ENTERTAINMENT
June 27, 2013 | By David Ng
The new season at the Kirk Douglas Theatre will feature four main productions, including a world-premiere musical and Irish actor Barry McGovern in a piece dedicated to Samuel Beckett. In addition, the 2013-14 season, announced Thursday by Center Theatre Group, will showcase solo pieces by actor Roger Guenveur Smith about Rodney King plus a new work by Luis Alfaro. "The Black Suits" (Oct. 27 to Nov. 24) is a new musical written by Joe Iconis and Robert Maddock about four young men growing up on Long Island and the garage band they form.
ENTERTAINMENT
May 3, 2013 | By Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
To some people - those who might attend a guerrilla reading in San Francisco, for example - Ken Baumann is a writer and small-press publisher who is part of the contemporary literary vanguard. And yet, to a generation of adolescent girls, he's instantly recognizable as a star of the beloved ABC Family series "The Secret Life of the American Teenager," now in its last season. "As long as I can do both, why wouldn't I want to?" Baumann asks at an L.A. cafe. He's lanky and pale-skinned, making it easy to see why he was cast as a high school student in 2008 (he's now 23)
ENTERTAINMENT
October 15, 2012 | By Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times
Technology is messing with John Hurt's head. His rental cellphone is ringing like mad, but when he tries to answer it, no one's there. "Four new messages!" the British actor exclaims, scrutinizing the phone's display screen as if it were written in Sanskrit. "What's going on?" Krapp would sympathize. In "Krapp's Last Tape," Samuel Beckett's quietly devastating one-act memory play, an isolated old man, a writer named Krapp, squares off with another confounding technological contraption: a reel-to-reel tape recorder.
ENTERTAINMENT
October 12, 2012 | By Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times Theater Critic
With his shock of silver-gray hair, his face etched by time with the lean expressiveness of a Giacometti sculpture and his soulful eyes registering every fleeting hurt and happiness, John Hurt bears a striking resemblance to Samuel Beckett in the distinguished British actor's magnificent rendition of "Krapp's Last Tape" at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. For anyone needing a reminder that theater can be an art (and not just a scrappy entertainment), this beautifully mounted production of Beckett's play, directed by Michael Colgan of Dublin's Gate Theatre, is not to be missed.
ENTERTAINMENT
April 16, 2012 | By Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times Theater Critic
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. Beckett, 20th century playwriting's No. 1 game-changer, and Pinter, his most original disciple, were writers steeped in literature.
ENTERTAINMENT
March 18, 2012 | By Margaret Gray, Special to the Los Angeles Times
On the awesomeness scale, the pairing of Alan Mandell and Barry McGovern in Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" is off the charts, a fantasy face-off in a league with George Washington versus Abe Lincoln or giant octopus versus giant squid — even though "Godot" is not the most action-packed of the existential classics. Mandell and McGovern are two of the most experienced and widely admired interpreters of Beckett's work, and beginning Wednesday at the Mark Taper Forum, they will perform together for the first time.