Los Angeles

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…

DEAFTRAP Writer Stephen Sachs and the Fountain Theatre have come up with what would appear to be a fresh approach to Rostand’s classic play, Cyrano de Bergerac. In this modern-day version, Cyrano is no longer the joyful poet, soldier, and owner of a humongous proboscis, but a frustrated poet who happens to be deaf. He…

TAUGHT BY MASTERS William Faulkner might or might not have quipped that Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies he’d ever met.   Faulkner definitely did call James both priggish and among the best of novelists, and even if the old-lady line proves spurious, it sounds enough like both of them that one wishes…

THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT A demon-possessed, bleeding-eyed, pyro-maniacal Raggedy Ann doll with pre-cum on her face is the vortex around which Michael John LaChiusa’s new comedy Sukie and Sue: Their Story swirls: it’s a flight of fancy that feels wickedly appealing, and he just about pulls it off. This new work, produced by…

ONE FROGGY EVENING Once again, Musical Theatre Guild (MTG), a company of professional performers who present concert-staged readings, has produced a stellar offering of a rarely-seen musical – William Finn’s A New Brain – that elucidated why it is rarely produced. More important, MTG also revealed how a musical’s spotty construction can be overcome with…

GRIEG, INTERRUPTED The Pianist of Willesden Lane features world-class piano playing, a moving story, a performer who has mastered the art of the former but not of the latter, and a director who can’t tell the difference. About ten years ago, pianist Mona Golabek wrote with Lee Cohen a children’s book about Golabek’s mother, Lisa…

THE TRIUMPH OF IRONY When Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (R&G) premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1966, the critics hated it. While a poor production may have been partially to blame, the ensuing decades have certainly vindicated him. Stoppard’s talent for reworking Shakespeare earned him a 1999  Oscar for Shakespeare in Love….

REVEALING JUDY HOLLIDAY If you really never cared about Judy Holliday, because you only know her from grating performances in unsophisticated 50’s movies, you’re not alone.   (Turns out she may have hated them more than I.)   And I was warned that Concealing Judy Holliday is built upon the somewhat familiar premise of a deathbed fever…

DRINKS ARE QUICK Corey Womack has produced and stage-managed my two favorite Shakespeare shows of the past year, and so to me she is among the most able and important people working in the American theater.   True, more famous names may bring the classics to Southern California stages.   But from Peter Hall’s uninspired Midsummer Night’s…

COME FOR THE MUSIC, STAY FOR THE CADILLAC The music is everything in Miss Saigon’”not the plot, which is strangely muddled at times, and not the lyrics, which are sometimes awkward. What sticks in your mind and what made the show such an enduring hit (currently the eleventh longest running show in Broadway history) is…

NEW BEGINNINGS “You are bafu!” is an insult hurled many times throughout Danai Gurira’s new play The Convert. Bafu means traitor; in this context, it is used to describe Africans who collaborate with Europeans in ways that go against tribal customs. Much of the drama in The Convert centers on those who are considered traitors…

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NATURALISM Much has been written about Eugene O’Neill’s decision to trade first names with his own dead brother Edmund when naming the younger Tyrone brothers in Long Day’s Journey into Night.   The autobiographical play about the family of a fading actor was after all so personal to the writer that he…

A YOUNG MAN’S PLAY Would-be writers are often given the advice, “Write what you know.” Of the many reasons why writers should write what they know is that it lends authenticity to their creative output. Anton Chekhov’s first full-length play, Ivanov, proves the truth of this dictum. While Ivanov is not exactly an autobiographical play,…

DAMES AT SEA: NOTES ON CAMP When Dames at Sea opened in 1966 at the Caffe Cino, a small coffee house and performance space in New York City’s Greenwich Village that was at the heart of the early off-off Broadway movement, the show was a trifle’”a campy lark into the backstage musicals of early talkies,…

AS GOOD AS IT GETS In his extraordinary production of Good People at the Geffen, director Matt Shakman has validated the necessary ingredients of a great show: First: Storytelling. In describing the plot of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People, one might categorize this seriocomedy as a “simple play,” as did the director. Shakman also said the…