Los Angeles

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…

DON’T BLAME MILLENNIALS: MILLENNIALS ARE KILLING MUSICALS IS KILLING MUSICALS (OR, WHEN SATIRE EATS ITSELF) An exhausting, vulgar, and unfocused musical that mistakes noise for insight and collapses into the very thing it claims to critique. There is a song in Millennials Are Killing Musicals, the new tuner currently suffocating at the Colony Theatre in…

A HYMN WITHOUT THE HALLELUJAH A polished, well-acted drama that never quite ignites Hymn by playwright Lolita Chakrabarti is a well-crafted piece, with detailed characters and dialogue that is enunciated with sincerity. Drina Durazo of Lower Depth Theatre, in collaboration with The Odyssey Theatre Ensemble’s Sally Essex-Lopresti, has mounted a slick two-man drama, which director…

HOLD YOUR HORSES A provocative subject that proves hard to recommend—and harder to ignore Olivia Dufault’s For Want of a Horse tackles a subject most plays wouldn’t dare touch—and to its credit, it does so without melodrama. But what might have been a deeply human exploration of how such a taboo shapes lives instead plays…