Did you ever hear the one about the guy who started up a new gig as a theater critic right as a global pandemic made public gatherings immoral and possibly even illegal? No? Just as ...

Here, in the third show of its ninth season, the Oceanside Theatre Company decided to do something they hadn’t done before, not even during their first-ever musical, last year’s Man of La Mancha: big production ...

Kid, the handsome, frenetic young trans writer surprised by a visit from his father Grey at the outset of Sylvan Oswald’s A Kind of Weather, is not the play’s main character. This is not a ...

There are many amusing moments in Madeleine George’s Hurricane Diane. That's to be expected, given its premise: sending the Greek god Dionysus — here rendered as the butch lesbian Diane — on a mission to ...

Playwright August Wilson is rightly celebrated for his wordsmithing — or maybe word-weaving would be better, or word-spinning. The talk that animates his late-’70s work Jitney (though it wasn’t produced until 1996) doesn’t feel worked-over ...

Rob Lufty’s “From the Director” letter in the program for Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap notes that “Lauren often talks about how every playwright has one basic story that they are trying to perfect with ...

No full review this week, but I did stop by Jitney at the Old Globe and Italian-American Reconciliation at Scripps Ranch Theatre. Cheers!

G. K. Chesterton, in his poem The Ballad of the White Horse, famously wrote that “The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry and all ...

San Diego Repertory Theatre’s production of Stephen Karam’s The Humans does a good deal of stage-setting before you even take your seat. A display by the box office provides “a behind-the scenes glimpse of the ...

A crucial component of the storyteller’s craft is placing actions and details in a specific order. For most stories, this is pretty straightforward: start at the beginning, then tell the events in the order they ...

Ring Around the Moon is a comedy of manners full of the stock characters that populate the genre. The action happens when everyone is invited up to the grand home of the Dowager Countess for ...

This is a funny show. It needs to be funny. If it weren’t funny it would be offensive, especially in our delicate and easily offended culture. The characters are so exaggerated that we don’t take ...

There are inherent tensions between how we are documented and how we view ourselves. We can hear this any time we listen to our own voices in an audio recording. Is that what I really ...

The Old Globe website describes Noura as, “A riveting West Coast premiere loosely inspired by Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.” I agree, it is loosely related to A Doll’s House. Very loosely.So loosely, in fact, that ...

“It’s just a shame you missed out on rock ’n’ roll,” a 1973 Lester Bangs tells an emerging music writer he’s taken under his wing, “It’s over. You got here just in time for the ...

If a show is only as good as its villain, then Amadeus is a great show. The title might refer to Mozart, but the show opens and closes with Salieri, the villain. The play, by ...

What does society feel about unmarried people over the age 45? For most of our nation’s history, the majority of the population has been married, so the democratic question has typically been: how do married ...

The Romeo and Juliet I saw at The Old Globe recently tried to “re-imagine” the classic tale. Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story actually does it. The success of West Side Story lies in the fact ...