Michael M. Landman-Karny

GREASE STILL HAS ITS GROOVE Altadena Music Theatre returns after devastating loss with Rydell High, right on schedule The year is 1959. Rock and roll is reshaping American culture, the Sexual Revolution is just around the corner, and Grease captures a generation on the cusp of change. In its original incarnation, the musical was a…

NO STRINGS ATTACHED? THINK AGAIN Erik Patterson’s provocative world premiere boasts superb performances but mistakes repetition for depth In F**king Strangers, receiving its world premiere from Echo Theater Company, playwright Erik Patterson begins with an arresting image: a terrified young man stranded beside a freeway, begging his mother to stay on the phone until help…

WHAT THE MUSIC BOX REMEMBERS A lavish production overcomes a book that never fully solves its own mystery A music box opens. A grandmother sings a lullaby to a five-year-old girl who will spend the evening trying to remember it. That is the show in miniature. Everything that follows turns on whether the memory is…

PEOPLE WHO NEED PEOPLE (TO MIND THE STORE) Michael Mullen shines in Jonathan Tolins’ affectionate backstage fantasy Jonathan Tolins built his 2013 solo play Buyer & Cellar around one of the stranger facts in contemporary celebrity lore. Barbra Streisand really does keep a basement mall under her Malibu barn: a doll shop, an antique store,…

LONG-DISTANCE DAMAGE Samuel D. Hunter finds devastating intimacy across thousands of miles Sam Shepard built True West on a kitchen and two brothers who could not stay out of each other’s way. They fought in the same room, over the same toaster, under the same desert moon. The room held the heat. Samuel D. Hunter…

SLIGHTLY TOO BIG FOR HIS WORLD Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer-winning drama offers comfort, compassion, and just enough unease beneath the surface A bell rings before the lights come up. Out of the dark rises Cranberry, New York, a fictional suburb of Rochester built at the size of a model train layout: a church, a bowling alley,…

THE JOINT IS JUMPIN’, IT’S REALLY JUMPIN’ Ebony Rep finds the joy, sorrow, and swing hidden inside Fats Waller’s enduring revue Ain’t Misbehavin’ does not tell the story of Fats Waller’s life. It does something trickier. Murray Horwitz and Richard Maltby Jr. built the 1978 revue from the Waller repertoire: the novelty numbers, the double…

PULLED OUT OF MYTH AND INTO THE HEADLINES Kenneth Cavander relocates Thebes to a near-future America, and something is lost in the move I first read Antigone in a basement college classroom in the fall of 1984, the week the polls turned against Walter Mondale. Kreon sounded like the calm voice on the evening news…

LORCA IN DRAG, WITH HIS CLAWS INTACT Rodrigo García and Ugho Badú reimagine a Spanish classic without dulling its edge Lorca wrote for women’s voices and then watched the world go silent on him. Carlota: Alhajero de Secretos (Carlota: Jewelry Box of Secrets) hands those voices to men, and the swap is the honest move….