Los Angeles

RING IT ON! I hadn’t read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring since junior high, and the movie, which is the first installment of Peter Jackson’s gorgeous film trilogy The Lord of the Rings, left me bewildered at best. To say then that I was dubious attending  a musical parody of the popular book and…

WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE Somewhere around half-way through Guy Zimmerman’s The Black Glass, a “Hollywood Fringe Festival premiere,” my mind began to wander. Every opportunity for me to jump on board with this dense, impenetrable, and esoteric mess had been squandered by abstruse writing, obscured plot, elusive character development, and…

THE FRIEND IN THE DARK Did you ever drive alone across a big, flat stretch of country at night?   You and your headlights and the asphalt spinning beneath like a long speckled treadmill – in a certain state of mind it’s easy to see the world as an Earth-sized ball rolling under your wheels.   Maybe…

FINDING CHEEZBURGER AT THE THEATER In a not-too-distant dystopian future in which lolcats  are humans’ only form of communication, the epic LOLPERA – a lolcat pop opera – links our memes  into a new religion for the Internet age. Ellen Warkentine and Andrew Pedroza’s inspired new work manages to provoke, disturb, and endlessly entertain. The LOLs echo…

THE GIFT OF SPEECH There is no possibility of love or happiness in Enda Walsh’s play The New Electric Ballroom, produced by Rogue Machine, winner of 2010 and 2011 Ovation and L.A. Drama Critics Circle awards. Walsh won a Tony for the book of Once just days before this show opened, and he is widely…

A MISSIONARY’S POSITION At rise: A critic is writing when the doorbell rings. The critic opens the door and reveals Savannah, a perky, Southern, cheerleader-type with pamphlets in her hand. Critic: Yes? Savannah: Hey, y’all! I’m here to spread the news about The Savannah Disputation at the Colony Theatre. It’s kind of like a cross…

A WELCOME MATT In Matt Soson’s new dark comedy The Lights Are Off, a college dorm room becomes a hotbed of sex, violence, drug dealing, and explorations of identity. The play centers on roommates grappling with competing moral codes. Bad boy Burnt, played by a gripping Mikey Hawley, battles with his uptight Christian roommate Randy,…

ATTEND THIS PLAY Go see Language Rooms now. I bought a ticket with no intention of a review, but Yussef El Guindi is far and away one of the most exciting new playwrights I have heard in years. The story takes place in an unnamed interrogation facility at an undisclosed location, and translator and interrogator…

A MUSICAL DIVIDED CAN STILL STAND How I adore Musical Theatre Guild, which is presenting a full-out, highly professional concert staging of the 1975 musical Shenandoah. MTG offers the chance to see rarely-produced musicals with such expertise that the viewer will forget there are even scripts in hand. Accompanied by marvelous musicians, the fully-costumed, lit,…

CAST DIVES IN HEAD FIRST TO MAKE pool (no water) FLOAT If you’ve been wondering whatever happened to all those experimental communal collective consciousness theater pieces that made New York’s famed La MaMa legendary back in the early 70’s, wonder no more. The art form is alive and well and swimming into The Complex’s Flight…

NO WAY The current production of No Way Around But Through, a world premiere play by Scott Caan, contains many ingredients  that explain why L.A. has little to no reputation as a fountainhead of great theater. It is more of a tutorial about the perpetuation of mediocrity than a reviewable event. Certainly, the play is problematic,…

BLACK BOX BASEBALL Rise Above Theatre Movement has proved once again that it is not afraid of performing difficult material. In the young theatre company’s first show, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, many of the actors were challenged by the play’s unconventional religious content and its lead actor bared his body on stage. In…

 ¿POR QUÉ? I have been trying to figure out sixty ways from Sunday’s opening of Los Otros just exactly how to approach a critique. The new one-act musical by composer Michael John LaChiusa (The Wild Party) and librettist/lyricist Ellen Fitzhugh (Grind) is essentially two sung-through monologues. For about 45 baffling minutes, The Woman (Michele Pawk),…

VERY IMPERVIOUS AND HARD TO GET, OR WHAT THE HELL..? I’m debating whether or not to tell you to go to Hell. Should you choose to go, playwright Steve Yockey will take you there in the world premiere of Very Still and Hard to See, a cluster of sporadically startling but ultimately opaque short stories…

RUN The Rogue Machine is one of the best theatre companies in Los Angeles, producing some of the finest productions anywhere. Sadly, their latest effort Where the Great Ones Run wandered off their true artistic center and truly left me baffled. The story basically is about a Country Star returning to his home town because…

A MESS IN BIG POCKETS Imagine yourself not exactly as JFK cheerleader Arthur Schlesinger Jr., but at least a 40ish New Deal Democrat, attending a John F. Kennedy rally in New York City in the summer of 1963.   You’re sympathetic to the president and his ideas, but you’re not one of the fresh-from-college, budding-hippie, personality-cult…

PIECE OF EIGHT Conceived by Ashlin Halfnight and Melanie Sylvan at New York’s Electric Pear Productions, Synesthesia can easily be classified in the “Why Didn’t I Think of That?” Department. The performance piece (actually, eight performance pieces in one) is a multi-medium event with such a clever concept that one would suspect the outcome would…

TOO MUCH TRAGEDY SPOILS CLEVER CONCEIT Prior to curtain at Sacred Fools’ production of Stoneface, the packed house watched samplings of Buster Keaton’s films, projected on a screen center stage. Hushed and rapt, almost reverent, many were even leaning forward towards the screen. When a funny bit occurred, the audience roared in unison, then just…