Los Angeles

A COMMUNITY OF ONE Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer-winning drama finds theatrical poetry in loneliness and hope Primary Trust is the sort of play that reminds us why theater matters. I want to state this at the outset, to avoid any risk of it becoming entangled in the words that follow: If you are impassioned by theater—or…

MAD SCIENCE, SANELY STAGED Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Cold War satire still packs a comic sting The Actors’ Gang has been a pillar of L.A. theater since 1988, when they burst onto the scene with their staging of Freaks at the old Tiffany Theatre on Sunset Boulevard, a production heralded by a poster sketch of Shannon Holt…

PEOPLE WHO NEED PEOPLE (TO MIND THE STORE) Michael Mullen shines in Jonathan Tolins’ affectionate backstage fantasy Jonathan Tolins built his 2013 solo play Buyer & Cellar around one of the stranger facts in contemporary celebrity lore. Barbra Streisand really does keep a basement mall under her Malibu barn: a doll shop, an antique store,…

LONG-DISTANCE DAMAGE Samuel D. Hunter finds devastating intimacy across thousands of miles Sam Shepard built True West on a kitchen and two brothers who could not stay out of each other’s way. They fought in the same room, over the same toaster, under the same desert moon. The room held the heat. Samuel D. Hunter…

THE WAR AFTER THE WAR A powerful family drama examines the lasting wounds of Vietnam and the Chicano Moratorium Some family dramas simmer, others explode, and still others leave emotional shrapnel embedded under the skin long after curtain call. Soul Sacrifice, currently having its world premiere at CASA 0101, does all three. Written by Consuelo…

SLIGHTLY TOO BIG FOR HIS WORLD Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer-winning drama offers comfort, compassion, and just enough unease beneath the surface A bell rings before the lights come up. Out of the dark rises Cranberry, New York, a fictional suburb of Rochester built at the size of a model train layout: a church, a bowling alley,…

THE JOINT IS JUMPIN’, IT’S REALLY JUMPIN’ Ebony Rep finds the joy, sorrow, and swing hidden inside Fats Waller’s enduring revue Ain’t Misbehavin’ does not tell the story of Fats Waller’s life. It does something trickier. Murray Horwitz and Richard Maltby Jr. built the 1978 revue from the Waller repertoire: the novelty numbers, the double…

PULLED OUT OF MYTH AND INTO THE HEADLINES Kenneth Cavander relocates Thebes to a near-future America, and something is lost in the move I first read Antigone in a basement college classroom in the fall of 1984, the week the polls turned against Walter Mondale. Kreon sounded like the calm voice on the evening news…

REACHING FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM Henry Ong’s final play transforms one man’s remarkable life into a timely cautionary tale Ascent is a small gem. It is not ostentatious enough to be affixed to the crown of some monarch, nor sumptuous enough to be a gaudy piece of “bling” dangling about some rapper’s neck, but it…

THIS ZORRO NEVER LEAVES A MARK Pacific Opera Project’s lavish production can’t rescue an opera that rarely catches fire Pacific Opera Project gave composer-librettist Héctor Armienta’s 2022 opera, Zorro, a lavish Los Angeles premiere last weekend at San Gabriel Mission Playhouse. Alas, strong production value was not enough to put life into this instantly forgettable…

LORCA IN DRAG, WITH HIS CLAWS INTACT Rodrigo García and Ugho Badú reimagine a Spanish classic without dulling its edge Lorca wrote for women’s voices and then watched the world go silent on him. Carlota: Alhajero de Secretos (Carlota: Jewelry Box of Secrets) hands those voices to men, and the swap is the honest move….

BRIGADOON EARNS ITS MIRACLE Pasadena Playhouse’s revelatory new production treats Lerner and Loewe’s fable not as nostalgia, but as a question of faith, sacrifice, and survival Dormancy is a survival strategy. Seeds use it. Bears use it. A village in the Scottish Highlands uses it in Brigadoon, which premiered on Broadway in 1947 — the…

LONG LIVE THE ABSURD Michael Michetti’s visually stunning staging transforms Ionesco’s meditation on death into a thing of eerie beauty It is rare, nowadays, when a play by the Romanian Godfather of absurdist theatre, Eugène Ionesco, is staged, and rarer still when it is staged well. That happy convergence can be currently experienced at the…

FATS WALLER’S JOINT IS JUMPIN’ AGAIN Ledisi and an all-star cast bring the Harlem Renaissance roaring back to life at the Nate Holden Center Ain’t Misbehavin’ is a sizzling celebration of Fats Waller’s music—songs that he made famous in a career that ranged from uptown clubs to downtown Tin Pan Alley to Hollywood and concert…

The Salon at the End of the Century: The Cardinal Assumption of Dark Library H.G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895, The Island of Doctor Moreau in 1896, The Invisible Man in 1897, and The War of the Worlds in 1898. Four books in four years, each one inventing a genre. He wrote them…