Jason Mannino

An Enjoyable Journey Into the Woods Be careful what you wish for. It’s the enduring lesson at the heart of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods, the Tony Award-winning musical that opens Desert Theatricals’ eighth season at the Rancho Mirage Amphitheater, running through Sunday evening, October 25. With its brilliant score, clever storytelling,…

WHEN LEGENDS READ, YOU LISTEN A star-studded staged reading proves craft, not spectacle, is the real event Some nights in the theater feel important before they even begin. rePLAY’s closing-night presentation of Better Late at the Plaza Theatre this past Saturday was one of them—not just because of Larry Gelbart’s sharply observed script, but because…

A CHILLING NIGHT UNDER THE STARS A high-energy production that refuses to look away from history’s shadows Desert Theatricals’ production of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret, currently running at the Rancho Mirage Amphitheater through April 19, is a visceral reminder of why this show remains so vital. Under the desert stars, the Kit Kat Club has…

A SUMMER OF MEMORY AND LOSS A moving revival that transforms urgency into reflection without losing its emotional core The lights went down at Dezart Performs’ gorgeous new home on Saturday, and I’ll be honest—my heart was in my throat before a single line was spoken. Having been in the audience for the Broadway premiere…

A FINAL BOW WITH HUMOR AND HEART DET closes its run with a sharp, funny family comedy about tradition and change There is a bittersweet irony in Desert Ensemble Theatre choosing Knife to the Heart for its final bow. For fifteen seasons, DET has been a home for sharp, thoughtful theater in the Coachella Valley,…

CHICAGO IS EVEN HOTTER IN THE DESERT Desert Theatricals just wrapped up their run of Chicago at the Rancho Mirage Amphitheater, and if you weren’t there this past weekend, you truly missed out on a spectacular night under the stars. It’s one thing to see this show in a traditional theater, but there’s something about…

If you were lucky enough to be in the audience at the historic Palm Springs Plaza Theatre on Friday evening, you witnessed something rarer—and more electric—than a standard play. The second installment of the inaugural rePLAY series delivered a “script-in-hand” performance of Charles Busch’s The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife that proved, beyond a doubt,…

A Celestial Collision of Wit and Chaos in Meteor Shower Steve Martin’s absurdist comedy Meteor Shower crashes onto the stage at Desert Ensemble Theatre like a cosmic cocktail party gone wonderfully wrong. The company’s current production of the play by Steve Martin—running through this Sunday—is a wild, starlit trip into the absurd, leaning unapologetically into…

There is a profound beauty in watching something fragile survive. In Dezart Performs’ breathtaking West Coast Premiere of Jason Odell Williams’ Destroying David, that fragility is everywhere: in the literal cracks of a 500-year-old statue, in the fractured heart of a grieving mother, and in the very air of the theater itself. Running through March…