Ed Rampell
LATEST ARTICLES BY Ed Rampell
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The Champ and the Chump: Colliding worlds in ‘Fetch Clay, Make Man’
July 6, 2023Recommended for theatergoers who love: Great acting, stories about racism, Muhammad Ali, film history, boxing, and searching for what lies beneath the surface to discover the substance.
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Passing the baton: The Memphis metaphysics of Martin Luther King in ‘The Mountaintop’
June 26, 2023Hill finds the nuance in depicting a character with the status of a prophet, but who is, as those picket signs of the sanitation strikers he’s supporting declare, “a man,” after all.
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The real and reel Ava Gardner: What price celebrityhood?
April 25, 2023As a film historian, when I heard a bioplay was being mounted about silver screen siren Ava Gardner at one of L.A.’s finest theaters, the Geffen Playhouse, it was “Westwood Ho!” for moi.
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It can happen here: Three L.A. museums shine spotlights on Hollywood Blacklist
April 17, 2023Learning about yesterday’s anti-communist Reds-under-the-beds hysteria can empower us to resist today's rising tide of book banning, school curriculum gagging, censorship, disinformation, history denial, expulsions, redbaiting and more.
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Traffic jam at the juncture of Black and ‘Blue’
April 11, 2023The second I entered the Matrix Theatre on the opening night of June Carryl’s Blue, Rogue Machine’s new play immediately got me into the mood indigo.
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Brecht’s ‘The Mother’: The Revolution will not be dramatized
February 16, 2023Brecht’s 'The Mother' is a 1932 adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s 1906 novel of the same name about the 1905 Russian Revolution, which has been called “the dress rehearsal” for 1917’s Bolshevik Revolution.
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‘Southern Girls’: A ‘woke’ play suitable for banning in today’s Florida
February 1, 2023“The playwrights who wrote this absolutely lived it. The play is very authentic.”
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‘Ubu the King,’ a raunchy play from 1896, revived in Culver City
November 23, 2022Its fanciful lunacy won me over and I ended up quite enjoying this 40th anniversary revival and tribute to one of L.A.’s greatest theaters.
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