Tony Frankel

A THREE-HOUR HOME RUN Clearly and cleanly, tried and true director Cynthia Ferrer and choreographer Alexis Carra Girbés trust the heart out of Adler and Ross’s 1955 Broadway classic, Damn Yankees.  Musical Theater West’s fall treat at Carpenter Performing Arts Center in Long Beach is glowing and glorious fun. Their faithful recreation gets richly rewarded by…

WHAT WILL YOU INHERIT? That Matthew Lopez’s sprawling near-7-hour 2-part play, with 3 acts in each part, keeps us captivated is quite a feat. Beautifully written, funny, sad, and hopeful, The Inheritance — a remarkable if flawed piece of ensemble theater — is a fresh, realistic look at gay life in NYC with reflections on…

CRANES HAS A CLIPPED WING Last night at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles, CalArts presented a new play by Octavio Solis, and the story is magnificent. In East L.A., a teenager named Nico has been mowed down by a car outside his home, but it’s a mystery as to why. And this was a special…

A BRAINDEAD MUSICAL REANIMATED TO GLORIOUS LIFE In 2007, the Mel Brooks musical Young Frankenstein opened on Broadway to largely dismissive reviews. Some say it opened too close on the heels of Brooks’s powerhouse, The Producers. But when the touring version visited Los Angeles years later with original star Roger Bart imitating the film’s star…

THE FARM-TO-FABLE REVOLUTION IS HERE In what is Los Angeles’s best season since well before the pandemic, comes along the best show of the season. Only in New York would one expect the caliber of talent and technical elements than in A Noise Within’s production of Animal Farm. Riveting, frightening, and entertaining, director Julia Rodriguez-Elliot’s…

THE SKY’S THE LIMIT IN THIS LOVELY PRODUCTION Unless you are an astronomer or an astronomy buff, you likely have never heard of Henrietta Swan Leavitt. She was an American woman who made discoveries during the early 1900s that helped later scientists establish the present scale of the universe. Leavitt’s story attracted the interest of…

A BLINDINGLY BRILLIANT PRODUCTION Since its premiere in c. 429 BC, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King has been considered the Mount Olympus of Greek Tragedies, largely because it humanizes the theme of fate, a subject that fascinated the Greek culture; personally, I warrant that a story which contains patricide, unholy incest, self-mutilation and not leaving well…