Tony Frankel

FATS WALLER’S JOINT IS JUMPIN’ AGAIN Ledisi and an all-star cast bring the Harlem Renaissance roaring back to life at the Nate Holden Center Ain’t Misbehavin’ is a sizzling celebration of Fats Waller’s music—songs that he made famous in a career that ranged from uptown clubs to downtown Tin Pan Alley to Hollywood and concert…

HOLD YOUR HORSES A provocative subject that proves hard to recommend—and harder to ignore Olivia Dufault’s For Want of a Horse tackles a subject most plays wouldn’t dare touch—and to its credit, it does so without melodrama. But what might have been a deeply human exploration of how such a taboo shapes lives instead plays…

THE COST OF LOOKING BACK With a soaring first act, I’m willing to pay the price for a second that can’t quite keep up Arthur Miller’s The Price has always been a talky, introspective piece—more excavation than action—but when it works, it’s quietly devastating. At Pacific Resident Theatre, director Elina de Santos delivers a production…

MASTER PRODUCTION During the last half-hour of the exquisitely produced “Master Harold”…and the boys, the Geffen Playhouse becomes theatre as a temple: a transcendental, spiritual, empowering and uplifting theatrical experience that only a playwriting craftsman like Athol Fugard could create. For what was up to then a lyrical examination of a white seventeen year-old school boy,…