mark Taper Forum a few weeks before its official unveiling was a bit like standing at the crossroads between the past and the future. It wasn't merely the sight of stage carpenters readying the set for "The House of Blue Leaves," John Guare's delirious 1970 farce, which will inaugurate the next chapter in the Taper's 41-year history when the show opens today. Nor was it the mix of old construction and new, the way the striking carousel-shaped building has been endowed with a freshly carved-out basement lounge complete with luxurious bathrooms, not to mention all the technical improvements that have the crew happily humming as they work.
October 8, 2008
THEATER REVIEW
'Tobacco Road' at La Jolla Playhouse
WHEN "Tobacco Road" premiered on Broadway in 1933, it pushed the envelope with its unsavory depiction of rural poverty. Would theatergoers looking for a fun night out want to have their noses rubbed in the degrading conditions of destitute Georgia sharecroppers? As it turned out, the middle class had a real appetite for this sort of filthy fingernail naturalism.
September 16, 2008
THEATER REVIEW
'The House of Blue Leaves'
GROPING for a comfortable moral in John Guare's classic black comedy "The House of Blue Leaves," which opened Sunday at the Mark Taper Forum in a sensational revival directed by Nicholas Martin, is a little like asking an escaped felon for some friendly advice. But one thing can safely be said: When it comes to trampling traditional family values, there's nothing more brutalizing than a middle-aged guy with a frustrated dream.
September 3, 2008
Tyne Daly plays a mama scorned in 'Agamemnon'
WHEN IT comes to pursuing the bad guys, few actors move mountains like Tyne Daly. For years on television she huffed and puffed after crooks as a New York City cop on "Cagney & Lacey." More recently, as a social worker on "Judging Amy," she battled for needy children while making sure her own gavel-pounding daughter never lost sight of what was really at stake in her courtroom. But playing Clytaemnestra in the Getty Villa's new staging of Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon” brings this righteous fury to what can confidently be called its tragic apex.
August 4, 2008
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK | THE ART OF PERFORMANCE
Heath Ledger in 'Dark Knight': Bravo!
Great actors, even those who have been blessed with longevity, often bear a tragic mark. It's not just the ups and downs of stardom that can make for a cruel career. Rough inner seas are typically the very reason someone seeks to be among what William Hazlitt, that lyrical witness of the early 19th century British stage, called "the motley representatives of human nature."
August 1, 2008
THEATER REVIEW
'Gulls'
Points for degree of difficulty: "Gulls," which is receiving its world premiere at the Theatre @ Boston Court, sets out to transform Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull" into a musical.
July 25, 2008
THEATER REVIEW
'Accomplices' by Bernard Weinraub
High-profile reporting isn't the usual route to becoming a playwright, but in one respect Bernard Weinraub's newspaper pedigree serves him well in "The Accomplices." Like any muckraker worth his salt, Weinraub knows how to level accusations and make them sting.
July 10, 2008
THEATER REVIEW
'Looped' at the Pasadena Playhouse
A new school of psychology is inaugurated in Matthew Lombardo's play "Looped," which had its world premiere Tuesday at the Pasadena Playhouse. It's called Tallulah Therapy, and it involves being stuck in a room with an aging Southern booze-and-pill-addicted actress who says the most outlandishly naughty things, reveals her sorriest secrets and demands that you confront whatever it is you've been running away from your whole life. And make it snappy, dahling -- this old diva needs a stiff drink.
July 14, 2008
THEATER REVIEW
'Of Equal Measure' at the Kirk Douglas Theatre
The trouble with historical fiction is that there often isn't a satisfying amount of either element. Fact constrains fantasy as the helpless past gets reduced to a pencil sketch.
August 1, 2008
THEATER REVIEW
'Body Politic'
Wendy Hoffman (Kristina Lear), an earnest screenwriter with an attractive, low-key style, wants to tell the story of injured vets at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Capt. Gray Whitrock (Michael James Reed), a strapping military guy with a prosthetic foot and a by-the-book manner, is the gatekeeper to the ward. Their verbal tug-of-war -- laden with as much partisan disdain as sneaky sexual subtext -- establishes the serious game of Jessica Goldberg's new play, "Body Politic."
July 7, 2008
ON SECOND THOUGHT
The drama after deadline
MUCH AS one would like to join Edith Piaf in a duet of "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien," a critic can't help having occasional regrets after passing instantaneous verdicts on scores of plays and musicals, usually in the space of a few morning hours after a deadline-spoiled night's sleep.
June 29, 2008
CD REVIEWS
Reviews are in: B'Way cast recordings
Curious about the changing sound of the Great White Way? Times Theater Critic Charles McNulty weighs in on five noteworthy cast recordings from the year on Broadway -- four from new shows that couldn't be more wildly disparate and one from a classic that's been absolutely revitalized.
June 15, 2008
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Team effort helps position for the Tony Awards
AMERICANS ARE suckers for teams. The prospect of talents blending into a collective heave ho of inspiration turns us into giddy school kids at recess. Sports fans know better than anyone the joy of watching the gifted spur one another to new heights. Want to see a grown man cry? Wait for the next bottom-of-the-ninth grand slam. Want to make him sulk for weeks? Fill him in on how those supposedly chummy superstars really feel about each other off the field.
