Los Angeles

MONSTER MASH In an effort to strip away the centuries, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has gone under the knife. Revitalizing the 200-year-old classic is the Beverly Hills-based performing arts center, The Wallis, which has commissioned a reimagining by Four Larks, an innovative L.A.-based theater company known for their interdisciplinary stylings. In this intimate world premiere production…

IT’S THE HIGH SCHOOL SHOW THAT I WISH I WROTE IN HIGH SCHOOL The thing that looks like a high school vanity project at the Geffen Playhouse is actually a world premiere with a lot of bucks behind it. While I certainly appreciate that Qui Nguyen of the self-described “geek” theater company Vampire Cowboys in…

CARYL ME HOME When the author is famed English playwright Caryl Churchill, theater about death and life’s surmounting surrealism isn’t depressing at all; it’s exhilarating. The author of Cloud Nine, Owners and Top Girls has written many short works as well, and right now two great one-acts are being given a minor production by Open…

YOU SHOULDA BEEN THERE Happy ever after is the stuff of fairy tales – yet, happy ever after is how we in the audience left the Alex Theatre on Sunday night. The show was It Shoulda Been You which enjoyed a respectable if modest run on Broadway in 2015. The New York critics, perhaps unused…

LIFE IMITATETH ART In Christopher Guest’s brilliant 1996 mockumentary Waiting For Guffman, the smalltown residents of Blaine, MO, come together to put on a show. But what if instead the residents in the film made the movie themselves? That’s the level of ironic self-unawareness permeating The $5 Shakespeare Company, a woeful work by Matthew Leavitt…

PAPA, CAN YOU HEAR ME? Every once in a while a play reminds us what – and how exciting – theater can be. In The Father (Le Père), French playwright Florian Zeller doesn’t just present a man with dementia, he makes us feel as if we have it, too. Electrifying Southern California with Zeller’s genius…

PASS THIS ROACH After a convoluted build-up, there’s a late scene in I Decided I’m Fine: A Roach Play that actually works. In it, Ellen (Veronica Tjioie), a trauma-stricken hoarder, exposes her “dirty secret” by welcoming outsiders into her shockingly cluttered home. If one can get past the improbability of such a willing invitation, the…

AT DAY’S END Thanks to Lanie Robertson’s bedrock-basic script, Wren T. Brown’s dedicated staging, Karole Foreman’s extraordinarily vulnerable performance, and Stephan Terry’s elegant piano playing, Ebony Rep’s 90-minute revival of Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill pays full homage to Billie Holiday’s heroism and heartbreak. Unlike her famous “God Bless the Child,” Lady Day…

HYMN-DINGER Sweet lovin’ Jesus, Del Shores is back, and he’s brought a band of gospel singers with him. In This Side of Crazy, writer/director/producer Shores introduces us to a Southern family comprised of the Christian singing trio, The Blaylock Sisters, and their gospel legend momma, Ditty Blaylock. These Christian ladies — well, one’s now an…

AFTER THE FLOOD Until the Flood lasts only 70 minutes. But its concentrated running time delivers a devastating drama. A ton of truth-telling now on tour at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, this 2016 one-act is the creation of actor, poet and oral historian Dael Orlandersmith. She becomes the partisans, witnesses, survivors and, above all, inhabitants…

YELLOW JOURNALISM, BLUE PLANET — UNCERTAIN FUTURES Propaganda has always existed. It’s when people promote and publicize their agenda utilizing biased or misleading information, a perfect tool for predomination, profit, and/or political power. With the advent of the internet, propaganda such as yellow journalism — which uses scandal-mongering, sensationalism and exaggeration of news events to…

SHEP IN TIME When I think of the late Sam Shepard, his plays Fool for Love, True West, Buried Child and Curse of the Starving Class usually come to mind. I was totally unfamiliar with Killer’s Head and  The Unseen Hand now playing as a double bill at the Odyssey in celebration of the theater’s 50th…