Entertainment
Mark Taper Forum to reopen with 'American Idiot,' Larissa FastHorse’s 'Fake It Until You Make It'
It’s official: Center Theatre Group is reopening the Mark Taper Forum in the fall.
The prominent Los Angeles theater organization announced Sunday night that the historic downtown L.A. venue, which abruptly paused its season last year because of a significant budget shortfall, will resume programming in October.
One of the first productions to play the Taper after its 16-month pause will be the world premiere of “Fake It Until You Make It” (Jan. 29-March 9, 2025), the commissioned play by Larissa FastHorse that was halted just weeks before opening last year. Directed by Michael John Garcés, the satirical comedy about shifting identities will debut after CTG’s two-week workshop last fall.
“Despite the disappointment of last summer,” FastHorse said, the workshop was a way for CTG Artistic Director Snehal Desai, Managing Director and Chief Executive Meghan Pressman and the rest of the group to say, “We’re still behind this piece.”
“It was a huge gift that basically saved us two weeks of rehearsal, as we worked out fight choreography, physical comedy timing and the nuts and bolts of farce,” FastHorse said.
“The Taper is my hometown theater, and it’s my favorite space in America for seeing a play,” continued FastHorse, who will be the first Native American writer to have a mainstage production at the Taper since it opened in 1967. “I’ve always wanted to have a play there, so it’s deeply meaningful that it will still be in that space.” After its L.A. run, the co-production will later play Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage.
Center Theatre Group artistic director Snehal Desai.
(Phillip Faraone)
CTG’s 2024-25 season — Desai’s first as the nonprofit theater group’s artistic director — kicks off with Green Day’s “American Idiot” (Oct. 2-Nov. 10), the politically-charged musical based on the band’s hit album of the same title. The rock opera, which made its Broadway debut in 2010, follows a trio of young Americans as they struggle to find meaning in a post-9/11 world.
The Taper staging will be produced with Deaf West Theatre and will feature an ensemble of deaf and hearing actors, performing simultaneously in American Sign Language and English. Desai approached Deaf West Artistic Director DJ Kurs about collaborating on “American Idiot,” a selection made strategically as a “cathartic” offering for this election year.
“These characters are screaming into a world that doesn’t hear them, so why not invert the metaphor with a trio of deaf friends who are trying to be heard in this world?” said Desai, who will make his CTG directorial debut with the production.
“DJ shared that, throughout the deaf community, there’s all these covers of punk rock, because you can feel the vibration of the music. We found a real organic synergy with the concept, and it felt like a way to reopen the Taper in a big way.”
Bernadette Peters, Lea Salonga and the company of “Old Friends.”
(Danny Kaan)
Over at the Ahmanson Theatre, CTG’s largest house, Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga will lead the previously announced “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends” (Feb. 8-March 9, 2025). Directed by Matthew Bourne, the tribute to the legendary composer heads directly to Broadway after its North American premiere in L.A.
The season continues with the Broadway tour of “Life of Pi” (May 7-June 1, 2025), based on the beloved novel by Yann Martel. The play, written by Lolita Chakrabarti and directed by Max Webster, will transform the Ahmanson into the vast Pacific Ocean, where a 16-year-old boy is stranded on a lifeboat with four other survivors: a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a 450-pound royal Bengal tiger — all of which come to life with an acclaimed combination of puppeteering and visual effects.
Meanwhile, the Taper will debut a new version of “Hamlet” (May 28-July 6, 2025), adapted and directed by Robert O’Hara with inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock and the film noir genre. Desai approached O’Hara, who helmed CTG’s production of “Slave Play” in 2022, about presenting a fresh take on a classic.
“I hope to do a new reimagining every season at the Taper moving forward,” said Desai. “While the Taper is known as a playwrights’ theater, I also want it to be a home for adventurous directors.”
Hiran Abeysekera as Pi and Fred Davis, Scarlet Wilderink and Andrew Wilson as the tiger Richard Parker in the Broadway production of “Life of Pi.”
(Matthew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade)
The Ahmanson will welcome “Parade” (June 17-July 12), the touring production of the Tony-winning Broadway revival. The musical — co-conceived by Harold Prince and featuring a book by Alfred Uhry and music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown — examines the true story of Leo and Lucille Frank, a newlywed Jewish couple whose lives in 1900s Georgia is upended when Leo is accused of an unspeakable crime.
