Tag Archives: critic

Local writers are reflecting on the best that appeared on Los Angeles stages, both large and small, the previous 365 days.  Turns out there was a lot: L.A. Times Theater Critic Charles McNulty’s list focused nearly exclusively on the larger stages but Orson Bean’s storytelling at the Pacific Resident Theatre made the list as well. Dany Margolies‘s list at Time Out includes the highly lauded ...

It’s December and the ubiquitous holiday music – playing since mid-November – reminds us that Christmas is just around the corner.  I’ve always been troubled by one particular Christmas carol I first learned at the tender age of 4: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. You know the story, right? Young buck born with funny nose. Ostracized and bullied for it. Naturally, an extenuating circumstance (“one foggy ...

Veteran theater critic Myron Meisel applies his Harvard jurisprudence training to the myriad of legal issues facing the Los Angeles theater community including the lawsuit filed against Actors’ Equity and Equity’s Motion to Dismiss same.  Meisel takes the long view, both backwards into the past and forwards into the future, in an attempt to not just make sense of possible Equity motivations but also to ...

The Telegraph: Critics have a job to perform at the theater: to help the public understand where to spend hard earned dollars and precious time.  Of course, it never hurts to have a little fun on the job and critics often invite a friend to accompany them to the office on the theater’s dime.  The Artistic Director of Britain’s National Theatre, Rufus Norris, is changing ...

KCRW:  It’s been widely known for a few weeks now that the much-feted Rogue Machine Theatre company was moving from the only home it has had since its founding in 2008.  Critic Anthony Byrnes reflects on this and points out that place is indelibly part of production and that theater is indeed part of theatre. Beyond Rogue Machine’s move there’s a lot of shifting real ...

Radio station KCRW’s theater critic, Anthony Byrnes reflects on five productions that most moved him in 2015. Man Covets Bird at 24th Street Theater Children’s theater? Yes.  Well, sort of.  No . . . just wonderful theater that could enchant a child and move an adult to tears.  The only tragedy of 24th Street Theater’s productions is that there aren’t more of them and they ...

Huffington Post writer Brad Schreiber gives his 10 best theater productions in Los Angeles for the year 2015.  Both the Geffen Playhouse and the Fountain Theatre score twice on his list.

Bitter Lemons:  As a site that aggregates reviews of Los Angeles theater, Bitter Lemons offers a unique perspective in what was the most compelling – or at least the most enthusiastically reviewed – shows of 2015.  As far as where to go for theater in 2016?  One place to start might be those companies with the best rated seasons of 2015: 1) Zombie Joe’s Underground ...

Miami is not particularly known for being a theater center for the US which is all the more reason why Christine Dolen’s thoughts on the scene there, after 36 years of watching it as a critic, are particularly compelling. I talked to Tennessee Williams at a table by the water in Key West. I met Edward Albee for the first time in the lobby of ...

Time Out:  Long time critic Bob Verini gives his assessment of LA theater in 2015. …a lot of first-class work managed to find its way to LA’s stages… the kind of ambitious, sometimes funky, risk-taking entertainment that regularly graces our vibrant, yet perennially underappreciated, theater scene.