Los Angeles

IT’S ONLY A FLOP There’s a glaring contradiction in  It’s Only a Play: Written by the usually crafty Terrence McNally, a 20-time Broadway playwright, this two-act love letter to Broadway theater and its “plays of fools” ’” depicted in full fratricidal frenzy at an opening night party ’” utterly mocks its message. The joke is on…

I CAN’T GET THAT TASTE OUT OF MY MOUTH Get ready for a show that is all vagina and no vulva. This bloody awful musical by Big Little Theater Company is of the women, by the women and for the women, especially lesbians — there are lesbians on stage, in the audience, and behind the…

HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN There is a world premiere now playing at Actors Co-op in Hollywood that is both ambitious and successful. The Human Comedy, set in the fictional California town of Ithaca in the San Joaquin Valley (think Fresno area), was first written as an MGM screenplay by Armenian-American William Saroyan, who was also…

LET ME IN, OR GET ME OUT? In writer/director Brynn Thayer‘s Let Me In, now running at the newly and spiffily remodeled Theatre 68 Arts Complex in North Hollywood,   actor Jorge Garcia of Lost fame gives a moving, funny, and incredibly nuanced performance as a New York cop on the day of his retirement. Mr….

DROP-DEAD FUNNY What happens when you take Little Shop of Horrors and mix it with The Pink Panther cartoons, and throw in a little dash of Urinetown? You get this fantastic dark musical comedy Did You See What Walter Paisley Did Today? Based on Roger Corman’s 1959 horror-tinged beatnik satire A Bucket of Blood, the…

COME FOR THE SCORE, LEAVE FOR THE BOOK Prior to Geffen Playhouse’s world premiere musical The Lonely Few, a pair of orange ear-plugs in ironically loud cellophane is offered to patrons, indicating a loud show will soon be upon us. We enter the amazingly transformed Audrey Skirball Kennis black-box theater, which now has patrons seated…

LOVELESS DISINFORMATION As I’m ushered into Antaeus Theatre Company’s mainstage theater at Kiki & David Gindler Performing Arts Center in Glendale to see Love and Information, I’m invited (as evidenced by a freshly painted sign) to “embark on an exploration of meaning.” In the 90 painful minutes that follow, however, this promised “meaning”’”like Godot’”never shows….

OFF TO NEVERLAND! It is common knowledge in the theater world that the most difficult show to create is a musical. The second is a parody. But both together?And yet, success has arrived in Los Angeles with For the Love of a Glove: An Unauthorized Musical Fable About Michael Jackson’s Life As Told By His…

HERE’S ANOTHER PLAY THAT SHOULD BE LOST A muddled, misjudged attempt to resurrect “Shakespeare’s lost play” that collapses under amateur acting, confused direction, and a baffling lack of theatrical intent. In Cardenio, now playing at City Garage, a character states in Latin, “De gustibus non disputandum est,” which means “There’s no accounting for taste.” Well,…

THE SECRET’S OUT: THIS GARDEN’S IN BLOOM It’s been almost a year since Ahmanson Theatre ushered in spring with the national tour of Hadestown. This season (thank ye, Fates!), spring has come again with a lush new production of the 1991 Broadway musical The Secret Garden. Based on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 English children’s novel…