“Feeling a touch more provincial lately? You should. With the cancellation of UCLA Live’s International Theatre Festival, Los Angeles’ status as a cultural world capital has suffered a serious blow. The fall program that brought cutting-edge theater from across the globe to the Westwood campus has been officially put on ice.

It’s a depressing though not unexpected development. In May, UCLA Live executive and artistic director David Sefton resigned in response to the cost-savings edicts coming down from above that put a big scary “X” on the theater program he began in 2002 and curated throughout with a connoisseur’s fearlessness.

The words “rethinking and restructuring” — those rhetorical piranhas infesting our recessionary waters — circled ominously. It doesn’t take a psychic to tell you that a limb is about to be torn off.”

– Charles McNulty, L.A. Times