Los Angeles

REAWAKENING In one of the bios for Deaf West’s production of Spring Awakening, actress Ali Stroker thanks the company for stepping out of the box, and turning what some may think as a ‘limitation’ into an opportunity. The “limitation” here refers to her wheelchair as well as deafness’”particularly, her cast mates who are deaf appearing…

COME HOME TO THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL The Trip to Bountiful, Horton Foote’s plaintive 1953 teleplay (adapted for Broadway and for the 1985 film with Geraldine Page), paints a picture of rural America in the 1940s that gently reminds us that there was (and may still be) a place in this country where people tip…

POP DOES OPERA  BIG, INTIMATELY Under Artistic Director Josh Shaw’s hands-on guidance, Pacific Opera Project has become L.A.’s most exciting new opera company. In just three years since POP began with the teeny-tiny production of Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, I sensed that this would be the company to make quality opera more accessible, approachable, and affordable….

COLD DEAD HANDS America’s bittersweet love-and-hate affair with guns is the target of playwright Victor Kaufold’s thought-provoking but lopsided satirical revue, which premiered in 2000 at the Blank Theatre’s Young Playwright’s Festival, their annual showcase of works by teen authors. The play was an immediate response to the massacre at Columbine High School, where a…

YOU’LL GET THIS GOAT Martin is an architect at the top of his profession; he and his wife Stevie and their son Billy live at, or on, the crest of civilization: rich, successful, smart, loving, happy. Their journalist friend Ross is, if not an Olympian, a dweller on the slopes; they are all cultivated, delightful,…

HERE’S CHARLEY This Sunday, September 21, Musical Theatre West will begin the Reiner Staged Reading Series fifth anniversary season with a one-time only performance of Where’s Charley? (1948), based on Brandon Thomas’s wildly successful Charley’s Aunt (1892), which had an original London run of 1,466 performances. Where’s Charley?, Frank Loesser’s first Broadway score, is one…

STRANGE BUT WATCHABLE BEHAVIOR Let’s see if I got this right. A tongue-in-cheek bio-musical and pseudo-adventure tale about John Broadus Watson’”wannabe preacher-turned-behavioral scientist-turned-ad man’”includes anthropomorphized barnyard animals, family drama, a love story, a talking lab rat, and a vaudevillian, Weill-esque score (from oompah and jazz to spirituals) : and this hydra-headed musical doesn’t suck?! Credit…

HEAVENLY DAY Samuel Beckett’s 1960 two-hander Happy Days presents a life in hell: Winnie, a middle-aged lady half-buried in an apocalyptic wasteland, is awakened and put to sleep by a harsh, ominous, unexplained buzzer; a lecherous and monosyllabic cripple, her husband Willie is little help; her day consists of finding ways to not go insane,…

BEYOND SAVING The title of the Loft Ensemble’s world premiere presentation asks the question, Will You Save Them? Unfortunately the answer is, “I can’t.” While the production is not completely lacking in positive attributes, without a complete rewrite of the script, this journey into the dark side of human nature will remain a lost cause….

ALL YESTERDAY’S PARTIES A projection reads “1,000,000 Years B.C.,” and the countdown (count up?) begins; that’s a lot of numbers to scroll on a stage bare of performers, and it’s a few minutes of tedium before the counter gets to the 200,000s and a naked man (Sean Patten, in a blond Glam wig and fuck-me…

HARD DRIVING COCK GOES DEEP Love may be “a many-splendored thing” but as Pat Benatar sang it’s also a “battlefield.” In Mike Bartlett’s Cock, making its Los Angeles premiere at Rogue Machine, the gloves are off and all the players come out swinging. For a riveting non-stop 90 minutes they counter and torment each other…

MORE D’OH THAN WOO-HOO The intelligent minds behind The Simpsons already had over 51,000 spectators (over three nights) in the palms of their collective hands before they sat down to write The Simpsons Take the Bowl, a hodgepodge of animated clips, anecdotes, guest star appearances, musical numbers, and fireworks’”all co-hosted by three voiceover artists: Hank…

ALBEE SEEING YOU AT THE RENBERG On the surface, Edward Albee’s The Goat,  or Who Is Sylvia? is about a middle-aged architect, Martin, who has a zoophilic love affair that threatens to destroy his family and everything he’s worked for, including an international prize for architecture. Look a little deeper, and you’ll see that this extraordinary…

INTO THE FOLD Recently divorced, and abandoned by her beloved three-legged dog, well-respected origami artist Ilana has fortified herself in her studio. Surrounded by paper, Chinese take-out boxes, and a giant, hovering origami hawk, the dejected, worn-down, and corrosive Ilana will be coaxed back to life by high school teacher Andy’”a goofy, kindhearted, and energetic…

SHINING NEW LUMIERE ON A FABLED CLASSIC Gaston Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera created a sensation when it was first unveiled as a serialization in the French newspaper Le Gaulois from September 1909 to January 1910. Based   partly on actual events that haunted the Paris Opera in the late 19th century, the tale…

A FLAT-FOOTED RACE In April 2014, lawyer and LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling was banned from the NBA for life and fined $2.5 million by the league after private recordings of him making racist comments were made public by TMZ, a gossiping media outlet that I believe is a far greater threat to humanity than…

THE UNIVERSAL AND THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE Holst’s The Planets and the U.S. premiere of English composer Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Erskine, a Concerto for Drumset & Orchestra: This very odd pairing arrived courtesy of the LA Phil on Tuesday, and while one was out of this world, the other was decidedly earthbound. The eponymous instrumentalist of Turnage’s four-movement…

A SORT OF JUDGMENT The Life and Sort of Death of Eric Argyle, Ross Dungan’s 2013 play about fate-after-death, is pleasantly eloquent and several times touching in a comforting way, but it offers little structural or thematic originality. A quietly desperate nobody straight out of T.S. Eliot dies a bumbling death and has his life…

THE PERFECT COCK Whether breeding chickens or designing your kitchen with rooster tchotchkes, it can be challenging to find the perfect cock. But if you’re looking to find  it in the theater, your search is over. I refer to the play Cock, the Los Angeles premiere of which opens at Rogue Machine this week. The punning,…

UNBURIED RED-HEADED STEPCHILD In the mid-1990s, Sam Shepard rewrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1978 play, Buried Child, for a new Steppenwolf production that director Gary Sinise dragged from Chicago to Broadway, where I saw and loathed it. It was a page-one, for-the-yokels rewrite, shrugging off the ambiguous Gothicism of the original to dress itself in frothy…