Los Angeles

BURNED BY AMBITION Sometimes the bravest artistic choice is asking for help. In Theft of Fire, Garrett Hildebrandt is presentable, well-spoken, talented, and smart. However, he’s not as talented as he believes himself to be and not smart enough to recognize that. (It’s excusable; he’s young.) Hildebrandt strides the stage at The Actors Company Let…

FROM BARK TO HEART A barking-dog complaint grows into something far more interesting I have been a fan of Richard Lucas since I reviewed his short, humorous, autobiographical novel The Dog Log, which chronicles life next door to two constantly yapping Yorkies and their hoarding, annoying owner as told through the device of a “dog…

ET TU, SHOESTRING? An ambitious historical comedy collapses under its own weight— but not without flashes of promise There are many different reasons for failure. All of them sting. The Fall of the Roman Republic… On a Shoestring Budget, now striding the stage at the Actors Company’s Other Space Theatre, is a failure. But a…

UNDER PRESSURE Ann Noble directs Ann Loud in a nicely twisted mystery set in a multi-crew submersible some 30,000 deep. Ann Loud, who penned the script and plays all five characters, skillfully captures the raw nerves of the crew and captain as they struggle to set the world’s record for longest sustained deep dive while…

CALAMITY JANE MEETS LAS VEGAS A charming tribute delivers plenty of Doris Day favorites, even if the biography occasionally takes a back seat Day After Day (The Life and Music of Doris Day) is like a slick—very slick—lounge act, the type you’d expect to see during Vegas’s heyday. Penned by Tony Santamauro, with Christy Mauro-Cohen…

WHAT THE MUSIC BOX REMEMBERS A lavish production overcomes a book that never fully solves its own mystery A music box opens. A grandmother sings a lullaby to a five-year-old girl who will spend the evening trying to remember it. That is the show in miniature. Everything that follows turns on whether the memory is…

SEND IN THE CLOWNS. ALL OF THEM. Will Thomas McFadden assembles a joyful showcase of clowning talent and comic invention Will Thomas McFadden has created a Jackson Pollock experience, only with clowns. (Really, talented clowns.) McFadden has gathered at the Broadwater Main Stage a kaleidoscope of the city’s top chuckle-creators for nightly romps. The clowning…

GHOSTS WITH HEARTBEATS Jon Schnitzer finds warmth and wonder beneath the bumps in the night Something Spooky, written and performed by Jon Schnitzer, is more about heart than haunting. Yes, there are strange goings-on, but the “investigation,” while focusing on things that go bump in the night, uncovers the spirit of an altogether different sort:…

A FREQUENT FLYER OF FUNNY Mike Blaha’s globe-trotting tales land more often than they miss Mike Blaha is a tall tumbler of funny. His show, Pivotal Nomad at the Broadwater Studio, starts with a blast as he relates doing stand-up around the world while pondering whether it’s time to click those ruby loafers three times…

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…