A seventh show of the 2024-25 season will be a Broadway musical at the Ahmanson, to be announced in the coming weeks.
CTG’s season also includes a continuation and expansion of CTG:FWD programming, an initiative created last year to present special events and community gatherings during the Taper’s programming pause.
These engagements include the 7 Fingers’ ”Duel Reality” (Sept. 11-22), an acrobatic spectacle inspired by “Romeo and Juliet” at the Ahmanson, as well as “SCAT! … The Complex Lives of Al & Dot, Dot & Al Zollar” (Nov. 22-24), a dance-driven jazz club piece from Urban Bush Women produced in association with Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center.
The company’s third stage, the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, will have its own lineup of CTG:FWD events including TheaterWorksUSA’s “Cat Kid Comic Club: The Musical” (Nov. 22-Jan. 5), adapted from Dav Pilkey’s “Dog Man” spinoff book series, and “El Otro Oz” (dates to be announced), a bilingual musical inspired by “The Wizard of Oz,” which had a limited run at the Douglas earlier this year.
CTG’s 2024-25 season subscription package, which goes on sale Monday online, includes “American Idiot,” “Fake It Until You Make It” and “Hamlet” at the Taper; as well as “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends,” “Parade,” “Life of Pi” and the yet-to-be-announced musical at the Ahmanson. Fall 2024 CTG:FWD programming will be available to purchase as add-on performances to the subscription package, and spring 2025 CTG:FWD programming will go on sale at a later date.
Movie Reviews
Miyamoto says he was surprised Mario Galaxy Movie reviews were even harsher than the first | VGC
Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto says he’s surprised at the negative critical reception to the Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
As reported by Famitsu, Miyamoto conducted a group interview with Japanese media to mark the local release of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
During the interview, Miyamoto was asked for his views on the critical reception to the film in the West, where critics’ reviews have been mostly negative.
Miyamoto replied that while he understood some of the negative points aimed at The Super Mario Bros Movie, he thought the reception would be better for the sequel.
“It’s true: the situation is indeed very similar,” he said. “Actually, regarding the previous film, I felt that the critics’ opinions did hold some validity. “However, I thought things would be different this time around—only to find that the criticism is even harsher than it was before.
“It really is quite baffling: here we are—having crossed over from a different field—working hard with the specific aim of helping to revitalize the film industry, yet the very people who ought to be championing that cause seem to be the ones taking a passive stance.”
As was the case with the first film, opinion is divided between critics and the public on The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. On review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, the film currently has a critics’ score of 43% , while its audience score is 89%.
While this is down from the first film’s scores (which were 59% critics and 95% public) it does still appear to imply that the film’s target audience is generally enjoying it despite critical negativity.
The negative reception is unlikely to bother Universal and Illumination too much, considering the film currently has a global box office of $752 million before even releasing in Japan, meaning a $1 billion global gross is becoming increasingly likely.
Elsewhere in the interview, Miyamoto said he hoped the film would perform well in Japan, especially because it has a unique script rather than a simple localization as in other regions.
“The Japanese version is a bit unique,” he said. “Normally, we create an English version and then localize it for each country, but for the first film, we developed the English and Japanese scripts simultaneously. For this film, we didn’t simply localize the completed English version – instead, we rewrote it entirely in Japanese to create a special Japanese version.
“So, if this doesn’t become a hit in Japan, I feel a sense of pressure – as the person in charge of the Japanese version – to not let [Illumination CEO and film co-producer] Chris [Meledandri] down.
“However, judging by the reactions of the audience members who’ve seen it, I feel that Mario fans are really embracing it. I also believe we’ve created a film that people can enjoy even if they haven’t seen the previous one, so I’m hopeful about that as well.”
Book Review
Dear Monica Lewinsky
By Julia Langbein
Doubleday: 320 pages, $30
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
First loves can be beautiful or traumatic, sometimes both. They are almost always intense, with emotions on speed dial and hormones running amok. Nothing like the durable consolations of late-life romance, but headier, more exciting and, in the worst cases, far more damaging.
