Carol Davis

The play is set in the St. Louis apartment of Amanda Wingfield (Terri Park) and her two adult children, Laura (Marisa Taylor Scott) and Tom (Tim Baran). The time is 1937 and the country was in the middle of the depression. Tom works in a shoe factory (Williams sold shoes for a time) and Amanda sells magazine subscriptions from her home, much beneath her status as a genteel Southern belle when a young girl. Money is tight but hope springs eternal for Amanda, the faded yet once popular belle, as she glides around their apartment recalling her glory days as a teen growing up in the south. Her repeating and reliving her past encounters with her own ‘gentlemen callers’(seventeen in one day) fascinates Laura, who longs for a gentleman caller of her own, but it annoys the hell out of Tom. [Carol Davis]

By Carol Davis SAN DIEGO — Playwright Sylvan Oswald identifies as a transmasculine interdisciplinary artist. That’s a mouthful for those of us just getting used to the words ‘trans’ or ‘transitioning’ or ‘transgender’, gender nonconformity, transsexual, gender reassignment, queer gender or labeling ones self as we/they or us. In the words of other mortals, “Get

urder For Two by Joe Kinosian (Book and Music) and Kellen Blair (Book and Lyrics) stars Tony Houck as all the suspects (count about 12) in a killing we don’t see.  Marcus Moscowic co-stars as JD Dumas, the wannabe detective who wants to solve the who-dun-it. Both enter. Marcus starts playing a four handed overture that ends with a BANG. Yup! A murder, maybe two, has been committed at the residence of Arthur Whitney, The Grand American Novelist. [Carol Davis]

Coronado Playhouse is presenting through Feb. 23 Broadway’s Matilda The Musical with book by Dennis Kelly and music and lyrics by Tim Minchin. It is certain to be one of the all-time family entertainment productions here as it hits all the high notes while pointing out that wisdom is not necessarily reserved for “adults only.” [Carol Davis]

By Carol Davis CHULA VISTA, California — In my growing up years, heaven was a place other people’s religions believed in. The one thing I knew for certain was Jews did not believe in heaven or hell. My friends and I talked that one to death – pardon the pun- when we got into philosophical

some of the ‘stuff’ said by character’s ‘A’ -Timothy L. Cabal and ‘M’ – Nancy Ross (the two adults playing the eleven-year olds in the West Coast Premiere of “Red Bike” at Moxie Theatre through Feb. 16th) , brought me back to an old TV Show -“Kids Say The Darndest Things.” … But these kids are not saying just the darndest things. They are looking at their world and their decaying community/low wage-earning parents, and the old bus driver who will one-day die on the job, through a different lens than those who are living the American Dream. [Carol Davis]

Stephen Karam’s drama The Humans, 2016 recipient of The Tony Award for Best Play, is currently showing at The San Diego Repertory Theatre downtown on the Lyceum Stage through Feb 2nd. I’ve said it in jest and in truth that I wouldn’t mind being a fly on the wall just to see what goes on behind closed doors in X Y or Z’s house. [Carol Davis]

In playwright Steven Dietz’s Bloomsday, currently in a charming and reflective production at North Coast Repertory Theatre though Feb. 2nd, Robert (Martin Kildare), a handsome and rather distinguished 50-something former professor tells the audience ‘that” Ulysses is the most under-read and over praised piece of doggerel ever hemorrhaged onto the world! Don’t take my word for it.  Ask half the critics and every college sophomore on earth. [Carol Davis]

Amid the angst, anticipation and anxieties felt by an awaiting audience in the lobby of the Civic Theatre downtown at the performance I attended of the long awaited national touring production of Dear Evan Hansen, now playing through Jan. 12th; there is a young man on stage, seventeen year old Evan Hansen (Stephen Anthony Christopher) with complex issues that frame his isolated life. [Carol Davis]