Los Angeles

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…

DANIEL EZRALOW: WHAT IS DANCE? To say that Daniel Ezralow is a busy man this week is an understatement. After making a worldwide name for himself as a dancemaker and aerial choreographer for theater, film, opera, concerts, and television, Ezralow is debuting his new Los Angeles-based company, Ezralow Dance, at the Ford Amphitheatre this Saturday,…

NOT AS TRYING AS IT COULD HAVE BEEN A slight bio-drama is given heft by larger-than-life performances in this latest outing from International City Theatre in Long Beach. Trying is based on playwright Joanna McClelland Glass’s own experiences as a 25-year-old woman from Saskatoon working as a secretary for the great, cantankerous Francis Biddle’”attorney general…

ONE IN A MILLION Rabid theatergoers who often attend plays are akin to miners panning for gold: The drudgery and disappointment from months of discovering rocks is dissipated when a precious nugget arrives. One in the Chamber is one such gem. Writer/director Marja-Lewis Ryan has crafted a harrowing account of a normal American family torn…

FORD INTO PECKINPAH VIA THE CHICKEN HYMN I’m a big fan of John Ford and Howard Hawks; My Darling Clementine and Red River are apex achievements in Hollywood studio storytelling. But Ford and Hawks were limited in ways that Impro Theatre is not. When Impro addresses the American Western as a system of philosophy and…

FIRST PERSIAN PLURAL To see the oldest extant Greek tragedy performed  sort-of  as it was 2500 years ago, but excluding masks and including Anne Bogart’s affection for fabric and yoga positions, you may now attend Aeschylus’s Persians  in a lovely amphitheater up in the Malibu hills. Essentially an after-the-fact ode to the Greek fighting spirit, delivered by a…