June 16, 2008
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Highs, if not heights at the Tony Awards
FIRST THE good news: Compared to our debt-roiled, war-mired nation, Broadway had a lot to celebrate this year. In addition to luminously acted new dramas and shimmeringly staged revivals, there was something approximating a genuine horse race for best musical -- a godsend for everyone who religiously sits through the normally suspense-bereft Tony telecast.
May 26, 2008
THEATER REVIEW
It's all in a farcical day's work in SCR's 'Taking Steps'
There's nothing like a British farce to make you feel stubbornly, even condescendingly American.
June 13, 2008
THEATER REVIEW
Stephen Belber's 'Finally' at Black Dahlia
Four monologues, four characters, one mesmerizing actor and a whole mess of sorry violence -- Stephen Belber's "Finally" at the Black Dahlia Theatre is a small Rashomon puzzle laden with pernicious explosives.
June 1, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway'
By theatrical standards, Broadway's 2003-04 season was hardly vintage. But for musicals it was an unusually newsworthy one. Headlines were made, naturally enough, by Rosie O'Donnell, who invested $10 million in the ill-fated Boy George musical "Taboo." The war between the blockbuster "Wicked" and "Avenue Q," the little puppet show that could, for the top Tony was fought with a surprising Harvey Weinstein-like fierceness. And Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's "Caroline, or Change" had launched an all-out campaign to rescue the Great White Way from complete commercialization with its envelope-pushing civil rights music drama.
July 20, 2007
THEATER REVIEW
'Avenue Q' can really grow on you
SAN DIEGO — If the words "Children's Television Workshop" light up old neural centers in your brain, consider yourself in the right demographic for "Avenue Q," the diverting Tony-winning musical that lends a new twist to the familiar "Sesame Street" formula.
May 20, 2008
THEATER REVIEW
'Two Unrelated Plays by David Mamet'
When you've been crowned the heavyweight playwriting champion of trash-talking masculinity, it can be hard to get anyone to acknowledge that you're good for more than just verbal uppercuts. David Mamet's talent has always been more diverse than his reputation. No, there definitely isn't an old softy waiting to emerge from behind the brawler's facade. But what about a bespectacled metaphysician with an absurdist streak or a vaudevillian cutup who could still probably make a killing in late-night sketch comedy?
March 27, 2007
THEATER REVIEW
Attention must be paid
Please put down whatever else you might be doing. This review demands your undivided attention.
February 23, 2007
THEATER REVIEW
'Wicked' is almost sure to be evergreen
"Wicked" parked its theatrical sorcery at the Pantages on Wednesday, and don't expect it to vanish in a puff of smoke anytime soon.
November 18, 2006
THEATER REVIEW
Straight into the face of war
"When Patrick came home in a coffin, the media contacted me," says Nadia McCaffrey. "They asked if I wanted the media to cover it. I knew it was forbidden to take photos of coffins with flags on them. But I thought about it and said, 'Yes.' "
November 17, 2006
THEATER REVIEW
Chalk one up for candor
By now you've probably heard a good deal about the psychological case study known as Carrie Fisher. To review the basic facts: Hollywood icon parents torn asunder by lavender-eyed Jezebel, early movie stardom marred by laughingstock hairdo, a minor shipwreck on the shoals of Paul Simon, rehab, resurrection via "Postcards From the Edge," rehab again, confession of mental illness to Diane Sawyer, bipolar acclaim, fresh scandal involving dead gay Republican operative in bed, more rehab. Prognosis: one-woman show.
March 21, 2006
THEATER REVIEW
Equal-opportunity love
Love in all its dizzying, rainbow-flag-waving variety is on frolicsome display in the Cornerstone Theater Company's "As You Like It: A California Concoction," which opened Friday at the Pasadena Playhouse.
September 24, 2006
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
One-man show
NO one said it was going to be easy. But with his first season behind him and his second already underway, Center Theatre Group artistic director Michael Ritchie has yet to communicate a clear theatrical game plan.
October 14, 2006
THEATER REVIEW
If it only had a heart
In the aftermath of Katrina, the sight of an African American family ambushed by a natural disaster can't help carrying political baggage. But racial concerns hardly register in Des McAnuff's update of the unpredictable theatrical twister known as "The Wiz."
November 3, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Wrestling With Angels'
Tony Kushner, author of the epic millennial trumpet blast "Angels in America," has never doubted that he's living in interesting times — "interesting" in the euphemistic sense of the proverbial Chinese curse. As an artist and citizen, he has felt a responsibility to respond to contemporary political upheaval through his plays and copious remarks as the quotable go-to guy now that Susan Sontag and Arthur Miller have moved on to that old public-intellectual retirement home in the sky.
November 3, 2006
THEATER REVIEW
'Piazza's' dramatic light grows sharper
Romantics beware: "The Light in the Piazza" may seem like a picture postcard of amour with its lovely American ingénue and handsome Italian bachelor falling head over heels amid the sensual backdrop of Florence. But all is not as it appears in Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas' musical adaptation of Elizabeth Spencer's 1960 short novel, which provides some ominous Henry James cloud cover on what from afar could be mistaken for a sweet, sun-dappled love story.
Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times
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