Los Angeles

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…

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…