Put a Little Drama in your Life
PAT LAUNER TIMES OF SAN DIEGO 6/11/15 Stop! In the name of love. If you’re a fan of Motown music (and really, who isn’t?), you’ll rush right down to the Civic Theatre to see “Motown, the Musical” (through Sunday only, and tickets are going fast). The national touring production of the 2013 Broadway hit (738 performances, nominated for Read More →
PAT LAUNER, CENTER STAGE ON KSDS-FM RUN DATES: 11/14/15 - 12/12/15 VENUE: ION THEATRE Thirty year-old slackers with no ambition or direction are not inherently the stuff of high drama. But in the hands of imaginative, award-winning playwright Annie Baker, who typically favors character over plot, they can be subtle case studies. Take KJ and Jasper, for example. One’s a college dropout; the other merely a high school grad. The dropout still lives with his mom. They used to Read More →
KPBS AIRDATE: November 21, 1991 I don't know if this is a far, far better thing than Ron Campbell has ever done, but I'm sure it's far, far more characters than he's ever played at one time. Almost twenty, to be sort of precise. And if the evening were a little shorter, it'd definitely be the best of Read More →
KPBS AIRDATE: March 4, 1992 The world is not a very promising place for women, in the eyes of Cajun playwright Julie Hebert. They're either reined in by a man, by society, by their color or by some powerful self-imposed constraints. They've got, metaphorically speaking, a bucketful of problems. Hebert's Read More →
KPBS AIRDATE: April 20, 1994 Say Happy Birthday to the Bard. This week is William Shakespeare's 430th birthday. To mark the occasion, as well as the 400th anniversary of his most purely romantic comedy, the San Diego State University Drama Department has mounted a thoroughly enjoyable production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The school went all out on Read More →
KPBS AIRDATE: April 6, 1993 (SOUND: “Four Jews in a Room Bitching” from “Falsettos”) The opening number of "Falsettos" says it all about the first act -- four Jews in a room bitching.... bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, funny, funny, funny funny... all the time. Well, not all the time. Because things get pretty maudlin and Read More →
“San Diego is a hotbed of theater. Every year, I see 200-250 productions. This is fertile ground for new work. In addition to the prodigious local talent, theatermakers from around the country come here to premiere their latest creations. San Diego sends more shows to Broadway than nearly any other city in the U.S.”
-Pat Launer