Stage and Cinema
- Highly Recommended
"...Masquerading as one of those staid drawing room mysteries Agatha Christie would knock off during Afternoon Tea while nibbling on scones with clotted cream and crustless cucumber sandwiches, An Inspector Calls by British playwright J. B. Priestley (1894–1984), currently on stage at Theatre 40, is a modern morality play set in an English drawing room which ends in the obdurate evisceration of a family."
Stage Scene LA
- Highly Recommended
"...Leave it to director Cate Caplin to take a play I had previously found to be heavy-handed and preachy, J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, and transform it into something quite magical at Theatre 40."
Hollywood Progressive
- Highly Recommended
"...Greystone Mansion is also an especially apt choice for this Whodunit because this site was where a notorious murder-suicide occurred in 1928. Indeed, in 2017 Kathrine Bates’ The Manor dramatized those tragic events in a play that literally moved from room to room where those incidents are believed to have taken place."
Night Tinted Glasses
- Highly Recommended
"...J.B.Priestley's play might almost count as an inspiration for The Twilight Zone. Exactly why I'll leave for you to find out. But the set up involves an engagement party in the home a wealthy businessman named Birling (David Hunt Stafford) whose daughter Sheila (Katyana Rocker-Cook) plans to wed Gerald (Isaac W. Jay), while Mrs. Birling (Diana Angelina) beams in pleasure and the son of the family, Eric (Monty Renfrow). Everyone--or almost everyone--feels extremely pleased with themselves, amid drinks and talk of jewelry and of course business affairs."
Stage Raw
- Recommended
"...Quibbles aside, Caplin’s staging, van Helsdingen’s knockout performance and the cast’s collective precision make this Inspector less a polite revival and more a sharp elbow to the ribs. It reminds us that Priestley didn’t write a comfortable play — he wrote a warning. And judging by the gasps following that final line, it still provokes astonishment 80 years after first staged."
Ticket Holders LA
- Recommended
"...Although the play stays rooted in the Dohenys' grand living room with its imposing marble fireplace and soaring hand-carved wooden accoutrements, it proves to be a perfect atmospheric choice for bewitched audience members to sink their imaginations into Priestley’s world of 1916 London society and his not-so thinly veiled indictment of its outrageously inequitable class system."
Larchmont Buzz
- Highly Recommended
"...Ask a rich man for financial advice, and he might tell you that money doesn’t grow on trees, cash is cold and hard, and diamonds are forever. Wealth insulates the uppermost circles of society from life’s harsher realities. ‘Old money’ endures while ‘new money’ strives, but far be it from both contingents to concern themselves with the drudgery and toil common to the lower classes. In An Inspector Calls, now playing at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills, a local tragedy takes one such well-to-do family by surprise when they find it contains the power to shatter their precious illusion of security."
The Hollywood Times
- Highly Recommended
"...From the moment the Inspector arrives, the production tightens its grip and never let’s go. The pacing is confident and deliberate, drawing the audience in as the moral unraveling deepens. The site-specific staging makes every revelation feel immediate and personal, keeping the audience fully engaged throughout."
Broadway World
- Highly Recommended
"...J.B. Priestley's Hitchcockian suspense drama An Inspector Calls centers on the Birling Family - Arthur, Sylvia, Sheila, and Eric - who live in a comfortable home in Brumley, a fictional English industrial city in the north Midlands where Arthur owns a large plant where he employs many locals. The story begins with the family gathering in their drawing room after enjoying a splendid dinner to celebrate their daughter Sheila's engagement to Gerald Croft."
