So Cal Arts & Entertainment

The pandemic seems to be generating more passion projects than ever, books willed into existence by their creators in spite of all odds. One such book is “The Compleat Beau Geste” by Frank Thompson, the author of two books on film director William Wellman and a noted...

Harlem, October 1935. The scene opens on Rose McClendon as Lady Macbeth, rehearsing the “screw your courage to the sticking place” scene from “The Scottish Play.” She asks 20-year-old wunderkind Orson Welles to direct their Negro Theatre Unit production. He turns them...

There’s a growing consensus women are getting shortchanged (as usual) in the revival of silent movie comedy. While Keaton, Chaplin and Lloyd are justly celebrated and lesser knowns like Charley Chase are getting their due, their female counterparts have been largely...

It takes two people to make a great painting, so the old axiom goes—one to paint it and one to tell him when to stop. Perhaps Aaron Sorkin put it in his contract his script for Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” (at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa...

Long before “Private Benjamin” and “A Few Good Men,” there were movies about women in the military. Better movies like “Cry ‘Havoc’,” “Mrs. Miniver” and “So Proudly We Hail!” The latter, about US Army nurses and the living hell they faced on Bataan and Corregidor...

“Black people don’t vote but they hold symbolic weight,” a mayoral candidate tells us at the outset of August Wilson’s “Radio Golf,” at A Noise Within (ANoiseWithin.org) in Pasadena through Nov. 13. The candidate, real estate developer Harmond Wilks (Christian...

From the moment an explosion interrupts the opening song in "Nina Simone: Four Women" at South Coast Repertory, you know this show is not going to be the usual theatrical experience. Christina Ham’s impressionistic musical drama about the ‘60s African American...

At the suggestion of friend, I listened to the soundtrack of “Hamilton” before catching the show about America’s first secretary of the treasury opening night at Segerstrom Center for the Arts (scfta.org) in Costa Mesa—where it runs through Oct. 16.  The touring...

Very few people could entice me to listen to an evening of Broadway show tunes. Not my drug of choice. But Bernadette Peters is one of the chosen few. She could sing selected passages from the Yellow Pages, the Racing Form, or the glossary of a textbook on...

F.P. 1 DOESN'T ANSWER (1932) is a German science fiction film made just before the Nazis turned their movie industry into a propaganda machine. Recently released on video, it would be wholly unfamiliar if not for one detail—Peter Lorre appears in a comedic supporting...