Nick McCall

A SELF-INFLICTED WOUND POSING AS THEATER. SAFE WORD: CURTAIN An erotic psychological thriller script without the erotic, psychology, thrill, or script Dear Gay Theater-makers, I am writing today to encourage you to see the terrible new play Punish Me, by triple-threat writer-producer-actor Michael Dukakis, currently renting space at the Hudson Backstage Theatre. Do I recommend…

OPERA AMONG THE GHOSTS From playful parlor deaths to a chilling one-act about crime, punishment, and memory, Source/Filter Music Collective made Heritage Square sing. On November 8, Source/Filter Music Collective returned to Heritage Square Museum with the west coast premiere of Michael Ching’s 2015 true-crime opera Alice Ryley, about the first woman executed in Georgia….

ONE MAN, TWO HOURS TOO LONG Ask yourself how much you liked The Play That Goes Wrong series. That’s a pretty good indicator as to your enjoyment of Richard Bean’s 2011 play, One Man, Two Guvnors, now running at A Noise Within. If you liked it, stop reading and go. You’ll have a great time….

TRACES OF POSSIBILITY Premiering Off-Broadway in 1989, Cindy Lou Johnson’s Brilliant Traces is one of those plays that can be either mesmerizing or exasperating and tiresome. Lacking a firm idea of what it wants to be, Soul Gym Productions’ new mounting at the Hudson for a brief three-day run, fell firmly in the latter. In the middle of…

IT MAY BE JUST ANOTHER DAY, BUT THIS ISN’T JUST ANOTHER PLAY If I were to start by telling you what author Dan Lauria’s sly new play is about, a great number of you might stop reading in disgust, thinking, “I’ve lived through that; I don’t need to see a play about it.” However, Just…

SEXLESS IN THE CITY Have you ever been with a guy who won’t shut up and just enjoy the blow job? That’s what it’s like to sit through Ashley Griffin’s new two-person play, The Opposite of Love, which premiered last year off-Broadway, and is now having its first West Coast performances at the Hudson Backstage…

A HELLUVA HELLAS Ancient drama gets short shrift here in Los Angeles. Sure, we get the stories, but the shows are usually adaptations, hardly ever a straight translation, and when we do, they’re performed in today’s style. In 2018, The School of Night did something radical: they performed Seneca’s Hercules Insane as written and with…

Teenagers these days are out of control. They eat like pigs, they are disrespectful of adults, they interrupt and contradict their parents, and they terrorize their teachers. — Aristotle When you have endless arts options to choose from every day, you eventually develop simple, blunt, sometimes arbitrary, rules to help decide what to see. One…

BEE MINUS Now playing at Wisteria Theater in North Hollywood is one of the few wonderful musicals from this century so far, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, by William Finn (music and lyrics) and Rachel Sheinkin (book). Now 20 years old, this delightful musical follows a group of middle schoolers as they struggle…