Konstantine Stanislavski Love art in yourself and not yourself in art.
Harold Clurman The stage is life, music, beautiful girls, legs, breasts, not talk or intellectualism or dried-up academics.
by Joel Elkins~
The Towne Street Theatre Company, formed in the aftermath of the LA riots with the mission of healing wounds through theatre, seems the natural venue for the world premiere of Langston & Nicolas, the story of the relationship between Langston Hughes and Cuban poet laureate Nicolás Guillén. Through fictionalized conversations between the two, [...]
by Joel Elkins~
There is something to be said for truth in advertising.
Dialogue Between a Prostitute and Her Client, now playing at The Fremont Centre Theatre, can best be described, unsurprisingly, as a dialogue between a prostitute and her client. No misrepresentation. No bait and switch. Now, if only the characters were as forthcoming.
The play opens [...]
by Joel Elkins~
It takes a lot of courage to write a play like The Unexpected Man, and just as much courage to stage a production of it. A play with only two characters is daunting enough, but when those characters, for the most part, don’t even interact, keeping the audience involved requires a tight rope [...]
by Joel Elkins~
Generally, after seeing a play, my first thought as a reviewer is “Now, what am I going to write about this?” I sit at the computer and the blank screen stares back at me while I resist the urge to channel my inner teenager and say, “Yeah, I guess it was okay.”
However, [...]
by Joel Elkins~
Stage Door was written by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman during the depths of the Depression and was later made into a movie starring, among others, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball, Ann Miller and Eve Arden. It takes place in the fictitious “Footlights Club,” a boarding house in Manhattan for aspiring [...]
by Joel Elkins~
There’s small theater and then there’s intimate theater. For its current production, The Knightsbridge Theatre has taped off its normal 99 seats and gathered about 25 folding chairs around the stage, pulling the audience so close they almost feel part of the action. Which is, I guess, the point. What’s more, the company [...]
by Joel Elkins~
What can we learn from a play’s title? Often, very little. I don’t think Shakespeare was imparting any great insight when he decided to name his play about King Richard III Richard III, or his play about a prince named Hamlet Hamlet. However, when a playwright honors a few words with the singular [...]
by Joel Elkins
In the old Soviet Union, bureaucracies were oversized and so were the theater companies. In fact, it was not unusual for companies to employ over a hundred full-time players. Naturally, this led Soviet playwrights to write epic productions in order to use them to their fullest potential. So when local director Aramazd Stepanian [...]
By Joel Elkins
When do we really grow up? At exactly what point do we go from being care-free teenagers to being care-ful adults? From being anti-establishment to being the establishment? And what causes this metamorphosis? Inevitably, every generation undergoes it, so the catalyst must surely be a universal one. Just [...]
by Joel Elkins
Vinnie is the story of Vincent Van Gogh (played by Glen Anthony Vaughan), who appears to modern-day struggling artist David Woodsey (Herbert Russell) during a night of despondency and heavy drinking. During their night of carousing, David laments about his failures as an artist and Vinnie commiserates and comforts his colleague, while discovering [...]
