Los Angeles

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE ALIVE AND WELL AND WAITING FOR GODOT Rajiv Joseph’s surprisingly complex and touching two-hander concerns a couple of guards assigned to stand watch at the walls in front of the newly built Taj Mahal, which will be revealed to the public for the first time since construction began 16 years earlier….

COME YE TO THE FAIR…LADY, THAT IS I’m rather certain one cannot visit enough  productions of My Fair Lady. The 1956 musical, based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, tells the tale of Professor Henry Higgins, a puffed-up upper-class grammarian, and Eliza Doolittle, his lower-class, flower girl protégé whom Higgins turns into a lady by changing her…

HOT DOG SUCKING AHEAD You know, it’s funny, I was asking a friend just the other day if he knows of any show in town which has a guy sucking on a hot dog. And it would be great if it wasn’t a drama but something cutting edge. Oh, plus some wildly original vaudevillian humor….

SUNNY AND SCARE You think theater in Los Angeles can be frightening? Well, here’s entertainment that’s intentionally soulless. “It’s so funny, you’ll laugh your head off” takes on a whole new meaning with The Groundlings Halloween Show (a.k.a. You Paid to Die Tonight II),  a frightening amalgam of sketch comedy and all the scary shit you…

CRITIC COVETS HEART It is unfair but true that in watching 24th Street Theatre’s American premiere production of Finegan Kruckmeyer’s Man Covets Bird, one automatically compares it to Debbie Devine’s last directorial effort here, Mike Kenny’s  Walking the Tightrope,  in 2013. That show won all the wins and toured all the tours, made everybody feel all the…

WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME …I would Love you ten years before the flood; And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews – Andrew Marvell It’s a measure of progress that a play about white people can be written by a black guy and directed by an Asian guy on what…

SOMETHING UNSATISFYINGLY APOCRYPHAL There are a few things that might not be entirely true about the Blank’s “World Premiere” of Jeff Tabnick’s Something Truly Monstrous, which opened last night in Hollywood. To begin with a quibble, a two-hour show by Tabnick called Barrymore’s Body, with what sound like most of the same elements, went up…

INHOSPITALITY IN A HOSPITAL A few weeks ago I spent a couple of nights at a hospital waiting for someone to be born. A couple of weeks later I spent a few more nights at the hospital, including time at the ICU, trying to keep the mother comfortable while she tried to stay alive. In…

ME NEXT TIME I’m running up Pico. It’s 7:54 p.m. and I just parked on Rimpau because I’ve only lived in L.A. for 18 years and Google Maps told me Theatre Theater was .1 mile from Rimpau, but it isn’t, it’s like 9 blocks, and I’m running. I was up at 4:30 this morning to…

LOS PECES VIOLENTOS There is a dark parable in the bible, in Luke or maybe John; it’s in the Scheherazade – the tale of the thousandth night, perhaps. Your translation didn’t have every night, anyway you didn’t read that far, but you almost know it. It’s in the Talmud. It’s a legend your grandmother used…

GANGSTER MUSICAL You’ve seen the movie, you’ve seen the car, now see the musical. Meet the most famous robbing, murdering, loving couple in U.S. history. From their first meeting at a West Texas diner through their tumultuous courtship and romance, from their brief, history-making crime spree to their fateful final drive through Louisiana, this thrilling…

“DON’T LOOK AT ME” Jillian Leigh’s second play, Hooked, is extremely ambitious and fairly successful in the hands of director Terri Treas, producer Michael Zand, and a strong cast including the playwright. While the play could use another couple of drafts and at least one scene either more or less, and though the opening-night performance…