'Endgame': Theater Review

When the sinisterly charming emcee played by Francis Jue clicks through black and white slides of the Khmer Rouge period near the start of Cambodian Rock Band, he rolls his eyes at the automatic associations most people have with the Southeast Asian country. "Bor-ring," he groans.

It says something about the supreme power of flesh-and-blood people portraying raw human feeling onstage, without the filter of another medium, that the most emotionally devastating and visually stunning moment in the radical new Broadway revival of West Side Story occurs when its extensive video elements are stripped away.

Everyone toils away during Alice Birch's new play,Anatomy of a Suicide: The audience, which attempts to decipher three separate but interconnected storylines being depicted simultaneously; the actors, who display perfect, split-second timing as they deliver dialogue constructed with the complexity of a musical fugue; and most of all the British playwright herself, who has created this jigsaw puzzle of a theatrical event that seems less designed to convey its provocative themes than to illustrate

Money corrupts. Not just the possession of it, but the lack of it; and democracy, justice, human decency will all suffer at its hands.

In recent interviews, the playwright Tom Stoppard has mused that his latest, Leopoldstadt, may be his last work — not because he's planning on dying anytime soon, but he writes slowly, and you just never know when you're 82. If that's the case, then this heady drama, marbled with autobiographical echoes and career-long preoccupations, will provide a rewarding seam for a final chapter exegesis in future literary biographies.

It takes guts to admit you were wrong — especially when you have been so right, so often.

“Leopoldstadt,” the most slow-burn and personal work of 82-year-old Tom Stoppard’s long stage and screen career, is an intimate epic. It springs to astonishing dramatic life in a now bare, but once glorious apartment off Vienna’s Ringstrasse in 1955. The only problem is, for all the visceral emotional intensity of that scene, it forms less than the last quarter of a play that begins, two hours earlier, at the same address in 1899.

The title of Daniel Zaitchik's new musical provides a clue that it isn't simply going to be a story of boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy runs the danger of losing girl. Most musical love stories feature one character rapturously singing an ode about another.

A large part of what makes Ruth Negga such a distinctive screen presence, in films like Loving and Ad Astra, is the emotional transparency she brings to characterizations notable for their meticulous physical composure.

It’s no secret that the hills of L.A.’s gorgeous Los Feliz neighborhood boast a veritable treasure trove of architectural gems. One of them is this enchanting French Tudor Revival, built in the 1930s and designed by Frank Scott Crowhurst, the architect responsible for Walt Disney’s nearby family home and Burbank studio.

A musical drama about the imminent demise of a shipbuilding town in the North East of England, and a union’s last-ditch attempt to reclaim the village’s pride? Audiences: No thanks.

Silent Sky — Photo: Scott Suchman

The idea that Samuel Beckett’s plays are actually funny in performance is considerably more honored in theory than in practice. But happily, a rare pairing of his “Endgame” and the little-seen “Rough for Theatre II,” now playing at the Old Vic in London, bucks the trend.

It took a trio of MacArthur Fellows — composer Matthew Aucoin, playwright Sarah Ruhl and director Mary Zimmerman — to bring to the boards L.A. Opera's world premiere Eurydice, a vibrant and musically of-the-moment take on a tale that has been adapted to the medium roughly 70 times before.

Paul Mazursky's 1969 film comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a witty social satire about the sexual revolution and the confusion it engendered among a generation, was perfect for its era. Now there's a new musical adaptation, receiving its off-Broadway world premiere with The New Group and staged by the company's artistic director, Scott Elliott.

There's an awful lot of baggage attending the new modern-day riff on the classic Greek tragedy Medea. Written and directed by Simon Stone "after Euripides," as the program puts it, this version retains very little of the original beyond the essential plot element of a scorned woman murdering her children.

Pilgrims — Photo: Christopher Banks