In Print This Week

In addition to the aforementioned Time Out piece on Green Day's American Idiot musical, I've got a few other writings in print this week.

• On newsstands today is American Theatre's first-ever "food" issue, which has lots of goodies: a great essay by Tina Howe, an illuminating Q&A with Jonathan Reynolds (yes, that Jonathan Reynolds), Nicole Estvanik Taylor's round-up of food-and-theater mash-ups, Mark Blankenship's survey of companies that have explored food as both social glue and theatrical theme, and Eliza Bent's look at what Stolen Chair Theatre Company has learned from community-supported agriculture. My contributions include a Q&A with William Pullinsi, founder of America's first dinner theatre (the Candlelight Playhouse), and, rather improbably, a series of tearout recipe cards (available in the print edition only), culled from plays that served real food onstage (I happily home-tested the lamb osso buco from Humana's premiere of Omnium Gatherum).
  
• I reviewed the Broadway A Little Night Music for this month's Sondheim Review (I was disappointed but not entirely dismissive) and interviewed star Catherine Zeta-Jones (over the phone, alas). What I'm most happy about, though, is that to honor Sondheim's 80th birthday, the Review asked contributors to write about their formative experiences with the composer/lyricist's work, and I eagerly took the opportunity to talk up a series of great small-theater productions of his work I saw in L.A. in the 1990s (Into the Woods at Actors' Co-Op, Sweeney Todd at East West Players, Company at West Coast Ensemble, Assassins at L.A. Rep, culminating with EWP's Pacific Overtures in Little Tokyo). Those un-star-studded, intimate stagings are the ones that sold me on the man's genius (along with the cast albums, of course), and I feel I was privy to a crucial truth about his work that it's taken the rest of the world years to catch up with.
  
• I reviewed three recently closed Broadway shows (View From the Brdige, Time Stands Still, The Miracle Worker) for the Catholic weekly America.
  

Not in print: A new post at the brand-spanking-new TCGBlog.org.