ENTERTAINMENT
July 13, 2012 | By Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times Theater Critic
Two questions immediately presented themselves when it was announced that "The Exorcist" was going to be done onstage: How? And why? At the show's premiere Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse, the creators seemed to be searching for answers to these challenges. God doesn't appear to be on their side. The how, at least on a visual level, turns out to be far more interesting than the why, which leads to all kinds of armchair moralizing and faux philosophizing. But fans of William Friedkin's 1973 film - a work that has caused more bad dreams than any other movie in Hollywood history, if my childhood is any guide - shouldn't expect any ostentatious spinning of heads.
ENTERTAINMENT
June 13, 2011 | Reed Johnson
"The Book of Mormon," the exuberantly foul-mouthed hit show about comically mismatched missionaries in AIDS-ravaged Africa, won the award for best musical, along with eight other awards, and Nick Stafford's "War Horse," starring a life-size puppet of a noble steed, won five awards capped by the best play trophy at Sunday's Tony Awards ceremony in New York. As was widely predicted, Sutton Foster won as actress in a musical award for Cole Porter's "Anything Goes," the best musical revival winner.
ENTERTAINMENT
June 6, 2005
PLAY "Doubt" MUSICAL "Monty Python's Spamalot" REVIVAL OF A PLAY "Glengarry Glen Ross" REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL "La Cage aux Folles" SPECIAL THEATRICAL EVENT "Billy Crystal 700 Sundays" LEADING ACTOR, PLAY Bill Irwin "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
ENTERTAINMENT
October 25, 2001 | PHILIP BRANDES, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
Taking the concept of grounding drama to literal extremes, a thick layer of soil transforms the expansive Open Fist Theatre stage into a bleak tableau of rural English farmland for the West Coast premiere of Caryl Churchill's "Fen." The striking "flat earth" visual focus is shrewdly appropriate for a play set in a region of eastern Britain with a long history of controversy over the use of its land, and where the present-day inhabitants lead impoverished lives bordering on indentured servitude.
ENTERTAINMENT
July 23, 2001 | LEWIS SEGAL, TIMES DANCE CRITIC
The worst moment in the generally fine Universal Ballet production of "La Bayadere" is the moment the audience wants most to see: the celebrated entrance of 32 women, one by one, down a ramp at the beginning of the Act 3 vision scene. This sequence has become a touchstone of classicism because of its stark simplicity: the same step endlessly multiplied by a growing number of dancers as a metaphor for eternity.
ENTERTAINMENT
July 7, 1996 | Jan Breslauer, Jan Breslauer is a regular contributor to Calendar
A giant clock hangs high above the kerchief-covered heads of young women slaving away at factory looms, ticking away the final moments of toil. Within a few beats, the workday is done and the captives spill out and make their way to a fairground. To the strains of the "Carousel Waltz," the scene fills with barkers and townspeople shedding their reserve as they lose themselves in the whirl of the spring carnival.