Matthew Lickona

1 week ago | sandiegoreader.com | Matthew Lickona

Mostly winsome, mostly winning, always assured Near the end of Jocelyn Bioh’s mostly winsome, mostly winning play set in a Harlem hair braiding salon, a woman who came in near the beginning and ordered microbraids says to the staff, “Thank you for this; I feel like I moved in for the day.” Comes the quick reply, “You did.” And just as a house is not the same as a home, simply being in a place is not the same as moving in.

2 weeks ago | sandiegoreader.com | Matthew Lickona

Chatting about life (and its end) over that first cup of coffee The tone is set before the stage is — or rather, as the stage is: a waitress in a Main Street diner, getting the place ready to open for the morning crowd. Making coffee, drying mugs, filling the napkin dispenser — a dozen tasks, most of them done as the audience is still finding its seats.

2 weeks ago | sandiegoreader.com | Matthew Lickona

Deepak Kumar’s story of a Midwestern strip-mall restaurant in crisis is…wait, wait, is it the strip-mall restaurant that’s in crisis, or is it the family that owns the strip-mall restaurant? What’s that you say? Why can’t it be both? Now you sound like Jacob, the ambitious young chef who opens the play by trying to convince owner Ananya to try his “kootaco” — koottu in a tortilla instead of Indian chapati.

2 weeks ago | sandiegoreader.com | Matthew Lickona

Spend an hour with San Diego’s self-appointed Laureate of Iambic Pentameter and Rhyme Full disclosure: your humble correspondent has been known to bang out an occasional sonnet for the guest of honor at birthday parties. As party tricks go, it isn’t bad: the subject gets flattered and ribbed a bit, the crowd gets a little highbrow-goes-lowbrow diversion, and I get to hunker down in a corner and not socialize for half an hour or so.

1 month ago | sandiegoreader.com | Matthew Lickona

Schein on, you crazy criminologist! On the one hand, the fact that Steven Dietz’s second riff on Agatha Christie — the first was 2023’s Murder on the Links — has been extended for a second time, such that it now runs through May 25, suggests that any further critical comment is unnecessary. The people have spoken: lightly comic, gently self-conscious takes on murder mysteries and the famous detectives who solve them are just the thing for a jolly night before the boards.