Los Angeles

A  PLAY WHICH  FALLS ON ITS FAITH Faith is one of the most prevalent themes in David Rambo’s God’s Man in Texas, and very likely where you place your faith or where you spend your Sunday mornings will inform your opinions of this production. On the one hand it is a dramatized sermon. On the other, as…

YOU MIGHT ENJOY THE  ACTING, BUT WILL YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC? It’s not easy to believe in magic watching Phylicia Rashad’s direction of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. While Rashad has a knack for the naturalistic style of theatre, evidenced in her astounding production of A Raisin in the Sun, she seems to have missed the…

A CAT IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a tricky play even before it leaves the page. Nearly sixty years after its first performance, Williams’ brilliant poetic language and the story’s pervasive darkness can easily steer it into the realm of melodrama. “Oft-revived,” it is both commercially and artistically primed…

MILES FURTHER, JAZZ FARTHER Pianist/keyboardist Herbie Hancock, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, trumpeter Sean Jones, and bassist Marcus Miller settled into Disney Hall to pay tribute to  arguably the greatest pioneer of Jazz music after Duke Ellington, Mr. Miles Davis. Hancock greeted the nearly sold-out audience with an emphatic “Los Angeles is in the House!”…

THE NEVERLAND AFTER DARK This ain’t Mary Martin’s Peter Pan. Or Walt Disney’s. Or Stephen Spielberg’s. With Peter Pan: The Boy Who Hated Mothers, playwright Michael Lluberes has his own take on the familiar story, at once faithful in spirit to Barrie’s original tale yet also interested in exploring Victorian attitudes about both children and…

BEWITCHED, BEGUILED AND THRILLED Mark Saltzman is one smart cookie. He approaches his new bio-musical of the legendary Lorenz Hart with a passionate curiosity about the great man’s life and career: intellectual curiosity about what was and imaginative curiosity for what might have been. Rodgers’ collaboration with Hart may be somewhat dwarfed in the public’s…

A ROCKY ROCKY MOUNTAIN ROMANCE In mountaineering lingo, “committing†refers to forcing yourself into a place of no return leaving nowhere to go but forward; and so it is with life, loss and love in Sharr White’s (The Other Place*) two-hander, Annapurna, making its Los Angeles premiere courtesy of the Odyssey Theatre. A drama with…

AFTERNOON DELIGHT Some people indulge in “culture” because they think that’s what they are supposed to do. They will slog their way through hours of highbrow offerings on PBS, slumber through a symphony or sit stupefied by a Shakespearian epic all because it makes them feel intellectually superior. The only problem is they aren’t having…

PASSION OVER PERFECTION wild Up is an electric ensemble of twenty-two twenty-somethings who vigorously perform a maelstrom of eclectic musical works ranging from J.S. Bach to They Might Be Giants. Led by the dynamic and skittish Artistic Director-Conductor Christopher Rountree at REDCAT in Disney Hall last Wednesday, the zestful ensemble performs  a bizarrely arranged program of…

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…