Michael M. Landman-Karny

EVERYTHING’S COMING UP JULE Broadway’s golden-age hits return in a world premiere revue that treats them as living drama Jule Styne’s name tends to arrive attached to titles that feel immovable. Gypsy. Funny Girl. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The songs have outlived their original performers, yet they still seem written for bodies onstage, for voices under…

THE DREAM ON CREDIT A clear-eyed, unsentimental staging that lets Miller’s argument land with full force Arthur Miller finished Act I of Death of a Salesman in a single day and the rest in six weeks, which tells you something about the pressure behind it. He had been watching his uncle Manny Newman for years,…

THREE SYLVIAS, ZERO THRILLS Beth Hyland’s world premiere at the Geffen Playhouse arrives with the kind of literary bait that makes theater people clasp their reusable water bottles in delight. Sylvia Plath’s ghost returns to her old Boston apartment. A present-day novelist moves in. The novelist unravels as her marriage curdles and her deadline circles…

TWO MONOLOGUES IN SEARCH OF A DIALOGUE Justin Tanner has spent decades making chaos look easy. Those early Cast Theatre productions like Pot Mom and Zombie Attack trafficked in a particular brand of Los Angeles mayhem — high energy and unruly and knowing. With My Son the Playwright, now receiving its world premiere at Rogue…

HERBERT ROSS’S BOHÈME RETURNS Beauty polished, questions still lingering Puccini’s tale may be endlessly familiar, yet the recent Los Angeles staging shows how even the most well-trodden path can still feel unsettled and full of open questions. For those new to the work, the opera traces two parallel romances among struggling artists in 1830s Paris….