Stephen Sachs is an intellectual juggernaut of a playwright who plumbs premises for his pieces from the pages of the Los Angeles Times and other news sources, populates them with well developed and finely crafted characters, then provides them with dialogue both sparkling and believable. He
Seven years prior to American Idol breaking out on Fox to become one of the most successful and talked about television shows in U.S. history, there was Star Search. From 1983 to 1995, Ed McMahon hosted the talent competition filmed initially at the old Earl Carroll
An award winning L.A. playwright and rabble-rouser of note who has hoisted glasses with Orson Welles, been arrested on three continents and once beat up Charlie Manson. In his early years of elementary school, Ernest Kearney escaped classes by writing and organizing little plays to take
A friend of mine, (one who knows I’ve just finished a year long project of re-reading the Bible—for the fifth or sixth time—and while doing so consolidating close to thirty years of notes and annotations into one very large volume), has been sending me tidbits
The year 2015 is slipping away into history, and more importantly into memory. We are oblivious to the value of memory in our youth. Is it because our experience with it is so shallow at that time in our lives? Or perhaps it’s that those aspects
“Hell is really cold, wet and smells like fish.” In the tale of his time as a greenhorn on a commercial fishing barge in the Bering Straits, John Cox definitely has an interesting story for his one man show, The Money Fi$h. However an interesting story
“Clip Show” A clip show is primarily a creature inhabiting the realm of television. Basically it denotes a particular episode, sometimes called cheaters, in which the producers of a certain series creates an entirely “new” episode by cannibalizing past ones. Sometimes you’ll find them featured as a series’
Meg Miroshnik’s The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls is a frequently poetic, consistently absorbing mishmash of Paglia’s pronouncements, Bettelheim’s theories and a cascade of feminist icons and archetypes ranging from Cinderella to “Pussy Riot.” Her credentials are solid enough: O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, finalist for the
“I was trained as a classical musician, so my approach to theater comes from a different perspective than most playwrights.” So says Mary Lou Newmark in discussing Breathing Room her stunningly beautiful and sensibly subversive work now on stage at the Greenway Court Theatre. Ms. Newmark’s
Arms and the Man is one of George Bernard Shaw’s most appealing plays; which is what he intended it to be. Shaw’s first play, Widowers’ House, produced in 1892, was an assault on the practices of London slum lords. His next play, Mrs. Warren’s Profession was
