Los Angeles

DEAD BLONDES TELL NO TALES — EXCEPT THIS ONE Conspiracy theories have surrounded the death of actress and restaurateur Thelma Todd since 1935, when her lifeless body was discovered in a garage slumped behind the wheel of her parked Lincoln Phaeton convertible. Alexandra Kopko, as the actress’s ghost, presents a bio of Todd’s life to…

WAITING FOR COWDOT Normally, a surfeit of hyphens in any production assures trouble ahead, but Aaron Francis, the writer-director-designer-producer of this subversive, potent indictment of the lethal potential of passivity, has shown himself the exception that either tests or proves that rule. In Betsy & Patty Find Out at the Broadwater Second Stage, seven cows…

MÉNAGE À MEH, OR BOB & CAROL & DEAD & AIRLESS Last Saturday, I caught the world premiere of Ménage à Quatre, a play that seems to promise a farce but instead delivers a muddled mess. Written by Peter Lefcourt and directed by Ryan O’Connor, the show is a guest production at the Davidson/Valentini Theatre…

THE KIND OF SEPTEMBER YOU’LL WANT TO REMEMBER With the original opening Off-Broadway in 1960 and running an astounding 42 years, The Fantasticks is a veritable classic amongst the repertoire of musical theater. This perennially popular piece by composer Harvey Schmidt and librettist & lyricist Tom Jones is a two-act chamber piece—an eight-character, minimalistic, melancholic, commedia…

LIFE ON REWIND In a co-production with HorseChart Theatre, Rogue Machine Theatre continues its astounding season with John Kolvenbach‘s gem of a play, Reel to Reel, a heart-warming, but definitely not sappy, time-jumping story of a 55-year marriage between the determined Maggie Spoon (Alley Mills Bean), a sound and performance artist, and her more reticent…

A KNOCK AT THE HEART With her staging of Dolores, Edward Allan Baker’s two-woman drama about domestic violence, director Stephanie Feury—at the theatre that bears her name—has placed on display a small gem of immense worth. Deedee Woche is Sandra, the married sister struggling to hold her lower-middle-class Providence family together. Davonna Dehay is the…

OFFTIME Abi Watkinson’s one-woman show 5:45 is a poor receptacle for a great deal of talent—one that feels underdeveloped and not fully thought through. The trouble starts with the title. A good title should grab attention, pique curiosity, and function as either clue or bait to lure in a potential patron: The Hundred Years’ War…

A TAIL OF LOVE ON A LEASH Playwright Benjamin Schwartz and director Natalie Nicole Dressel, in league with actors Callie Ott and Spencer Weitzel, have served up in Dog of Carnage one of the sharpest comedies in the Hollywood Fringe. Set in a courtroom—presided over by a grating, tonal, squawking, authoritarian judge—Ott and Weitzel are…

SOUNDCHECK FOR SURVIVAL “Aha…sure…uh-huh…yes…ummm…you say….†And so begins NO, dancer/actuation artist Annalisa Limardi’s intriguing, minimalistic dissertation on the social pressures exerted on women, and men as well, to be amenable, positive and passive to the point of evaporation. Limardi hurls about the sizable stage at the Eastwood Performing Arts Center, weaving in and out of…

PAGING DR. DRAMA, STAT! VITALS NOT STABLE Nursing Is My Life was a heart-breaker for me. Charley Karlotta has spent decades as a registered nurse, raising her family, and dreaming of one day doing a show proclaiming how “nursing is her life.” Karlotta is a petite elfin of a person, and you cannot but be…

NICAEA TRY Oh, Constantine! at the Zephyr Theatre is an odd nut to crack. Or I should say review. One of the best-produced shows at the Fringe, this is the brainchild of playwright / director / producer Jan-David Soutar, with producers Athena Rethis and Clent Bowers, production designer Courtney Stepleton, lighting designer Miles Berman, and finally…

HOW TO RAISE A DAUGHTER (AND YOURSELF) Woven from his essays featured in Cosmopolitan and O The Oprah Magazine, gay Armenian-American Haig “Hike” Chahinian recounts his humbling and oft-time hilarious adventures as he fumbles through fathering a bouncing biracial baby girl. A compassionate contemplation of all the hardships and hazards the heart is willing to endure for the joy of…

A DUPLEX THAT’S GOING TO THE DOGS Those who flocked to the “Sunshine State” during the population boom of the 1920s and ’30s, were mostly “easterners” who had only known tenement living, cut off from the world outside on the upper floors of some aging brownstone and reduced to the numbers of their apartment door….

ACTING WHILE ASIAN: A SURVIVAL GUIDE IN ONE ACT Kung Fu, Sidekick, Wise Man, Dead: The Hollywood Starter Pack. Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die pulls no punches in its portrait of two Asian-American actors navigating Hollywood’s tangled machinery—one a hardened veteran, the other freshly idealistic. Set in the late 1980s but pulsing with…

A NEW MUSICAL HAS ARRIVED TO PUMP UP PATRONS FOR DECADES TO COME Allen Moyle’s 1990 film Pump Up the Volume starred Christian Slater as Mark, a graceless, socially awkward high school student in Phoenix, Arizona, a town so conservative that even the Saguaro cactus wore Bush/Quayle campaign buttons. Unable to fit in, Mark resorts…

PIPPIN GOES HOLLYWOOD Pippin, with music and lyrics supplied by Stephen Schwartz,  and book penned by Roger O. Hirson  (who was best known for writing the script to the war flick The Bridge at Remagen) may have been an oddity when it opened on Broadway in 1972, given the choice of the central character, but…