Los Angeles

“WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T ASK WHAT THIS SHOW WAS ABOUT” Natalie Portman, The Musical! is a two-hour, no-intermission sketch-comedy musical written and directed by Brittany Garms, with music by Frankie Marrone and Tara Pitt.   With Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman as her theme, Garms does not explore Ms. Portman’s already very public personal history, but rather…

CLASSICAL/CONTEMPORARY MASHUP There are few venues in Los Angeles better suited to productions of ancient Greek plays than the Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater at the Getty Villa. Not only does it boast a large outdoor amphitheatre surrounded by galleries full of Greek and Roman antiquities, but it is positioned towards the sea and away…

NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE Author Joan Didion’s powerful piece of writing, the elegiac monologue The Year of Magical Thinking, receives its Los Angeles premiere in this intimate production at the Elephant Theatre.   Didion’s play, adapted from her book, describes what can only be called a bona fide annus horribilis, in which her beloved husband…

A WHOLE NEW WORLD Musical revues are a tricky business. While highly enjoyable and entertaining, even high profile compilations like Side By Side By Sondheim and the Fats Waller song book Ain’t Misbehavin’ amount to little more than glorified cabaret shows. Jukebox musicals—a la Smokey Joe’s Cafe (Leiber and Stoller) and the long running Broadway…

SILENCE! THE FRANCHISE Silence! The Musical was one of the big hits of the 2005 New York International Fringe Festival. The parody of Jonathan Demme’s 1991 Oscar-winning horror thriller Silence of the Lambs found a home Off-Broadway last year, created enough buzz for a long run, and is still packing ‘em in. Now, the Los…

THE PLAYWRIGHT MUST HAVE EATEN A PILLOW, BECAUSE THIS PLAY IS DOWN IN THE MOUTH Andy Bloch’s The Bellflower Sessions is a bleak, black comedy about Jack Calvin, a victim of “The Great Recession,” and his unorthodox, vulgar, yet purportedly effective shrink, Dr. Wendy Bellflower. In spite of its timeliness and readily relatable subject matter,…

A BROOKLYN LOVE STORY – FUHGEDDABOUDIT! Originally produced as Emergency Used Candles for NYC’s Emerging Artists Theatre One Woman Standing Festival and then followed by a run at the famed Cherry Lane Theatre Off-Broadway, the newly titled A Brooklyn Love Story is making its L. A. premiere at Theatre 68.   For those of you who…

WITH A LITTLE LOVE, THIS COULD BE GREAT The perfect show is like the happy marriage: you can go decades without seeing one.   If the script is good, the lead actor is usually somebody’s cousin, or the director doesn’t understand the material; a great production almost never has a great script.   And so on.   Eclectic…

MAGIC TRICKS OR TRAGIC MIX? Every once in a while a show comes along that defies classification. Elephant Room, making its West Coast Premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre is one such show. It’s sort of a comedy, it’s sort of a magic show, it’s sort of a bloated SNL skit, it’s sort of an…

FISHING FOR LAUGHS If you are now or were at some point a wannabe entertainment professional, chances are you’re no stranger to slinging hash in a greasy spoon to make ends meet.   Playwright David J. Duman spent his formative years dishing up organic eats to some of San Francisco’s “most particular, demanding, and ridiculous diners.”  …

THE ACTORS SHINE IN A  CLOUDY PLAY Playwright Christy Hall comments about her play To Quiet the Quiet, “I am most interested in the complexities of the human condition,” and in her work she truly draws fine character studies. But there is some difficulty in the plot development. In an effort not to give away too…

A NATIONAL LAMPOON While the 2012 presidential election has provided entertainment enough, from Donald Trump’s political posturing to the Sarah Palin bus tour, there’s always room for a little light-hearted comedy. City in a Swamp Productions doesn’t take itself too seriously, but is clearly following every step of the election, even to including a reference…

IT’S THE PERFECT YEAR FOR THIS POWERFUL STORY, BUT FOR THIS PRODUCTION..? It must be an election year, as artistic directors all around the nation are presenting Adrian Hall’s meaty 1987 adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-Prize winning classic, All The King’s Men. It is a tale of two journeys: Willie Stark, a gubernatorial candidate…

A LITTLE BLUE More than a few friends recently mentioned that there are many “great” things on the boob tube. Since I don’t watch TV, it came as a surprise because I assumed it was mostly pablum. I was equally disturbed by this information not because I hold TV as mindless and addictive, but because…

A MOUTHFUL OF SAND Kiff Scholl’s production of Raymond King Shurtz’s new play, Under the Desert, is a show that’s impossible to discuss without equivocation.   It’s not terrible, and there are good things in it, but I’m not happy I saw it. When one sets a two-character play in a greasy spoon in the desert,…

SEE HOW THIS WARTIME FARCE HOLDS UP The marquee outside of Lamb’s Players declares See How They Run to be “one of the funniest shows ever.”     While never achieving a promise as great as that, Lamb’s has resurrected a sixty-year-old gem with good effect and more than enough laughs. As staged farces go, this one…

SOUR SATURDAY A troubled production is a sad spectacle, especially at a venerable theater that does some fine work.   PRT’s new staging of the John Steinbeck novel Sweet Thursday tries hard, and that it fails to coalesce does not negate the good stuff that makes up the mess.   It does, however, make for a dull…

SUBLIME CITY Son of Semele has consistently produced spectacular productions with scant resources in their awkward garage-like space nestled between lower Silver Lake and Historic Filipino Town.   Forever fearless when it comes to bringing challenging work to a town where theatre is often relegated to an ugly step-sister at the ball, their U.S. premiere of…