Los Angeles

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…

IT IS (BUT SHOULDN’T BE) DONE There was something that felt particularly showcase-y about It Is Done, which can best be described as a 22-minute episode of The Twilight Zone laboriously stretched into a full-length one-act. There are three characters in Alex Goldberg’s talky script. Hank (Michael McCartney) is the skanky proprietor of a bar…

COMMUNION If the Ahmanson Theater is akin to a cathedral (elevated rules of decorum apply, and a certain dress code, and it’s expensive and showy in such a way as to invite your tithe and your awestruck adoration), the Glendale Centre Theatre is more like a Universalist meeting house that grew out of a commune,…

THE PERFECT PINOT PAIRING Pinot Noir is presently one of the most popular wine varietals in California thanks to Sideways. First published as a novel by Rex Pickett in 2004 before being made into a feature film starring Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh, Sideways is now a play making its…

BONA FIDE ACTING FUELS DIDACTIC SCRIPT At about the same time that the United States entered WWI, units of the 24th Infantry Regiment, one of the Army’s four black regiments, set up camp on the outer edge of Houston. The Regiment had already seen action in the Philippines and New Mexico (against Pancho Villa), so…

OF GOOD TURNS AND SCREWINGS All emotional reaction comes filtered through prerequisite knowledge: the sound of a crying baby is annoying, unless it’s your baby, in which case that sound may make you feel anything from relief (“It’s your turn, babe”) to terror (“I thought he was napping – that sounded like it came from…

FOLLIES IN HOLLYWOOD Follies has always been a fabulous musical. It may not be Stephen Sondheim‘s greatest musical, but it is the Stephen Sondheim musical that his admirers most desperately want to love. Follies contains what is arguably his most ravishing score.   Musically, it evokes ghosts of theater songs past, while lyrically, it creates an…

THE IMPERFECT STORM Over lunch today, I tried to tell someone about Michael Elyanow’s new take on the Medea myth and found myself crying into my tikka masala.   The material is horrifying enough in the Euripides version: a witch, having lost the affections of the lover for whom she has sacrificed everything, kills his new…

IT COULD HAVE BEEN WONDERFUL East West Players’ cross-cultural take on the Stephen Sondheim/Harold Wheeler musical A Little Night Music highlights one of the most shimmering and romantic scores in American Musical Theatre, but the capricious performances and inconsistent directorial choices obstruct the radiance necessary to tell the tale about erotic liaisons in turn-of-the-century Sweden….

BETTER BE ON YOUR AVANT-GARDE Have you ever eaten at a new restaurant and summed it up thusly?: “I have no idea what I just ate! It was a little tough to chew and digest, but the presentation was thrilling and I loved the flavors. For what you get, the fare was reasonably priced, too….

INTIMATE OPERA Bringing opera to a wider audience is the noble goal of many a musical entrepreneur, but few succeed as well as Josh Shaw and Stephen Karr, founders of the Pacific Opera Project (POP). The company has been around less than a year, in which time it has already found its own home at…

A CAPTIVATING GENDER-BENDING STORY In Michael Premsrirat’s thoroughly engaging The Girl Most Likely To, an unnamed teenage Boy (a winning Tobit Raphael) is, and always has been, in the wrong body. Donning women’s clothes is so natural to him, that he puts on a wig, slips on a skimpy outfit (which shows off his comely…

RIGHT UP HALF-BAKED ALLEY Keith Stevenson’s writing in Out There on Fried Meat Ridge Rd. unsteadily walks a line between high and low comedy, veering more often toward sit-comism.   More skit than play, this quasi-story tells of a redneck saint who uses doe urine for cologne (Mr Stevenson) and the bottom-feeders he attempts to redeem…