Los Angeles

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…

A RARELY HEARD SYMPHONY TRUMPS AN OFT-HEARD RHAPSODY It never makes sense to me why Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3 is still not in the popular orchestral repertoire. Yes, it is approximately 20 minutes shorter than his other Symphonies – No. 1 (1896) and No. 2 (1908) – containing three instead of four movements. It was…

IN THE SHADOW OF STARS David Wiener’s ten-year-old, never-before-produced play Cassiopeia needs work.   As usual at Boston Court, this experimental piece has received a production so grand that it more than warrants seeing.   Also typical of Boston Court, this challenging show is so sharp that it highlights the weaknesses of its script, such that Mr….

WALKING THE TIGHTROPE STRIKES A PERFECT BALANCE AND SOARS TO THEATRICAL PERFECTION Lab24, the resident experimental theater company of the 24th STreet Theatre [sic], has scored a stupendous success with their debut production Walking the Tightrope. Based on a lyric poem by Mike Kenny, director Debbie Devine has transformed the ode into a highly stylized…

GOTH MEETS GIRL During the first five minutes of Lovesick I was beginning to think I had ended up at a school play. The acting was highly exaggerated, the props looked like elementary school paper-mache and the dialogue was doggerel verse. Fortunately, it got better. I wish I could say it got a lot better….