Los Angeles

REVENGE AS ENTERTAINMENT With Will Swenson and Lesli Margherita, La Mirada goes all in for this major revival Some shows you make time for. Others you plan around. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is one of those shows — if it’s done right. When the musical first arrived in 1979 (winning 8…

A DELICIOUSLY VERY WRONG WAY TO CELEBRATE THE HOLIDAYS Santa’s dead, the carols are cursed, and Zombie Joe wants your soul for Christmas If you survived Urban Death: Tour of Terror in October—and lived to tell the tale—Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group is inviting you back for a holiday encore that swaps pumpkin guts for…

A HOLIDAY PANTO THAT KNOWS WHAT IT’S DOING The Actors’ Gang offers a family-friendly fairy tale with teeth Children of the Winter Kingdom – The Bonkers Adventures of Holly and Spruce, now frolicking at The Actors’ Gang in Culver City, is reminiscent of the beloved British Christmas pantomimes. The family-friendly show is festive and song-filled,…

TAKE THAT, NAKATOMI The Troubies blow up Die Hard, Heart-style — and it’s pure holiday mayhem The Troubadour Theater Company — the Troubies — has been wreaking musical-comedy havoc around Los Angeles since 1995, and their latest spoof, Die Heart: The Director’s Cut, might be the most gloriously unhinged holiday offering they’ve detonated yet. Their…

HERBERT ROSS’S BOHÈME RETURNS Beauty polished, questions still lingering Puccini’s tale may be endlessly familiar, yet the recent Los Angeles staging shows how even the most well-trodden path can still feel unsettled and full of open questions. For those new to the work, the opera traces two parallel romances among struggling artists in 1830s Paris….

A PRINCIPLED PRODUCTION Simon Stephens’ deceptively simple romance finally reveals its cosmic heart in close quarters at Skylight Theatre Director Cameron Watson delivers a remarkably authentic and poignant tale with his production of Heisenberg, a short play based on a rather unremarkable human relationship story. What is remarkable is that this intimate outing, which opened…

DON’T JEW HAVE ANYTHING BETTER TO DO? {From the Archives — Back in 2010, when Facebook was still fun and Broadway still flirted with stereotypes like they were going out of style (which they were), Stage and Cinema took a trip to Jewtopia. We survived to tell the tale — and we’re not even charging…

THE PAST IS NEVER DEAD — IT RINGS THE DOORBELL Priestley’s prophetic 1945 masterpiece glows with fierce clarity at Theatre 40 Masquerading as one of those staid drawing room mysteries Agatha Christie would knock off during Afternoon Tea while nibbling on scones with clotted cream and crustless cucumber sandwiches, An Inspector Calls by British playwright…

CUTE MEETS CUTE, AGAIN Rendered with a rom-com frame around a night of emotional archaeology, Douglas Lyons’s Table 17, briskly staged by Zhailon Levingston, wants to be irresistible, and for the most part it is. The premise is simple but well-served: two years after their breakup, previously engaged Jada (Gail Bean) and Dallas (Biko Eisen-Martin)…

THIS WAY TO THE AMERICAN DREAM– MIND THE TRAP DOORS Kafka’s story still needs an ending, but Open Fist delivers a wildly inventive Amerika If you think America is in an existential crisis right now, you either don’t know your U.S. history, or you aren’t familiar with Franz Kafka’s Amerika or, The Man Who Disappeared—which, in Dietrich…

Bluebeard’s Castle, A Medieval Musical Thriller by Russian director and playwright Sofia Streisand, making her U.S. debut at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, displays immense ambition that achieves only partial realization. Streisand took her inspiration from La Barbe Bleue, the French fairy tale of a serial killer whose preferred victims are the women wed to him….

SUPER ZEROES UNITE! Aging heroes, flat jokes, and laughs that need life support Golden Age by Thomas J. Nisuraca is the roughest of rough theatre. Staged by Force of Nature Productions and directed by Aurora Culver at North Hollywood’s Sawyer’s Playhouse, Golden Age kicks off with a premise worthy of a Saturday Night Live skit:…