Shari Barrett

YOU’RE THE TOPSY TURVY During the forced shutdown of theaters due to the COVID pandemic, The Actors’ Gang in Culver City kept its employees on salary and health insurance, adapted their outreach programs in schools and prisons to a virtual format, and continued workshops with its actors online. The group’s Artistic Director Tim Robbins shared,…

A PLAY NOT WORTH EXPLORING Doggedly determined to fight yesterday’s battles,  Nell Benjamin’s farce  The Explorers Club  manically mocks the heyday of male British explorers. Fuddy-duddy adventure seekers with aboriginal blood on their hands, these intrepid trekkers did a lot more than find the source of the Nile; they blazed a trail for imperialism, colonialism, racism and misogyny….

UNSAVORY IS SAVORY INDEED Those of us who grew up on the Westside of Los Angeles certainly remember hanging out on the Venice and Santa Monica beaches when we were kids. Times then were as innocent as we were, and our parents had no fear that predators were lurking about trying to do us harm….

A DICTATOR DICTATES MUSIC IN STALIN’S MASTER CLASS In a time when politics collide with state and federal budgets for the arts, Stalin’s Master Class  — a wildly comic, music-filled ride by British playwright David Pownall — is all too relevant for today’s audiences. Odyssey Theatre Ensemble founding artistic director Ron Sossi helms with his unique…

MAD ABOUT GOING MAD Los Angeles-based Theatre Movement Bazaar is dedicated to developing a unique style of theatre rooted in physical action which merges dance, theatre, music, and cinema, heightening physicality to create provocative storytelling. Their latest production at the Odyssey Theatre, Going Mad: Alice in Hollywoodland, was written by Richard Alger and directed by…

TIME TO CHECK-IN TO HOT L HOLLYWOOD Written by Roger Mathey based on his own personal experience working in a three-star hotel in Los Angeles for over a decade, The Night Auditor takes place during the graveyard shift in a seedy Hollywood hotel that attracts the outcasts of society. The stories are all based on…

WOMEN AND SPACE: THE JOURNEY SO FAR The World Premiere of Singularities or the Computers of Venus, written and directed by Laura Stribling, runs through Sunday, June 2 at The Road Theatre in North Hollywood. Set in three different time periods from 1789 through the present, it examines the lives of women astronomers as they…

IT’S MAN AGAINST AI IN MAINTENANCE With the current threat of AI-generated digital characters taking over roles portrayed by human actors, it’s timely for Peter Ritt  to comically explore this hot topic in his new play High Maintenance at The Road Theatre Company in North Hollywood Directed with insightful clarity by Stan Zimmerman this world premiere…

HOPE IS A WAKING DREAM — Aristotle Close-up magic by master illusionist, storyteller and seeming mind-reader Helder Guimarí£es is mesmerizing and dazzling  in The Hope Theory, an 80-minute wonderment which opened last Friday. This is his fourth collaboration with EGOT award-winning director/producer Frank Marshall at Geffen Playhouse in Westwood (Invisible Tango, The Present streamed during the…

THE DECONSTRUCTED PLAY’S THE THING William Shakespeare’s Hamlet recounts the story of the ghost of Denmark’s murdered king who wants his son, Prince Hamlet, to kill his uncle Claudius, the man who murdered the king to seize the throne and marry Hamlet’s mother. Long considered one of the world’s greatest tragedies, it delves into Hamlet’s…

A MONSTER MASH Like most boomers, I was raised watching black-and-white horror movies. Both frightening and amusing, those giant ants, grasshoppers and spiders attacking some innocent town were the best action movies back in the day. And once seen, the major  monsters  — King Kong, Godzilla, The Blob, Frankenstein, Dracula, et al. — are not forgotten. In…

A ROYAL KING From the moment Irish actor extraordinaire Pat Kinevane appears out of the darkness as if in a dream, his lithe body moving as seductively as a snake into a sexy Argentine Tango, you will be entranced to meet Luther, a lonely Elvis Impersonator looking for love in all the wrong places. Taking…

I FEEL YA, OPHELIA Acclaimed playwright, director, and actor Stefan Marks has outdone himself taking on three roles in his World Premiere play Ophelia, now at the Odyssey Theatre through May 18. It’s a tale of family history, the journey to find love, the heartbreak of dementia, struggling to forgive yourself for past mistakes, and…

WITNESSES FOR THE PROSECUTION Taking place within the confines of a witness room in Manhattan Criminal Court, four obdurate NYPD officers who have “done all this before and know what to say” are coached by the Prosecuting Attorney, who is fact-checking their testimony prior to a drug suppression hearing.   She has instructions on what they…

A VIEW TO GREAT THEATER Theatre Palisades has a hit on their boards with a true-to-life production of Arthur Miller’s landmark drama from 1955, A View from the Bridge, sharply directed by Cate Caplin. What stands out in 2024 about this primal script is how much Miller anticipates today’s xenophobic anti-immigrant witch hunts ’” rancor…

FOR THEATERGOERS DESIRING A COAT OF LOVE, THIS SHOW IS BESPOKEN FOR Sometimes friends or even co-workers can become more like family than your relatives. Such is the case in Wolf Mankowitz’s The Bespoke Overcoat, inspired by Nikolai Gogol’s famous short story “The Overcoat“ about a long-suffering, poor warehouse clerk who seeks to obtain a…

A FASCINATING DIVERSE UPDATE TO CHEKHOV’S THREE SISTERS In 1900, Anton Chekhov wrote the play Three Sisters, centering around siblings both very similar and remarkably different who grew up in Moscow but now reside out on a country while longing to return to the more exciting lives they led in the big city. Told over…

YOU MIGHT WANNA MISS THIS TRAIN Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 psychological film noir thriller Strangers on a Train,  which he directed and produced to mixed reviews, was based on the 1950 novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith. But since then, the film has been regarded much more favorably; and in 2021 was selected for preservation…