South Coast Repertory
Los Angeles
(714) 708-5555
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
***
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has written a “sweet and canny portrait of the artist as a young fanboy,” said Charlotte Stoudt in the Los Angeles Times. It’s the mid-1980s, and 13-year-old Franklin has become obsessed with Cerberus, the cheesy, plastic-fanged vampire host of a local late-night TV horror show called Nightmare Theatre. He’s also a Stephen King wannabe who spends nights in his bedroom writing short stories in which “mummies run amok and parents are carved up for dinner.” Franklin’s love of all things freaky turns out to be part adolescent self-discovery, part an attempt to escape from his family’s “blood-sucking ways.” His jock brother ridicules his geeky tendencies, and his warring parents undercut his writerly ambitions. Home, it seems, is where the real horror is.
Like its teen protagonist, Doctor Cerberus is “much more substantial than it first seems,” said Paul Hodgins in the Orange County, Calif., Register. What seems like a lighthearted salute to campy TV creature-features quickly gains surprising depth: Franklin also must deal with a dawning awareness that he’s gay, and his attempts to break this news to his rage-filled father and mean-spirited mother are scarier than anything on late-night television. Jamison Jones pulls impressive double duty as two of Franklin’s mentors—both the titular TV host and Franklin’s uncle, an ailing television writer who nurtures the boy’s own artistic dreams. Brett Ryback, meanwhile, vividly brings Franklin to life in a tour de force portrayal of “a young creative mind trying to find its outlet.”
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.
-
The Senate's nixed dress code isn't short of mixed reactionsWhy Everyone's Talking About Conservatives are taking issue with the axing of a longstanding Senate tradition
-
October by-elections: what's at stake for Labour, Lib Dems and Tories
Parties will contest two former safe Tory seats on 19 October, putting pressure on Rishi Sunak
-
The billionaire-led quest for immortality
What if Jeff Bezos or Peter Thiel could live forever?
-
If/Then
feature Tony-winning Idina Menzel “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents.
-
Rocky
feature It’s a wonder that this Rocky ever reaches the top of the steps.
-
Love and Information
feature Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span.”
-
The Bridges of Madison County
feature Jason Robert Brown’s “richly melodic” score is “one of Broadway’s best in the last decade.”
-
Outside Mullingar
feature John Patrick Shanley’s “charmer of a play” isn’t for cynics.
-
The Night Alive
feature Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension.”
-
No Man’s Land
feature The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written.”
-
The Commons of Pensacola
feature Stage and screen actress Amanda Peet's playwriting debut is a “witty and affecting” domestic drama.