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Los Angeles
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THE AUTUMN GARDEN by Lillian Hellman – The Antaeus Company at the Deaf West Theatre – Los Angeles (North Hollywood) Theater Review
WHAT A DIFFERENCE A CAST MAKES Let me tell you a story. A tale of two casts. Once upon a time there was a playwright whose name was Lillian Hellman. You may have heard of her. She had a taste for melodrama, it’s true, but, at her best, she wrote some of the most effective…
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PHANTOM LUCK by John Steppling – Gunfighter Nation – The Lost Studio – Los Angeles Theater Review
THE GHOSTS OF GAMBLERS PAST AND PRESENT AND NO FUTURE Someone once said that the only poet Los Angeles ever produced was Raymond Chandler. It must have been said before John Steppling came along. Steppling is the one playwright who has located the rot at the core of our city and its environs and who…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: ANNIE (Musical Theatre West in Long Beach)
SHE’S BA-A-A-ACK Annie, the sugar-coated phenomenon that seems to have the life of an Everlasting Gobstopper, is back on the boards, courtesy of Musical Theatre West in Long Beach. The show, about comic strip legend Little Orphan Annie, keeps being remounted for a reason: this feel-good Depression-era musical has remarkably melodious tunes (music by Charles…
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Theater Review: THE TRAIN DRIVER (Fountain Theater in L.A.)
LIFE GOES ON, DOESN’T IT? The cemetery is the home of the nameless and it is strewn with pebbles and bits of garbage that serve as headstones. The keeper of the cemetery lives next to it in a shed that is equipped with not even the barest essentials. In this world of death, one does…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: VENICE (Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City)
OTHELLO! THE MUSICAL A thousand years ago, when Los Angeles theater was still taking baby steps (1968, to be precise), an Englishman, Jack Good, had the idea of a musical version of Othello – it wasn’t the first time, of course, Verdi’s opera having quite brilliantly executed the same idea quite a few years before…
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Theater Review: FUTURA (Boston Court in Pasadena)
THE FONTS THAT CHANGE THE WORLD It takes a lot of brass to write a futurist play about a not-so-distant time when print is dead and it is necessary to learn to write again. It takes even more brass to start the play with a thirty-five minute lecture on the history of typography and the…
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Theater Review: ANNA IN THE TROPICS (Sierra Madre Playhouse in Los Angeles)
TOLSTOY NEVER MADE ME SO HOT In his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Anna in the Tropics, Nilo Cruz created the role of striking, velvet-voiced, Cuban lothario Juan Julian, a lector who is hired to read books to the workers in a 1929 Tampa cigar factory — it alleviates tedium, inadvertently educates them, and, in this case,…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: HAMLET, PRINCE OF PUDDLES (L’Enfant Terrible at Bootleg Theater)
A PRINCELY PRODUCTION Once in a great while, a play will have me floating off the ground as if I had just been licked by God; a play that makes me feel better for having been alive; it encompasses great writing, acting, direction, and a triumphant technical team. Examples this past year are Cousin Bette…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: PIPPIN (DOMA Theater Company at the Hudson Backstage)
BEST BE SKIPPIN’ PIPPIN I need to stop reading press releases and just go to review a show. A recent  production of Oklahoma! announced a darker, grittier version which intrigued me enough to see it for the umpteenth time. The corn-fed musical turned out to be as dark as Deanna Durbin. Now comes the 1972 musical…
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WHEN GARBO TALKS! by Buddy Kaye and Mort Garson– International City Theatre – Los Angeles (Long Beach) Theater Review
DIDN’T GARBO SAY THAT SHE WANTED TO BE LEFT ALONE? Any great auteur will tell you that the opening number of a show should let the audience know what they’re in for: Jerome Robbins asked the Fiddler team, and they came up with “Tradition.†He asked the Forum team, and Sondheim came up with “Comedy…
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MEASURE FOR MEASURE by William Shakespeare – A Noise Within – Los Angeles (Glendale) Theater Review
