Los Angeles

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:…

SECOND STAR TO THE RIGHT—AND STRAIGHT INTO HILARIOUS DISASTER The La Mirada Theatre’s Broadway Series takes a gleeful nosedive into chaos with Peter Pan Goes Wrong, Mischief Theatre’s follow-up to The Play That Goes Wrong. Directed with buoyant precision by Eric Petersen, this meta-farce turns every technical blunder and mistimed cue into artful slapstick that…

HONORING A FAMILY STUCK IN A HOLOCAUST NIGHTMARE Four actors, four moving walls, a wooden table and chairs, and historical projections combine into an extraordinary theatrical experience in the hands of director Darin Anthony, set and production designer Justin Huen, and projection designer Ben Rock who enhance the emotional impact of Paper Walls by Elliot…

SWEET, CHARMING, AND BRIMMING WITH LIFE, HELLO, DOLLY! IS MUSICAL COMEDY HEAVEN It’s always extraordinary to hear a live orchestra in a musical these days — a rare and exhilarating luxury that immediately elevates the experience. Under the crisp and buoyant baton of Dennis Castellano, Musical Theatre West’s Hello, Dolly! fills the Carpenter Performing Arts…

WHEN INTROSPECTION FLATLINES: DAVID ROUSSEVE’S BECOMING DADDY AF IS MORE LIKE WTF After more than twenty years away from full-length solo work, choreographer and storyteller David Roussève returns with Becoming Daddy AF, a 90-minute self-portrait presented by CAP UCLA that promises introspection but rarely delivers the emotional punch it’s built around. The premise is compelling…

THANKS TO ANTAEUS, CYMBELINE RIDES AGAIN Who knew Cymbeline could gallop? Director Nike Doukas’s new staging at Antaeus Theatre Company turns one of Shakespeare’s most notoriously unwieldy plays into something brisk, lucid, and surprisingly delightful. Though often dismissed as a late-period jumble, this Cymbeline proves that with intelligence and judicious trimming, even Shakespeare’s strangest hybrids…

AMAZING THEATER HERE AND NOW Kai A. Ealy stands in a doorway wearing a coat that looks like it weighs forty pounds. Maybe it does. His Herald Loomis has just walked off seven years of forced labor on Joe Turner’s chain gang, and the weight is literal: bones, memory, rage, the specific gravity of stolen…

A MILD CASE OF THE CREEPS Ah, Halloween — All Hallows’ Day, Allhallowtide, Jack-o’-lanterns, the madcap lads of West Hollywood, the troops of pint-sized witches, Iron Men and Disney princesses marauding the city’s better neighborhoods lugging trick-or-treat bags bulging with Gummy Bears, Bit-O-Honeys, and Bazooka Gum, and of course the edgy saturnalia that infests Hollywood…

A GHOST STORY THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF TO DEATH It’s 2012 in Sherman Oaks, CA, when Thai-American life-insurance salesman Max (David Huynh) begins sleepwalking and violently lashes out at his pregnant wife Bincy (Christine Corpuz), prompting her protective Thai-born father Somboon (Alberto Isaac) to spirit her away and attempt a homespun exorcism. Max survives a second-story…

WHEN GRIEF MEETS THE ALGORITHM The terrible beauty of grief is that it makes us do irrational things with the most rational tools. In Lauren Gunderson‘s anthropology, now in its North American premiere at Rogue Machine Theatre, a Silicon Valley software engineer named Merril uses artificial intelligence to resurrect her missing sister Angie, only to…

BRAIDS AND BELONGING Some plays don’t announce themselves with spectacle. They invite you in through a metal grate, into a cramped Harlem salon where the air smells of braiding gel and the television plays Nollywood movies on loop. Before you know it, you’re laughing, aching, realizing how invested you’ve become in the fate of women…