Los Angeles

BEING ALIVE IS AN UNDERSTATEMENT When the senseless Leap of Faith had its out of town tryout at the Ahmanson before its crash-and-burn on Broadway, there was only one thing which made sense: the pyrotechnic performer Raúl Esparza. This magnetic talent made evident that he could sing the listings from a phone book and make…

RED AND BROWN  IS THEATRICAL  GOLD Los Angeles is usually the last major theater city in the states to see productions of playwrights whose works have received praise in their world premieres, either in New York or at a regional house.   It often takes years for exhilarating plays to arrive in what is the busiest theater city…

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID Bootleg Theater  continues its run of the  world premiere of Death of a Salesgirl, an absurdist tragicomedy with integrated media, about one woman’s struggle to free herself from her past. Written by Patricia Scanlon, and starring Scanlon and Paul Dillon,  Death of a Salesgirl is a dark and humorous parable of a salesgirl breaking…

FLEET FEET, HOLLOW HEART When notes jostled in and out of the written score during the overture of Musical Theatre West’s 42nd Street, it portended a production that doesn’t have all the ingredients in place for a fully satisfying experience. The opening, that has the curtain raise just a bit to let us meet a…

LESS ADO IS STILL MUCH ADO Shakespeare’s plays tend to be longer than those of contemporary playwrights, typically running 120-150 minutes. This leads many theatre directors to wonder about the feasibility of performing Shakespeare, since contemporary theatre audiences seem to have increasingly short attention spans – perhaps 70-90 minutes. A typical solution is that of…

THE SHTICK MAY DETRACT FROM THE PLAY, BUT JUST TRY TO RIVAL THE ACTORS’ GANG The Rivals (1775), Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s wonderful Comedy of Manners, is a play about pretension; everyone in the work is pretending to be better in station or morality than they actually are’”from a military officer who mimics being a sexy…

AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF SILICON VALLEY Build hasn’t started yet, but the minute you walk into the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater at the Geffen Playhouse you feel drawn into another world by Sibyl Wickersheimer’s beautifully conceived and executed set. You’re in the middle of what looks like a mid-century Cliff May Rancho gone…

I OUGHT TO BE IN PICTURES OUGHT TO BE BETTER You would be hard-pressed to find anyone proclaiming I Ought To Be In Pictures to be Neil Simon’s finest hour, but even with its shortcomings it deserves much better treatment that it is currently receiving at the Falcon Theatre in Burbank.   Unlike his mid-60’s smashes…

A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY Faith by Evelina Fernandez, directed by Jose Luis Valenzuela, is a sensitive portrayal of a Mexican-American family in the 1940’s. Good performances and a smart use of music ultimately succeed in transforming a spotty episodic tale into a meaningful drama. Two melodramatic vignettes in Mexico seem to serve as a prequel, planting…

A CLOSE SHAVE The Pacific Opera Project’s production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street promises so much blood that before the curtain goes up three characters ask if the people in the first two rows might like to buy ponchos for one quid each.   The ponchos aren’t really for sale…

HIS OWN PRIVATE BOISE We’re in Boise, Idaho, in the break room of an arts and craft chain store called Hobby Lobby. Two men appear on closed circuit television doing a sort of home shopping channel patter about their wares. (They also break the fourth wall and do the announcement about turning off cell phones…

SEMINAR SEARCHES FOR MEANING The premise: four fiction writers have paid five thousand dollars each to participate in an exclusive seminar with a renowned teacher. Filled with witty wordplay, love triangles, and hints of something deeper, Center Theatre Group’s production of Theresa Rebeck’s writerly comedy Seminar is fun, colorful, and entertaining’”but ultimately offers emotionally lean…

THEY’RE DROPPING LIKE FLIES AT ACTORS CO-OP Since it was first published in1939,   Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (originally titled Ten Little Niggers and quickly renamed for the 2nd printing) has sold over 100 million copies, making it the best-selling mystery novel of all time. In 1943 Dame Aggie adapted the novel for…