Even decades later, Jean Dornan, the protagonist of Julia Langbein’s smart, poignant and involving novel “Dear Monica Lewinsky,” can’t recollect her own first love in tranquility. Its after-effects have derailed her life, and an unexpected email invitation to attend a retirement party in France honoring her former lover sends her into a tailspin.
An agitated Jean finds herself praying to none other than Monica Lewinsky, the patron saint of bad romantic choices, or as Langbein puts it, “of those who suffer venal public shaming and patriarchal cruelty.” In Langbein’s comic, but also deadly serious, imagination, this is no mere metaphor. The martyred Monica has literally been transfigured into a saint. And why not? Surely, she has suffered enough to qualify.
Jean and Monica have in common a disastrous liaison with an attractive, powerful, married older man. Monica was humiliated, reviled, then merely defined by her missteps. Meanwhile, her arguably more culpable sexual partner survived impeachment, retained both his political popularity and his marriage and enjoyed a lucrative post-presidency.
Jean’s brief fling during the summer of 1998 coincided with the public airing of Monica’s doomed romance. Jean’s passion took a more private toll, but she still lives with what Monica calls “this deepening suspicion that your existence is a remnant of an event long since concluded.”
Though framed by a fantastical conceit, “Dear Monica Lewinsky” is at its core a realist novel, influenced by the feminism of #MeToo and precise in its delineation of character and place. Langbein’s Monica — having finally transcended her past and ascended to spiritual omniscience — becomes Jean’s interlocutor. Together, they relive the fateful weeks that Jean spent studying the Romanesque churches of medieval France and charming David Harwell, the Rutgers University medieval art professor co-leading the summer program.
Every now and again, Monica, as much savvy therapist as all-knowing seer, interrupts Jean’s first-person account to offer guidance. Threaded through the narrative, as contrast and commentary, is a martyrology of female saints. These colloquially rendered portraits, reflecting a punitive, patriarchal morality, describe girls and women who would rather endure torture or even death than sully their sexual purity — stories so extreme that they seem satirical.
The portraits play off the novel’s milieu: a series of churches, as well as the medieval French castle that is home to an eccentric and mostly absent prince. The utility of religious doctrine and practice is another of the book’s themes. One graduate student, Patrick, is a devoted Roman Catholic, unquestioning in his faith. Others are merely devout enthusiasts of medieval architecture. Judith, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, has an addiction of her own: an eating disorder that threatens to disable her.
A rising junior at Rutgers, Jean is one of just two undergraduates in the program. Her initial dull, daunting task involves measuring and otherwise assessing the churches’ “apertures” — windows and doors. Later, she is assigned to collaborate on a guidebook and write a term paper.
A language major unversed in art, architecture or medieval history, Jean feels overwhelmed at times. But she does have useful talents: fluent French and the ability to conjure delicious Sunday dinners for her bedazzled colleagues. (The author of the 2023 novel “American Mermaid,” Langbein has both a doctorate in art history and a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for food writing, and her expertise in both fields is evident.)
As the summer wanes, Jean’s fixation on David grows. Langbein excels at depicting the obsessive nature of illicit, unfulfilled desire — how it swamps judgment and just about everything else. A quarter-century Jean’s senior, David is trying to finish a stalled book project, laboring in the shadow of his more prolific and successful wife, Ann. An expert on the erotically charged religious life of nuns and the art it produced, she shows up briefly in the story and then conveniently disappears.
David is smooth, seductive and, to 19-year-old Jean, far more appealing than the fumbling schoolboys she has known. But he turns out to be no more grown-up or emotionally mature. After the flirtation and its consummation, David beats a hasty (and unsurprising) retreat. Then he does something worse: He allows his guilt to shred his integrity.
In the aftermath of that summer, a wounded Jean stumbles through her last two years of college, “berserk, unfocused, humiliating.” She abandons her academic and career ambitions, takes a job as a court interpreter, and marries Michael, an affable nurse who has little idea of her emotional burdens.
Then that invitation, inspiring “a racy heat,” arrives, and Jean must decide whether to confront her past or keep running from it. Is there really much of a choice? Fortunately, she has the saintly Monica as her guide. More clear-eyed now, Jean must reject her martyrdom and reclaim her own truth and agency. If she does, David, at least in the realm of the imagination, may finally get his comeuppance.
Klein, a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.