IN FULL MEASURE In A Noise Within’s production of Measure for Measure, there is no doubt that laws which dictate morality are a reality, and The Duke (Robertson Dean) is concerned that he is too lax regarding the licentiousness of Vienna; he goes undercover as a Friar so that he may secretly observe his Deputy,…
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DIVING NORMAL by Ashlin Halfnight – SFS Theatre – Los Angeles Theater Review
CREATIVE TEAM SWIMS BEAUTIFULLY, BUT SCRIPT TAKES A DIVE SPOILER ALERT: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS INFORMATION THAT MAY SPOIL YOUR EXPERIENCE IF YOU PLAN TO SEE IT After a particularly challenging conversation with my theatre companion, it became clear that neither one of us could figure out why a play with so much potential could leave…
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EVERYTHING WILL BE DIFFERENT: A Brief History of Helen of Troy by Mark Schultz – Zephyr Theatre – Los Angeles Theater Review
EVERYTHING IS DISTURBING AND FUNNY Acned, awkward, ambitious, angry, alienated, angst-ridden adolescent Charlotte (a must-see performance by Alana Dietze) is having a bad go at it (more so than the normal discomfiture of pubescence): her beautiful mother has recently passed on, and her father Harry (a moribund Christopher Fields) is drinking and lashing out at…
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Theater Review: FDR (with Ed Asner at The Pasadena Playhouse)
HOW DO YOU SPELL RELIEF? William S. Burroughs said, “Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.†Well, what a relief it is to see the venerable Pasadena Playhouse open for business again after a financial housecleaning. There are indeed angels in our midst that came to the rescue after the Playhouse closed on February 7 and…
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Theater Review: THE TRAIN DRIVER (Fountain Theatre)
WHERE GRIEF GOES TO DIE There is a Turkish expression: “He that conceals his grief finds no remedy for it.” A train driver named Roelf (Morlan Higgins) is doing everything he can to remedy his all-consuming trauma caused by the death of a black woman and her baby, whose faces he saw immediately before they…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: OF GRAPES AND NUTS (Victory Theatre Center in Burbank)
AMIABLE PARODY AMBLES AND RAMBLES I agree with director Paul Stroili that the mythical regard for John Steinbeck, Nobel Prize-winner for literature, makes his novels ripe for parody. Of Grapes and Nuts (the melding of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men) was written 20 years ago by Doug Armstrong, Keith Cooper and…
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Tour Theater Review: THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR (Shakespeare’s Globe at the Broad)
A  BLOODY GOOD MERRY A delightful, rollicking, and imaginative production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, famous for Falstaff (the Renaissance Homer Simpson, if you will), appeared at Shakespeare’s Globe in London and, through the magic of benefactors and angels in the art world, has arrived in North America; more specifically (and luckily) for us, in…
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Theater Review: J.M. BARRIE’S PETER PAN (National Tour at the OC Performing Arts Center)
NEVERLAND NEVER LANDS – NOR DOES THIS PETER PAN TAKE OFF. In 2003, Universal Studios released a version of Peter Pan, J M Barrie’s beloved tale of childhood imagination that is threatened by burgeoning adulthood. The film used mind-boggling CGI effects to enhance the story of Peter, the boy who refuses to grow up, and…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE GOAT, OR WHO IS SYLVIA? (Chance Theater in Anaheim)
ALBEE SEEING YOU IN ANAHEIM HILLS [Reviewer calls his mom:] “Hey, Mom! I just saw Edward Albee’s The Goat at The Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills. The body of work this company has produced in the last year is seminal to the small theatre scene in Los Angeles. OK, Ma, Los Angeles adjacent. “What is it about?…
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DEAR HARVEY – Lee Strasberg Center – Los Angeles (West Hollywood) Theater Review
MILK AND SYMPATHY Dear Harvey Milk: After you were assassinated in 1978 (along with San Francisco’s Mayor Moscone) the gay community responded with a peaceful candlelight march instead of a violent demonstration. It spoke to a population’s ability to deal with grief in an elegant, eloquent, and loving style – not unlike the current production…
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