Mia Bonadonna

HELL COMES TO THE GARMENT DISTRICT Melbourne-based Four Larks is performing their ghostly junkyard opera, Orpheus, in a secret space on the outskirts of the Fashion District. Workshopped at Getty Villa Theater Lab, Four Larks narrates the mythology of Orpheus and Eurydice, navigating the Grecian hero through an ancient underworld as he attempts to resurrect…

IT’S SAFE TO PUT YOURSELF IN HARMONY‘S WAY Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman’s high-energy, surprisingly melancholy new musical, Harmony, depicts the real-life story of the all-male singing ensemble, the Comedian Harmonists. Through buttery, close harmonies, an excellent cast, and fluid staging, this unusually dichotomous musical follows the Interwar boy band through their formation in the…

GOAT ON A BOAT Edward Albee’s diligently disturbing tragicomedy, The Goat or Who is Sylvia?, is running at California Repertory Company in the belly of the Queen Mary’s Royal Theatre. One of Albee’s most well-known works, Goat follows the dissolution of a perfect family after central character, Martin, reveals that he is having a zoophilic…

A HEART-POUNDING, COSMOS-QUESTIONING PIECE OF THEATER Today may be your last chance to see Blue Cube’s hauntingly philosophical drama, Coldwater, but now that it has been tried out as part of Son of Semele’s Company Creation Festival, the hope is that this exciting work will soon get its own run. The plot follows three characters…

SKETCHY THEATER Velvet Pile’s comedic look at identity and commercial branding, A Word from Our Sponsors, is running as part of the Son of Semele Company Creation Festival. Comprised of comedic duo Alexis Notabartolo and Amanada Barnes, Velvet Pile uses comedy to explore arbitrarily existent social constructions such as gender roles and standards of beauty….

WHAT A DOG Poor Dog Group’s S.M.S.I.W.O.O.F. (SaveMySoul In a WorldOfOddFoices) or 8 bottles of vodka is a dance-centric, multimedia performance based on text messages sent between the members of the ensemble. Given the abstract nature of this performance art, it is rarely possible for the viewer to know the creator’s explicit meaning. It is…

APPARENTLY CAT FIGHTING IN TRASH ISN’T AS FUN AS WE THOUGHT IT WOULD BE Jami Brandli’s ambiguous whodunit, S.O.E., strands three disillusioned and combative rivals together during a state of emergency Boston snow storm. Set in a filthy post-party kitchen amid a sea of upturned plastic cups and cigarette butts, S.O.E. revolves around novelist Josh,…

FAKE BOOK COMES TO TRUE LIFE Published in Paris in 1894, The Songs of Bilitis is a book of poems and epitaphs describing the life and loves of an ancient lesbian heroine named Bilitis. With emotional flourish, author Pierre Louí¿s biographically describes her simple country upbringing, pinnacles of romantic love and sexual gratification, and eventual…

CYBER SEEDINESS, FBI BUREAUCRACY, AND TABOO MONSTROSITY COME TO VIVID LIFE IN SEXSTING Written in collaboration with Internet crime attorney Susan Raffanti, Doris Baizley’s boundary-blurring examination of entrapment ethics depicts the undercover Internet chat room exchanges of an FBI investigator. Working under reactionary bureaucratic top-down pressure, the agent’s modus operandi is the explicit entrapment of…

THE THEATER TAKES ON  CORPORATE AMERICA’S  EVILS After a flurry of controversy in 2012, Mike Daisey’s provocative activism-cum-monologue work, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, is playing at Theatre Asylum. ­ This factual account is testimony of the tragic human exploitation that occurs at the Foxconn factory in Shengzhen, China, the world’s biggest manufacturer of Apple…

PROMISING SCRIPT BUTCHERED BY PRODUCTION VALUES Adam Seidel’s sanguinary dark comedy, Catching the Butcher, is an unlikely and eccentric love story in which a secret and utterly sick relationship develops between Bill, a selectively cruel serial killer, and Nancy, his Stockholm Syndrome affected victim. Seidel uses psychological horror to craft a deliciously demented commentary about…

A RAUCHNY REUNION FOR THE PEANUTS GANG Set at Charlie Brown’s funeral in modern-day Los Angeles, Brendan Hunt’s raunchy parody, Absolutely Filthy, is an admirably smutty comedy which imagines a dysfunctional reunion of the Peanuts gang, now all grown-up, cocksure, and full of middle-age disgruntlement. Under the fluid comedic direction of Jeremy Aldridge at Sacred…