Los Angeles

THE KISS OF DEATH A drama overloaded with “dots” that just don’t connect The Ruskin Group Theatre’s production of Stephen Fife’s Blue Kiss starts off with promise. Todd (Casey Morris), a somewhat stuffy, failed poet and depressed academic, has reluctantly agreed to tutor Susan (Carolina Rodriguez), a somewhat manic, wanna-be poet student. We’ve been here…

A NEW BEAT ON AN OLD DRUM A vibrant revival powered by talent, spectacle, and cultural pride Crazy Talented Asian Americans! “To create something new, we must first love what is old.”– Mei-Ling from Flower Drum Song I fell in love with East West Players and JACCC’s co-production revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Flower Drum…

THE COST OF LOOKING BACK With a soaring first act, I’m willing to pay the price for a second that can’t quite keep up Arthur Miller’s The Price has always been a talky, introspective piece—more excavation than action—but when it works, it’s quietly devastating. At Pacific Resident Theatre, director Elina de Santos delivers a production…

MASTER PRODUCTION During the last half-hour of the exquisitely produced “Master Harold”…and the boys, the Geffen Playhouse becomes theatre as a temple: a transcendental, spiritual, empowering and uplifting theatrical experience that only a playwriting craftsman like Athol Fugard could create. For what was up to then a lyrical examination of a white seventeen year-old school boy,…

KAFKA IN AMERICA— AND LOST AT SEA Striking visuals adrift in an overlong adaptation Who isn’t familiar with Franz Kafka (1883–1924), the tormented Czech writer? Or The Metamorphosis, Kafka’s most notable tale chronicling Gregor Samsa’s angst when he wakes one morning to discover he’s transformed into a “monstrous vermin”? While Kafka wrote a good deal…

LOST IN TRANSLATION— AND INTENTION Pulitzer winner that provokes, puzzles, and occasionally frustrates. Is it a scream into a void or a play? English, by Sanaz Toossi, won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for drama. It racked up five Tony nominations. Critics nationwide tout it. Yet, in spite of Atlantic and Roundabout’s handsome co-production, now on…

A HELL OF A MOUTHFUL A play where grief, faith, and ambition collide —and silence carries the weight Jacobson knows that the domestic and the exalted do not occupy different rooms. Hell Mouth, now receiving a luminous production at The Road Theatre Company, opens on a son cleaning his dying father and pivots, in a…

FOUNDING FATHERS, FOUND WANTING A promising historical premise undone by uneven writing What Price Freedom, by Tony Blake, having its world premiere at Moving Arts Theatre, recounts one of the more unusual moments in the course of the American Revolution: when John Adams (destined to be the second president of the United States) and Benjamin…

EVERYTHING’S COMING UP JULE Broadway’s golden-age hits return in a world premiere revue that treats them as living drama Jule Styne’s name tends to arrive attached to titles that feel immovable. Gypsy. Funny Girl. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The songs have outlived their original performers, yet they still seem written for bodies onstage, for voices under…