Los Angeles

TWISTED LITTLE PASSIONS IN THE SUBURBS Now that A Noise Within –   the Southern California repertory theater company dedicated to the classics – has gotten a snazzy new suburban theater in Pasadena, guess what?   They are doing the same fair-to-middling work on their new stage as they did in their old space in Glendale. I…

UNAPPRECIATED MASTERPIECE OR ABJECT FAILURE? Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein began the Golden Era of Broadway with two musicals that reimagined the previous form of musical comedies – a cluster of songs packaged together by a plot – by using songs to heighten and embellish a striking narrative. After creating Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel (1945),…

A TENNESSEE WILLIAMS CARICATURE A number of theatres in Los Angeles have marked the 100th anniversary of Tennessee Williams’ birth by staging productions of his plays. Following upon the successful runs of A House Not Meant To Stand at The Fountain Theatre and Five Beauties at the McCadden Theatre is the Elephant Theatre Company’s production…

THE BLIND LEADING THE HALF BLIND “It’s The Devils meets Marat/Sade.” someone said to me. “Yes,” I responded. “As performed by the Marx Brothers!” We were talking about the new Zombie Joe’s Underground show, Hosea Nova: A Jealous and Violent Man, Robert Riemer’s wacky baroque take on Hosea, the Biblical prophet of doom (where there’s…

SHORT TAKES ON CURRENT LOS ANGELES THEATER AS IT WAS: As Is, written by William M. Hoffman in 1984, when so many of our contemporaries were dying of the AIDS epidemic, still maintains its power. If it is dated at all, it is dated in good ways: it means that our so-called “gay” theater has…

A FOOL-IPINO FOR LOVE Just as the “problem” of immigration continues to be debated by our politicians, so does it continue to be presented in our theaters. Earlier this year, in the springtime, Tom Jacobson’s new play The Chinese Massacre (Annotated) was presented at the Atwater Village Theatre. His complex historical drama, which provided little…

AN ERROR IN COMEDY One of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, The Comedy of Errors, is also his shortest and most farcical. In fact, while scholars argue over the classification of other Bard works, there is no denying that this play belongs to the category of Comedies: the tale of two sets of separated twins is not…

GET SOME FANNY There are many reasons to see the revival of Harold Rome’s 1954 musical Fanny at the Alex Theatre, but you only have one shot. Musical Theatre Guild (MTG), an Equity company of the finest musical theatre talent in, well, anywhere, will present this captivating Marcel Pagnol story on Monday, November 14 at…

SITTING VIGIL FOR THE CENTER THEATRE GROUP, OR LIVING ON BORROWED THEATER Vigil, which was first done in Canada in 1995, is an oft-produced play, having been translated into 19 languages. At the same time that Malcolm Gets was appearing in an Off-Broadway production in 2009, A.C.T. in San Francisco was planning their 2010 outing,…

FALL FLAT My extreme reluctance to recommend Next Fall should not necessarily deter you from seeing it. Stay with me here. Geoffrey Nauffts’ Tony-nominated play, which concerns a gay couple with polarized religious beliefs, is a hybrid of Steel Magnolias (Southern quips and medical melodrama), Manhattan (the neurotic, atheistic, hypochondriac New Yorker who lands a…

DELICIOUS ACTING, HALF-BAKED SCRIPT October has seen a great run for mothers on the Los Angeles stage: Lily Knight in Peace In Our Time at Anteaus, Denise Crosby in House of Gold at EST/LA and now Casey Kramer as an Irish matriarch in Theatre Banshee’s perfect mounting of the imperfect Dolly West’s Kitchen. The second…

MANAGEABLE HAIR Say what you will about Musical Theatre West’s fluffy season selections, including Winter Wonderettes, Forbidden Broadway and Spamalot, this company continues to collect an astounding assemblage of artists equal to that of Broadway (in fact, many have performed on the Great White Way). But wouldn’t it be great to see this great talent…

THE TROUBLE WITH BHUTAN I am not advocating that bad directors should face a firing squad in the town square in full view of the entire community. But I have seen three plays now that were directed by Elina de Santos and, in baseball parlance, three strikes and you’re out. In none of the plays…

A BIGGER NOISE NEEDS TO BE MADE WITHIN A Noise Within (ANW), one of the nation’s leading classical repertory theatre companies, has done the unimaginable: after 19 seasons in a Masonic building in Glendale, they not only amassed enough donations to build a permanent home in Pasadena, but they started their 20th season without a…

WHAT’S COOKING IN HER KITCHEN? In the bracingly intelligent and potentially powerful Hermetically Sealed, playwright Kathryn Graf has set out to explore the ways in which families deceive themselves and how, in order to protect each other, they somehow manage to effectively destroy their own lives. Since each secret is revealed as it might be…

TENNESSEE W’S MASTER CLASS FOR ACTORS The New American Theatre production of Five Beauties (or, as it turned out to be at the performance I attended, Four Beauties) is not like going to the theater at all: it’s like attending an acting class in which each scene is beautifully executed and is unified by the…