Los Angeles

CAUGHT IN A TAP Savion Glover is easily one of the best tap dancers this country has ever produced, but to the adoring throng at the beautifully sleek and modern Valley Performing Arts Center, Glover is both an institution and the rock star of the tap world (where else would you see a concert where…

COMICAL, HISTORICAL, WHIMSICAL, “POP”ICAL If you like Shakespeare: go.   If you hate Shakespeare: go.   If you love or loathe Peter Cetera: go.   If you dislike ecstatic, adorable, hard-working mega-talents willing to entertain you by all of a thousand means at their disposal: go anyway; this show might just find your pulse. Two Gentlemen of Chicago…

THE QUESTION IS: CAN YOU SEE TOMMY? Everything is murky about the DOMA Theatre Company’s new production of The Who’s Tommy at the Met Theatre’”the performances, the sound design, the staging, the choreography, and especially the lighting. Often actors are hardly visible when they sing, and the lighting design seemingly hasn’t been created with any…

BUT ONLY BY A THREAD During Connected, the 2011 dance piece from Australian company Chunky Move at the Luckman Theater in Los Angeles last week, a strip-club cat-call was heard from the audience when the performers removed portions of their costumes. With apologies to artistic director and choreographer Gideon Obarzanek for some hinterland denizens, the…

WHAT IS AN AFRICAN AMERICAN? While many plays purport to examine race issues, few tackle them head on. Ensemble Studio Theatre’s production of The Many Mistresses of Martin Luther King, by debut playwright Andrew Dolan, certainly does. It may not say anything new about race in America, but it does discuss race issues in a…

COMIC EPHEMERA In Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s 1636 comedy L’Illusion Comique, the modern playwright has abandoned the contextual trappings that make the original at all interesting, in order to write for a contemporary audience.   The result, in Casey Stangl’s fleet staging, very slightly disguises shallow earnestness as light amusement.   It’s fun; it’s supposed…

BLACK AND WHITE AND GOOD ALL OVER A smart play is usually a provocative play, but a provocative play is rarely smart.   Many playwrights competent to stir controversy have neither the chops nor, sadly, the intention to say much of benefit except to their own notoriety; and really talented writers don’t always invest in the…

THE GODOT WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR Samuel Beckett is a great comic playwright. You don’t believe me? Then run, don’t walk, to the Mark Taper Forum and see the blissfully funny and yet profoundly melancholy revival of Waiting For Godot. You will finally see what so many productions fail to get: that Estragon and Vladimir…

SOMEHOW, IT KEEPS ON WORKING For those who have never seen the 1978 musical Working, the Production Company’s current revival may be somewhat of a revelation. The subtitle of Studs Terkel’s brilliant oral history of the same name – adapted for the stage by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso – is People Talk About What…

IMPRISONED BY ART Most literary intellectuals have as much business writing about life behind bars as incarcerated felons have teaching text analysis.   In the last few months, Los Angeles has hosted two plays written by playwrights who have spent time, and set stories, in prisons.   Miguel Pinero did his time as a thief and drug…

OH WHAT A TANGLED WEB WE WEAVE While Theatre Unleashed’s cast and crew have a gloriously and unashamedly good time bringing The Spidey Project to the West Coast, it’s a shame that their source material isn’t the parody it promised to be in the press release. There are some very funny moments in this silly,…

GROUNDLINGS ZERO The best part about cleaning up my DVR last weekend was catching up on Raising Hope, the hilarious FOX comedy. It’s funny, surprising, naughty, sometimes dirty, and wholly original. In one episode they give Cloris Leachman a beautifully timed joke about how she could only have an orgasm with her late husband when…

AMERICAN NIGHT SUCKS, BUT IT SWALLOWS Juan José, a Mexican cop sick of being on-the-take, has crossed the border in search of citizenship, leaving his pregnant wife behind. Panicking over flash cards while studying for his U.S. citizenship exam, Juan falls asleep and the rest of this 90 minute, intermissionless, astoundingly uneven cavalcade of skits,…

HATE THE MUSICAL, BUT LOVE, LOVE, LOVE THE PRODUCTION Whether you love or hate the musical version of The Color Purple, no one, and I mean no one, can or will deny that this is one of the finest productions ever staged in a small theater in Los Angeles. Director Michael Matthews has taken a…

TWO MORE ONE-PERSON PLAYS AT THE SKYLIGHT Burke Byrnes’s  The Yellow House (Fridays) and Harry Hart-Browne’s  Special Delivery (Saturdays) both possess the virtues and weaknesses of one-person shows. Both have the bracing intelligence of their creators. Both are very well performed. Both are highly personal and yet avoid the narcissism that personal works are often guilty of….

WHY DO WE HAVE WHY WE HAVE A BODY? Every few years a vanity project comes along so appalling that one’s jaw hangs open for its entire running time, saliva connecting the lower lip to the floor in a single unbroken strand.   The planets have to align very particularly for a travesty of this magnitude…

A GROUNDED SEAGULL In Chekhov’s The Seagull, the young, angst-ridden writer Tréplev maintains that “What we need are new forms! We need new forms, and if we can’t have them, then we’re better off with no theater at all.” Yet when Chekhov wrote this line in 1895, he was referring not to the interpretation of…

A NEGLECTED CLASSIC GONE AWRY The story of Antony and Cleopatra shares with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet those two indispensable elements of tragedy: love and death. While Romeo and Juliet is perhaps Shakespeare’s best known play, Antony and Cleopatra is all but neglected. This is all the more surprising considering contemporary interest in its principal…