Los Angeles

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…

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…

BEST BE SKIPPIN’ PIPPIN I need to stop reading press releases and just go to review a show. A recent Â 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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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?…

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…

“ANOTHER THING I LIKE IS THE HOME-RUN TROT†It is not so much that time has been unkind to Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out but that we were perhaps too kind to it in the first place. Now, stripped of its self-importance and with enough time having elapsed since it won all its prizes and…

ALTHOUGH BUMPY, MERRILY DOES INDEED ROLL ALONG Because Actors Co-op’s production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Merrily We Roll Along whirls along like a carnival ride, you would think the centrifugal force of Richard Israel’s staging would have actors flying from the stage. The opening number, “That Frank†has players smoothly whipping around at just the…

REMEMBERING TOM If revivals are to be the mainstay of our national theater – thereby turning our theaters into museums – then interpretative artists are going to have to find ways to guarantee that theater continues to be a living, breathing organism. One way is to rediscover the elements that define a classic and unify…