Los Angeles

NO SHIT, SHERLOCK As with Good Boys playing across town, Mysterious Circumstances doesn’t quite give us an ending the material deserves, but hoo-boy what a ride this is. Directed by Matt Shakman with a magical meta-theatrical flourish that makes life worth living, our fever dream is based on the still-unsolved true-life death of a Sir…

DEATH LIVES Arthur Miller makes Willie Loman, the tragic figure in his Death of a Salesman, 63 years old. So I was more than a little skeptical as to whether or not Rob Morrow (of Northern Exposure fame) could pull it off. At Ruskin Theatre Group, Morrow, with his boyish good looks, appears much younger…

A GOOD GOOD BOYS COULD’VE BEEN GREAT Gay playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (contributor to  Glee  and  Big Love) gets a revival of his drama Good Boys and True that premiered at Steppenwolf ten years ago. There is some solid stagecraft in his story about a privileged prep-school teen caught up in a sex scandal, but it’s shocking that while…

I WANNA SEE THE PRODUCERS Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. The Celebration production of The Producers is as far away from the Borscht Belt as a New York musical comedy — whose central characters are named Bialystock and Bloom — can get. On the other hand, this is the kind…

A ROLLER COASTER RIDE TO THE HEART OF DARKNESS I will always love good theater but, even so, every so often there comes along a play that actually restores one’s faith in the possibilities of theater. Dana H by the brilliant Lucas Hnath is just such a play. And Les Waters’ direction couldn’t be more…

LOOT CONDUCT At a time when drawing room comedies ruled West End theatre, and even the shock of the raw emotions depicted in Osborne’s Look Back in Anger had faded, a complacent London audience enjoyed such safe, heartwarming fare as Hello, Dolly!, and the water-thin comedy There’s a Girl in my Soup. Then in 1966…

A PUNCH IN THE GUT Raw as realism requires, good plays about boxing are more than just  Rocky slugfests. Like Clifford Odets’ seminal  Golden Boy, they transform an atavistic popular distraction into a metaphor for sweet success, the reward of pluck and nerve — or, as the title of Sucker Punch implies, a parable on selling your…

HAS TOLSTOY EVER BEEN SO HOT? In his Pulitzer Prize-winning play,  Anna in the Tropics, Nilo Cruz created the role of striking, velvet-voiced, Cuban Lothario Juan Julian, a lector who is hired to read books to the workers in a 1929 Tampa cigar factory — it alleviates tedium, inadvertently educates them, and, in this case, causes…

BILLY BOY OH BOY Meet Billy, an ex-con sharpshooter who is living his American Dream in 1979. This optimistic showman, romantic, and visionary has encouraged a fraternity of castaways — a Native American and his wife, a car thief, an ex-nurse, an erstwhile bank teller — to join him as entertainers in a troupe about…

GRAFFITI THAT ASKS PERMISSION Carly Uhlenbeek (Jasmine St. Clair), an African American suburban seventh grade girl, seeks answers in playwright David Jacobi’s Ready Steady Yeti Go, a Rogue Machine production that is part of the National New Play Network’s rolling world premiere program. She assembles her friends to reenact the events of a recent hate…

PLENTY TO DESIRE When I was thirteen I discovered Tennessee Williams when I picked up his play A Streetcar Named Desire at the New York Public Library. I don’t know if I fully understood it at that age, but there was one line that not only stayed with me my whole life, but is the…

SHOOTING STAR AIMS, SHOOTS … AND BORES Shooting Star, billed as “A Revealing New Musical” — and getting its World Premiere at the Hudson Theatres in Los Angeles under the direction of Michael Bello — offers us a glimpse of one man’s journey through the world of gay porn. Written by Florian Klein (a.k.a. adult…