'Grand Horizons': Theater Review

“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.

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.

Raise your hand if you’ve been swooning over Keanu Reeves since he and Sandra Bullock escaped a rigged bus in Speed?

Richard E. Grant has taken his obsession with Barbra Streisand to a new level by commissioning a sculpture of his heroine’s head.

There are superfans and then there's Richard E. Grant. The longtime Barbra Streisand fanboy took his adoration a step further on Thursday, sharing with his followers the two-foot-tall sculpture of the iconic performer's face he had commissioned. 

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.

When an ancient woman seeing out her last days in a trash can asserts that "nothing is funnier than unhappiness," it's impossible not to laugh. But then she, and playwright Samuel Beckett, quickly add a corrective: "We laugh with a will in the beginning.

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

Spring Awakening: Evan Daves — Photo: C. Stanley Photography

Merry Wives — Photo: Cameron Whitman

The Confession of Lily Dare fairly begs the question: Why stay home watching old films on Turner Classic Movies when you can see Charles Busch send them up in his gloriously campy, cross-dressing fashion? Returning to the parodistic style with which he made a name for himself in such comedies as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Psycho Beach Party and Die, Mommie, Die! (the last two also made into movies), the actor-writer here delivers an amusingly loving send-up of the sort of melodramatic, pre-Code

A life hanging perilously in the balance of charged-up, polarized opinions: This courtroom drama could easily have been titled “Twelve Angry Women.” But playwright Lucy Kirkwood (“Chimerica,” “The Children”) is far too strong and imaginative a writer for so hand-me-down a cliché. Instead she opts for “The Welkin,” an old English term for the vault of the sky, and the scope of that word indicates the scale of her ambition.

There has always been a reassuring earnestness about Sting — a rock star fueled by art and activism, content to consume himself with projects not necessarily driven by fame and fortune. His latest isThe Last Ship, a reboot of his commercially disappointing 2014 Broadway show, a semi-autobiographical look at a dying shipyard town in the north of England.There were all sorts of reasons the original production didn’t fly on Broadway, but Sting’s glorious music was not one of them.