Los Angeles

THE LITTLE DOG LAUGHED, BUT THE AUDIENCE WASN’T SO LUCKY Douglas Carter Beane’s 2007 Tony-nominated play The Little Dog Laughed is a comedy. Apparently director Jon Cortez did not get that memo. Under his misguided, clueless and inept   watch at the Zephyr Theatre, what should be a brisk romp turns into a laborious 2 1/2…

WHAT WILL YOU SEE IN RED? John Logan’s 2010 Tony-winning Red is a work of art, and the Mark Taper Forum is presenting the 2009 Donmar Warehouse Production, starring the illustrious Alfred Molina as Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko. Attending the play cannot be recommended enough. The script is in many ways a revelation in…

THE PLAY’S THE THING IN BLAME IT ON BECKETT The Oxford Dictionary defines a dramaturge as “a literary editor on the staff of a theatre who liaises with authors and edits texts”; it is the trials and tribulations of a dramaturge that takes center stage in John Morogiello’s Blame it on Beckett, the second production…

A PERFECTLY ORCHESTRATED EVENING I sincerely hope that you don’t have plans yet for Saturday, August 18. Conductor Rachael Worby will lead a celebration of the American Songbook in an alfresco concert on the Caltech grounds in Pasadena. To call this evening “unique” is an understatement, as it features Rickie Lee Jones accompanied by full…

MIND YOUR MANOR Site-specific theater productions’”that is, theatre which is performed in unconventional spaces compatible to the script’”remain mystifyingly uncommon. For example, why do outdoor versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream have us sitting on a lawn or in some bleachers, when it could be thrilling to follow actors around in a forested location? Is…

A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY Productions of William Shakespeare’s plays grace the Los Angeles stage year round, but in the summer they multiply prolifically and fill public spaces. Among these, the productions of the Independent Shakespeare Co. (ISC) at Griffith Park are perhaps the most accessible due to the park’s central location, easy freeway access…

THE TRUE AMERICAN DREAM: KILL A PRESIDENT The cast is terrific in the Coeurage Theatre Company’s revival of Assassins at the Actors Circle Theatre’”and it is their commitment to the material that highlights both the strengths and weaknesses in this rarely performed Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical. The strengths include sharp characters and fabulous songs; the…

BRING ON THE BOTOX Fans of reality television, rejoice! The Real Drunk Housewives of the San Fernando Valley has just hit the stage – live and in person, sloshed and singing. While this new musical parody could use a facelift here and there, The Real Drunk Housewives is shaping up to be a fun evening’s…

THE BAT: A SWING AND A MISS Nowadays, more times than not, new plays are a wham-bam, down-and-dirty, in-and-out in 80 minutes “theater-lite” affair. Not that I’m complaining (I relish any chance to get to bed early), because even with their diminished running time, they are usually vapid, pointless exercises that delve no further than…

POETRY OUT OF MOTION I was quite keen to see Amy Freed’s The Psychic Life of Savages; curious about its fictional take on Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, the dead, messy poet heroines of my angst-ridden teenaged years. I would read Plath’s ripe paean to father fixation and suicide, Lady Lazarus, over and over’”bathing in…

WHO NEEDS HORSES? FARM BOY GALLOPS ALL ON ITS OWN War Horse is the theatrical juggernaut that took London by storm, crossed the pond, swept the Tony Awards and hit the road, recently completing a run at the Ahmanson Theatre. The majesty of the fantastical staging’”especially the life-sized horses created by the Handspring Puppet Company’”provided…

A GOGOL BORDELLO In adapting Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 comedy The Government Inspector (also known, in direct translation, as The Inspector General) for a modern idiom, Oded Gross has taken a work of enduring satire and made of it an instantly dated parody of 2011.   The original stands outside nation, era, or political alignment as an…

BEST BE ON YOUR AVANT-GARDE Understanding the origins of REDCAT, the downtown center for innovative visual, performing, and media arts, will assist the uninitiated in preparation for the avant-garde 9th Annual New Original Works Festival, now playing through August 11, 2012. And if you don’t like some of what you see at the festival, knowing…

SMART FOOLERY A young-audience offshoot of the Troubadour Theater Company, the Funky Punks seem dedicated to kiboshing the notion that a clown’s function is to scare children.   At the hour of comic tumbling, dance, acrobatics and puppetry I attended, the only child who cried was merely afraid of being dragged onstage.   In fact, except for…

DIS HERE’S A DIFF’RENT KIND OF HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL There is something very sweet going on in Eric Dodson’s and Alan Ross Fleishman’s new musical A Ring in Brooklyn. The unusual pleasure of the unamplified human voice’”the performers use no microphones’”is coupled with the creators’ obvious affection for their characters, elevating a rather simple premise…

IRREVERENT IN TRANSLATION In the same way that many really awful movies are actually good in the sense of being funny to laugh at (rather than laugh with), so the screenplays chosen by the Magnum Opus Players for stage use are so terrible that they make good comic theatre. And just to be absolutely clear,…