Los Angeles

MONSTERING THE ARTS Giant monsters and theatrical pretensions collide in Dan Caffrey’s gleefully unhinged new play Has the spark seemed to have left the LA theater scene? Does a night at the theater mean a choice between commercial dreck or heavy messaging? Are you weary of your thoughts being provoked yet again? Well, consider adding…

GRIEF IN MOTION Christina Harris keeps Deborah Brevoort’s meditation on loss moving with remarkable theatrical urgency There is very little stillness in The Women of Lockerbie, and that turns out to be one of the great strengths of Christina Harris’s superbly directed production at The Actors’ Gang. Deborah Brevoort’s play takes place seven years after…

WISHING FOR MORE Beautiful voices aren’t enough to cast the spell this Sondheim classic demands It seems like there’s always a production of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods running nearby. Last weekend, South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa opened its production, just a week before Morgan-Wixson in Santa Monica opens theirs, so…

A LANDMARK CASE GETS THE SITCOM TREATMENT A pivotal civil-rights case deserves sharper comedy and deeper drama than Howard Skora’s overstuffed retelling provides On September 17, 1998, a 911 caller claiming there was a weapons disturbance sent police into John Lawrence’s Houston apartment. Officers arrested Lawrence and Tyrone Garner under a Texas law criminalizing sex…

GUILT IS SOMEONE ELSE’S BUSINESS Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy makes murder a profession, morality a technicality, and laughter increasingly uncomfortable Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen opens with a man about to be hanged and everyone fussing over procedure. It is 1963. James Hennessy insists the police have the wrong man. His executioner, Harry Wade, is unmoved. Harry…

WHEN THE APOCALYPSE LOSES ITS MAGIC José Rivera’s surreal vision of a world coming apart demands theatrical daring that this earthbound revival rarely delivers What would you do if you lived in the Bronx, God went senile, and your guardian angel left you to fight him with the other angels? This is the scenario of…

A TOWN LEARNS WHAT IT’S WORTH Darko Tresnjak’s blistering production watches Güllen purchase its way toward murder When the Burgomaster (mayor) of Güllen rises in his most solemn civic register and declares that his town would rather starve than have blood on its hands, Claire Zachanassian lets the speech hang. The richest woman in the…

THE HUMAN INTEREST RATE A deeply affecting production makes its unrelieved sadness difficult to shake Kierkegaard shows up late in Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God, now at Rogue Machine, delivered almost as a throwaway line by a mortgage broker named Keith. Proof of God, he says, isn’t something you build….

ROUGHING IT This new musical still has considerable work to do Carl Jung called the work individuation: integrating the selves we invent with the self that has to live in the world. Wild Child shows it understands the idea in a single stage direction. Near the end, the teenage protagonist Rina finishes the song she…

A TREE GROWS ON 24TH STREET Mike Kenny’s lyrical world premiere makes magic Simplicity fused with memory is one of the foundations of poetry, and truth finds its most eloquent expression in an economy of words. This is certainly exquisitely exhibited in Mike Kenny’s Winter’s Bench, presently enhancing the stage of the 24th Street Theatre….

MAMET MAKES A PASS AT THE LADIES Three women turn Victorian propriety into a wicked game of lust, jealousy, and verbal warfare David Mamet is best known for plays populated by men who lie, bully, bargain, betray, and verbally bludgeon one another. Then there’s Boston Marriage. Written in 1999, the comedy centers on three women…

DONIZETTI’S BURIED TREASURE AND RUBBLE POP finds music worth hearing in a comedy better left buried Pacific Opera Project did not pull Il fortunato inganno (The Fortunate Deception) from a library shelf. Artistic director Josh Shaw traced the score to Italy and a 1998 revival at the Festival della Valle d’Itria, three years after its…

A MOST ACCOMMODATING DISASTER Frisch’s comedy leaves no one comfortably outside the joke Gottlieb Biedermann tells his wife and his maid that even if he had three spare beds standing empty, taking in a stranger would still be out of the question. He says this in one breath. In the next, he offers the stranger…

THE BLUES COME WITH A PRICE Power, ownership, and exploitation run through a sharply realized production of August Wilson’s classic A stew uses whatever is in the house. Carrots. Potatoes. A piece of meat, if there is one. Maybe the marrow worked out of the bone. Then dinner ends. What remains sits in the pot,…

PERICLES IS WORTH THE VOYAGE A questionable framing device doesn’t sink Boston Court’s lively take on Shakespeare’s rarely staged adventure The groundlings who attended William Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre back in 1608 (or 1619, hard to nail these dates down) would certainly have gotten their penny’s worth, as did the audience at the West…