The sixth outing in the director’s chair for filmmaker Kirk Jones, I Swear dramatizes the real-life story of touretter John Davidson (played by Robert Aramayo). Tourette’s Syndrome, for those unfamiliar with the condition, is a nervous system disorder that causes various tics, the most prolific being erratic and explicit language. However, as I Swear expertly showcases, the syndrome is far more than ill-timed outbursts of curse words. Davidson’s story is one of societal frustration, finding your people (both with and without the condition), and using your voice to help others rise. The subject and subject matter are handled with absolute care and understanding under Kirk’s measured vision and Robert Aramayo’s BAFTA-winning performance.
The film kicks off with the greatest exclamation to democracy ever uttered (*%#! the Queen!), as a nervous John Davidson prepares himself before entering an awards ceremony hosted by Britain’s royal family. Right away, the film tells us what it is: a triumph over adversity that blends humor and human drama with education. It’s an important setup, as the film flashes back to Davidson’s 1980s youth, where we see his time as a star soccer recruit flatline as his condition takes hold. Davidson’s life spirals from there. Some aspects, like school bullying and accidental run-ins with authority figures, are expected but important to empathizing with young Davidson’s (young version, played with heart by Scott Ellis Watson) new everyday life. The more tragic, a complete meltdown of his family system, is unsettling if quick. His father (Steven Cree) is never given enough screen time to explore his alcohol coping tendencies. However, his mother Heather’s descent into easy fixes and blaming is crushing and convincing. Harry Potter series actress Shirley Henderson (Moaning Myrtle) gives a layered performance as Heather. Someone who loves her son, but also feels cursed by him as the entire family exits the picture. It’s bitter, she’s tired, and fills each conversation with ‘only medication and your mother can save you’ energy.
From there, the viewer and Davidson find refuge in a host of characters. Maxine Peake plays Dottie, the mother of a childhood friend and a retired mental health nurse. Screen vet Peter Mullan plays maintenance man Tommy Trotter. Together, they help Davidson build a life and an understanding of himself that carries the film forward into its second half. After that, the film is primarily a 3-actor show as director Kirk fills the screen with these tour-de-force performances. Peake and Mullan are great vessels to get the film’s main message across: patience, love, and a shared responsibility between the diagnosed and those who understand their struggle can help change the path for people quickly left behind by a normative world. Together, they are the soul of the movie, with the filmmakers clearly hoping the audience will follow their lead after they exit the theater (in my case, the beautiful Oriental Theater for the Milwaukee Film Festival). Both performances are perfectly warm and reflective and shouldn’t be left out in discussions of I Swear.
I say this because the movie is anchored by The Rings of Power actor Robert Aramayo, who leaves Elrond’s elf ears behind to bring an acute naturalism to his performance of main character John Davidson. Aramayo’s physicality and timing of the fitful Tourettes Syndrome never feel out of place or overplayed. In fact, the movie as a whole does an amazing job of never veering into sentimentality. While many moviegoers left with tissues dabbing their eyes, the filmmaking never felt like it was forcing that reaction out of audiences. It straddles the line between feel-good and reality with every story beat and lands squarely on the side of letting the real inform our feelings. Anyone with an ounce of empathy will grasp the film’s message and hopefully take it with them into life.
I Swear continues at the Milwaukee Film Festival on Tuesday, April 21st, and releases nationwide April 24th, 2026, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
-
Kentucky11 minutes agoSadiqa Reynolds removed from U of L board, as Kentucky Senate doesn’t confirm her
-
Louisiana17 minutes agoMom whose 3 children were killed in Louisiana mass shooting still has bullet lodged in face — and sometimes thinks kids are alive
-
Maine23 minutes agoThese are the Best Outdoor Dining Joints in Maine, According to Locals
-
Maryland29 minutes agoU.S. Air Force reverses course on retiring A-10 Thunderbolt planes, making way for potential Maryland return
-
Michigan35 minutes agoUS supreme court sides with Michigan in its fight to shut down ageing pipeline
-
Massachusetts41 minutes agoHeavy police presence due to ‘ongoing incident’ in Tewksbury
-
Minnesota47 minutes agoTikToker’s ban from St. Paul parks lifted after appeal, agent says
-
Mississippi53 minutes ago8 rivers, lakes are the most alligator-infested water in Mississippi