Los Angeles

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…

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…