Los Angeles

THE THEATER TAKES ON  CORPORATE AMERICA’S  EVILS After a flurry of controversy in 2012, Mike Daisey’s provocative activism-cum-monologue work, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, is playing at Theatre Asylum. ­ This factual account is testimony of the tragic human exploitation that occurs at the Foxconn factory in Shengzhen, China, the world’s biggest manufacturer of Apple…

WAY TOO EARLY PLAYS Imagine you’d never heard of the Wooster Group, and that you knew nothing of the avant-garde theater’s storied history, or its origins in the downtown scene of 1970s New York that revitalized the American stage, or its famous founders including Spalding Gray and Willem Dafoe.   And suppose you didn’t know who…

YOU CAN SKIP THESE SKETCHY SKETCHES Those of us who are of a certain age reverently remember the National Lampoon as being one of the great humor magazines of the 1970s and early 1980s.   Yes, the film Animal House essentially brought the Lampoon “brand” into the mainstream, but prior to that, the ribald humor and…

THE GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PRESENT Race and immigration are popular topics on the LA stage, at least when it comes to more serious theatre. And there is good reason for this. LA is an incredibly multiracial and multicultural city that can be incredibly welcoming to non-white immigrants as well as threatening, persecuting and deadly. Some…

BRAWL IN THE FAMILY It’s a funny thing about families. We didn’t choose them, but they form the most important relationships in our lives. It’s the luck of the draw and some of us get dealt the aces and some the deuces. In A Family Thing, Gary Lennon’s brutal black comedy of familial misfortune, the…

MUSICAL WITH A CHECKERED PAST GETS A CHECKERED PRODUCTION Chess, the musical about two chess tournaments between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War, is the 1979 brain child of lyricist Tim Rice, who teamed up with ABBA composers Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus to create the (still) immensely popular 1984 concept album….

PROMISING SCRIPT BUTCHERED BY PRODUCTION VALUES Adam Seidel’s sanguinary dark comedy, Catching the Butcher, is an unlikely and eccentric love story in which a secret and utterly sick relationship develops between Bill, a selectively cruel serial killer, and Nancy, his Stockholm Syndrome affected victim. Seidel uses psychological horror to craft a deliciously demented commentary about…

I’D LIKE TO RETURN THIS GIFT, PLEASE The Geffen Playhouse has a proud tradition of staging crackerjack productions of dramatic works by some of the modern theater’s greatest playwrights. To their misfortune, though, these works invariably turn out to be the celebrated playwrights’ most excruciatingly dreadful plays – the ones, you suspect, that the authors…

BENCHED SHOULD HAVE BEEN BENCHED A cantankerous senior gets his dander up when he discovers a stranger occupying his favorite Central Park bench in the L.A. premiere of Richard Broadhurst’s Benched. Five minutes into the show I began wishing that the squatter would simply get up and leave so I could as well. No such…

THE DRAG QUEEN TO DRAG YOUR THOUGHTS AWAY FROM YOUR TROUBLES I first saw Coco Peru perform in a B movie sendup – a campy romp called Blood Orgy of the Carnival Queens!  But at New York’s Off-Off-Broadway Hamlet Theatre in 1994, the actress playing Kitty Valise, Student Nurse was simply Miss Coco. Later that week,…

WHERE’S THE SCANDAL? When I first drove past the Zephyr Theatre looking for parking, I saw what appeared to be anti-pornographic picketers on the sidewalk in front of the building. I wasn’t looking forward to wading through that melee. Well, by the time I parked and finally arrived for the show, the picketers were nowhere…

TALK ABOUT A LONG AND WINDING ROAD So, this cool cat painter, a blonde Frau, and several Liverpool lads named John, Paul, George, and Pete walk into a bar in Hamburg: While this sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, it is actually a more accurate description of Backbeat, a bad “musical.” Based on…