Los Angeles

AN UNABASHED LOVE LETTER TO MICHAEL McKEAN Dear Michael McKean, I hereby declare that I am unashamedly besotted with love for you. Why? Because last night, I saw you take a handful of songs by Randy Newman and watched you become a different character with every song, turning each into an exquisitely dimensional one-act play….

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOLMES The world premiere of Watson, The Last Great Tale Of The Legendary Sherlock Holmes, presented by the Sacred Fools Theatre Company, has a lot going for it: side-splitting Vaudevillian-type sight gags, brilliantly inventive direction, comedic acting that harks back to silent film, insanely luminous and flowery dialogue, a cohesive plot,…

WISCONSIN Â IN SENSURROUND What do you get when you mix the styles of Grand Guignol, farce, and situational comedy with the sensibilities of the Coen Brothers (Fargo) and Frederick Knott (playwright of Dial M For Murder and Wait Until Dark)? One would think a bloody, horrific mess, but The Butcher of Baraboo, at the Lankershim Arts…

THE CURE FOR THE BLUES HAS ARRIVED I have not been lucky enough to see legendary singers – such as Keely Smith, Dean Martin, or Ella Fitzgerald – perform standards live. Time and again, I am told by people who saw them what magic occurs when an original personality with a distinctive voice interprets songs…

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…

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…

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…

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…