Los Angeles

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…

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…