By Cynthia Citron BURBANK, California — In 1943 two highly unlikely collaborators quarreled their way through a movie script that earned the anxious concern of the Breen Office (administrator of the industry’s moral censorship guidelines), and was nominated for seven Academy Awards without winning any. The collaborators were Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, and the [...]
By Cynthia Citron ENCINO, California – To anyone who only knew film critic Roger Ebert from his television persona, arguing with his long-time colleague Gene Siskel, you might characterize Ebert as “the grumpy one.” But when he died this week after a 10-year battle with cancer, the heartfelt tributes from his friends and fellow critics emphatically [...]
By Cynthia Citron SANTA MONICA, California — It’s really a puzzlement trying to figure out who the producers of Avenue Q had in mind for an audience for their puppet show, since the production is too cloyingly cutesy for grownups and too explicitly sexual for kids. (In fact, the show comes with a warning: “Not [...]
By Cynthia Citron LOS ANGELES –He is a 23-year-old college graduate preparing to go to law school. He is verbose, awkward, and intensely focused. The sort of young man who will offer a 20-minute response to “Hello.” He has Asperger’s Syndrome. She is a recluse living in a fantasy world of her own creation, tied [...]
By Cynthia Citron BEVERLY HILLS, California — A tall man in a tightly-buttoned suit and a bowler hat, carrying a large black umbrella, stands on a ledge on the seventh floor of an apartment building. Behind him are seven arched windows from which a collection of weirdos pop from time to time like the [...]
By Cynthia Citron LOS ANGELES — For anyone who’s ever wished that he had grown up as the child of a major celebrity, Elliot Shoenman’s new play A Heap of Livin’ provides a powerful cautionary tale. Ramblin’ Harry Roe, a hillbilly folk guitarist impeccably played by the formidable Lawrence Pressman, has been a spectacular [...]
By Cynthia Citron HOLLYWOOD — Timothy McNeil’s new play, Machu Picchu, Texas, now having its world premiere at the Stella Adler Theatre in Hollywood, is about an angry, dysfunctional family again, folks, but this time the intensity is mitigated by a cast that is uniformly excellent and a set designed by Michael Fitzgerald and Aidan Fiorito that [...]
By Cynthia Citron SANTA MONICA, California — If there’s one thing that makes actor Judd Hirsch grumpy, it’s when a critic throws in information that Hirsch considers extraneous or irrelevant to the current role that he’s playing. For example, he has played literally hundreds of roles in his more than 40-year career, but he is [...]
By Cynthia Citron SANTA MONICA, California — So this Jewish atheist gets into a conversation with an atheist convert to the Church of England… Sounds like there should be a shaggy dog punch-line at the end, but instead you get Mark St. Germain’s riveting play, Freud’s Last Session , an imagined discussion between Sigmund [...]
By Cynthia Citron SANTA MONICA –You may think that all this rain we’re having is caused by a drop in barometric pressure. But are you aware that Tanna Frederick, Robert Standley and their director Jack Heller are in heavy-duty rehearsals for N. Richard Nash’s play The Rainmaker, which opens this week at the Edgemar Center [...]