Los Angeles

OUR INKBLOT INTERPRETATIONS: SPLAT, SPLAT, SPLAT, SPLAT, SPLENDID Theater isn’t just what it brings to us, it’s also what we bring to it. At least, that’s the general idea behind Open Fist Theatre Company’s Rorschach Fest, a series of five experimental one-act plays from risk-taking playwrights: John O’Keefe, Harold Pinter, Daniel MacIvor, and Caryl Churchill….

HERE’S SOMETHING THAT WILL INTEREST YOU This is the second show this year in L.A. to take head-on the insanity of modern journalism (the insanity being that while newspapers deliver so-called news, they gotta make a buck, so sensationalism often wins out [ask Hearst], but now we have the interenet to contend with, where any…

LOST … AND FOUND Found: A New Musical is determined to find its way. After a run off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theatre Company in 2014, this reworked West Coast premiere —   now playing at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in Downtown L.A., stumbles through its first act with vague ambitions, disconnection, and cloying clichés, only…

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…