Los Angeles

HISTORY AS MYTHOLOGY AS ROCK AND ROLL Dan Dietz’s American Misfit is the kind of smart, provocative entertainment that stimulates the best part of an audience: its appreciation.   As produced by the ever-resourceful Theatre @ Boston Court, this play furiously delineates some mixed results of the American experiment with historical footnotes that illuminate our present…

NO SLIPS HERE After previous productions in Chicago and New York, Daniel Talbott’s first play Slipping touches down in Los Angeles and serves as both the inaugural production of Rattlestick  Playwrights Theater in Los Angeles  and his directorial debut. The deconstructed text is challenging – hopping back and forth in  place and time  utilizing a plethora of short scenes…

A MARRIAGE MADE IN HEAVEN Less than a month after its pop-up production of The Barber of Seville, Pacific Opera Project (POP) continues Beaumarchais’ trilogy with Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (Le Nozze di Figaro). Unlike that pop-production, this brief run in two successive weekends at Porticos Art Space in Pasadena and the Miles Memorial…

A DARK, RIVETING AND WORTHY TRIP TO THE FOREST An undeservedly small house took in Friday’s performance of Caryl Churchill’s brilliant, unsettling Mad Forest.   Commissioned in 1990 in response to the events of the 1989 Romanian Revolution, this is a challenging piece of theatre that Open Fist deserves recognition for producing.   Under Marya Mazor’s smart,…

THE GEFFEN PRODUCTION OF AMERICAN BUFFALO PREFERS TO GRAZE RATHER THAN STAMPEDE The script of David Mamet’s assaulting and brutal American Buffalo still packs bite after thirty-eight years. The rapid-fire rat-a-tat-tat staccato dialogue crackles, and its unsentimental, unflinching portrait of two-bit low-lifes willing to scrape, scrap, and screw anything and everything to get their slice…

SO MANY ATROCITIES IN ONE EVENING When stories appear which elucidate the carnage during WWII, many look to heaven and ask, “Why?” But the script and execution of Our Class, about a true-life European massacre, are so rife with problems that you now have other reasons to clench a fist to the sky with the…

L.A. Contemporary Dance Company (LACDC) presented their spring program last weekend and what began in the first half as inaccessible artiness became a thrilling showcase for co-founder and Artistic Director Kate Hutter, both as choreographer and dancer. The second half of Then. Now. Onward!, which played in the Diavolo Dance Space, began with Hutter’s Unravel,…

NOT MUCH UNDERGROUND Author Neil Gaiman writes for the anime and graphic novel era – rollicking adventures that are tonally glib, suffused with whimsy and wit, and full of puns, extraordinary concepts, and vivid characters.   Attempting to adapt these novels for the theater is an audacious idea – and so much more so to stage…

LADIES IN THEIR GOLDEN YEARS REAWAKEN BROADWAY’S  GOLDEN AGE The Southland Theatre Artists Goodwill Event (best known by its acronym S.T.A.G.E.) presented its 29th cavalcade of stars this year at the snazzy Art Deco-styled 1930 Saban Theatre (originally the Fox Wilshire). This annual fundraiser (created by Michael Kearns and James Carroll Pickett in 1984) raised more…

THE MISCHEVIOUS INDEMNITY OF NOIR You can bring a blanc sensibility to noir, but noir finds a way of seeping in’”its luxurious, sweet poison stealing focus when you’re not looking. In Billy & Ray, playwright Mike Bencivenga and director Garry Marshall set out to tell the undeniably funny story of how Billy Wilder and Raymond…

BETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE A soldier named Mario returns from Iraq just in time for the 2005 New Year’s celebration with his East Los Angeles family, friends and novia – but he also returns traumatized by war. Fueled by guilt and sorrow, he has nightmares and begins drinking more and more, spinning out…

MAX RAABE & PALAST ORCHESTER MAKE VENUE DEBUT AT WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL The public’s fondness for songs has an extensive and nearly unbroken history, and one of the acmes of this history took place in America from the 1910s into the 1950s. During this time, songsmiths created ditties that were so well constructed in…

TALLIS SOME MORE With their presentation of the Broadway Festival last week, the Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College not only validated the extraordinary rebirth of downtown Los Angeles but offered as the festival centerpiece a chamber concert by the Tallis Scholars inside the revitalized 1893 Bradbury Building. Seated on multiple levels around…

A BUTTERFLY THAT’S STILL IN THE COCOON Katherine Noon’s latest ensemble workshop-developed hydra creation, The Bargain and the Butterfly, takes its inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Artist of the Beautiful. In Hawthorne’s tale, Owen Warland works at a watchmaker’s shop; he is a brilliant fool with a heart of gold who is more caught up…