Los Angeles

FINDING YOUR TRIBE Theatre of Identity, aka Social Issues Theatre, is a fascinating phenomenon: this genre promotes a particular people’s cultural identity and invites members of that culture and other cultures to experience that culture’s joys, problems, history, traditions, and point of view.   Plays like Torch Song Trilogy, The Boys Next Door, and Yellow Face…

L. A. THEATER RISES FROM THE DEAD With an assemblage of the bravest actors in Los Angeles, Zombie Joe returns with an all-new Urban Death, the naturalistic horror show in the style of Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. In just under an hour, this ghoulishly delightful series of vignettes serves up unfathomable repulsions, profound evils, distressed…

FAKE BOOK COMES TO TRUE LIFE Published in Paris in 1894, The Songs of Bilitis is a book of poems and epitaphs describing the life and loves of an ancient lesbian heroine named Bilitis. With emotional flourish, author Pierre Louí¿s biographically describes her simple country upbringing, pinnacles of romantic love and sexual gratification, and eventual…

WHAT DO YOU DO WITH A BAD MOM? Chalk Repertory Theatre continues presenting non-traditional, site-specific theatre with the world premiere of Dorothy Fortenberry’s newest work, Mommune. “Mommune” is the name of a childcare center, and the two-hour real-time melodrama about motherhood – featuring an all-woman ensemble – takes place at an actual day care center,…

SALVATION IN A STORM Who is the titular Flying Dutchman? Is he a mythological figure, a type of the wandering Jew bound to traverse the earth in travail until his day of salvation comes? Is he in some way the composer, an outsider and a genius yearning for acceptance and recognition? Or he is simply…

HOWLER Steve Yockey’s new play isn’t new, and it isn’t a play. The first contention first: Part of a new promotional concept of “rolling world premieres” designed specifically to hype theaters and the scripts they mount, Wolves already played in Atlanta, New Orleans, and Tempe last year. This isn’t a tour; it’s four different productions…

GAY ABSTRACTION For years, Ken Roht has proved himself to be one of the most inventive theater practitioners in Los Angeles. His avant-garde works include the renowned 99 Cent Only shows, which contain extravagant costumes by Ann Closs-Farley and sets wholly manufactured with items acquired at the 99 Cent Only Store. The original, entertaining and…

WHAT WERE JEW THINKING? Baby boomers should recall the time when a great comedy album could be played with regularity. Some of my favorites were Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow…Right! (1963), which contained his iconic “Noah” sketches; George Carlin’s Class Clown (1972) with its infamous track entitled “Seven Words You Can Never Say…

THE PLAY ABOUT A TRIAL ULTIMATELY BECOMES A TRIAL TO WATCH Stephen Adley Guirgis’ The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is a courtroom drama set in Purgatory where the guilty or not guilty verdict literally means heaven or hell for the one standing trial. The one being judged in this case is former apostle and…

A  RESTRICTED BUT  RIVETING ROOM Novelist Ira Levin may be best-known for Rosemary’s Baby and Stepford Wives, both made even more popular by their film adaptations, but as a playwright, Levin wrote the fifth longest-running play in Broadway history, Deathtrap (1978), made less popular by its film adaptation. Five years prior to Deathtrap, Veronica’s Room (originally subtitled…

BEHOLD THE BREATHTAKING BEAUTY OF CAVALIA’S ODYSSEO In 2003, Normand Latourelle, one of the co-founders of Cirque du Soleil, was ready to up the entertainment ante when he introduced his equine extravaganza Cavalia to the world. The show was a smash right out of the gate and has been galloping around the globe ever since….

GO GET LOST IN AUSTEN I drove to Jane Austen UnScripted directly from a production of Oklahoma!  as grand and empty as the wind sweepin’ down the plains.   With a quarter of the cast of that Rogers and Hammerstein show, and a tithe of the expense, seven Impro Theatre actor/writers showed more integrity to the spirit…

A COMPLETE WASTE OF WORDS If you hold a doctorate in linguistics then you might (and that’s a very questionable “might”) find some interesting banter in Complete, the alleged comedy written by Andrea Kuchlewska currently making its West Coast premiere at the Matrix Theatre. If, on the other hand, the scientific study of syntax and…

THE CORN IS HIGH INDEED Messrs. Rodgers and Hammerstein reinvented American Musical Theater for the ages when they created Oklahoma! in 1943, incorporating song and dance to tell their story rather than detract from it. The musical avoids creaking with age because Hammerstein’s book shuns overt sentimentality, and the lyrics are chock-full of poetic imagery…

RIPPED TO RAGS IN A BEAUTIFUL WAY John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book award-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath operates as both a harrowing portrait of the American struggle for life, liberty, and happiness, and an impassioned rally cry for the downtrodden; it is a fitting title (suggested by the writer’s wife) considering it…

CYBER SEEDINESS, FBI BUREAUCRACY, AND TABOO MONSTROSITY COME TO VIVID LIFE IN SEXSTING Written in collaboration with Internet crime attorney Susan Raffanti, Doris Baizley’s boundary-blurring examination of entrapment ethics depicts the undercover Internet chat room exchanges of an FBI investigator. Working under reactionary bureaucratic top-down pressure, the agent’s modus operandi is the explicit entrapment of…

WOODY LIGHT One iconic comic writer; eight monologues cut from the screen time of seven of his most memorable female characters; a six-person, all male cast: Those are the ingredients of Roy Cruz’s latest monologue-homage-comedy show, The Women of Woody, presented by Oh My Ribs! last weekend. Cruz’s last project in this vein was the…

ON THE WAY TO PARADISE [EDITOR’S NOTE: Since this 2013 review, Paradise has been re-tooled. Please see our new review of the 2018 production.] There is a telling item buried among the bric-a-brac of Stephanie Kerley Schwartz’s detailed country set of an economically depressed, coal-mining, hillbilly burg named Paradise:   A tin sign shows a forest…