Los Angeles

LOVE CONQUERS COMMON SENSE My takeaway about Oscar Wilde in David Hare’s intellectually stimulating but overly static play of ideas, The Judas Kiss, now at Boston Court, is this: The literary genius, raconteur and bon vivant was not the wisest of men, making him largely liable for his own downfall. It may have been that…

TOO MANY CHOICES If Chekov’s characters could be said to be trapped by society, circumstance, and their own neuroses, the characters in playwright Nicky Silver’s Too Much Sun, now at the Odyssey Theatre, are more spoiled for choice. Money and opportunities give them physical possibilities; the guilt of those who have failed them and their…

CRIPPLE THE FUN Funny and heartbreaking, Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan is nothing less than a slalom run of emotional ups and downs and plot twists and turns. Antaeus Theatre’s production doesn’t necessarily hug every curve like Olympians, but the many snow jobbing characters in this 1996 dark comedy still leave an impression. As…

HYPER-ACTIVISM A promising hip-hop group formed by two childhood friends — a white writer and a black hype man — is thrown off its beat by racial tensions in the West Coast premiere of a powerful, funny and meaningful drama: Hype Man  by Idris Goodwin. The Fountain Theatre has opened it’s 2019 season with the third…

WITNESSING UGANDA IS AMAZING, EVEN THOUGH THE SHOW NEEDS WORK Griffin is a young black New York actor in search of more than a career. When he is kicked out of his church choir because he’s gay, it prompts him to join a volunteer program working with orphaned youth in Uganda. Once there in the…

UNFORGETTABLE AND FORGETTABLE AT THE SAME TIME Well, here’s a show that, while it doesn’t defy description, is nonetheless perplexing. As with Matthew Borne’s Cinderella, now playing across town, only you can decide whether or not the convoluted goings on play second fiddle to the astounding talent and dancing on stage. Co-written with Coleman Domingo…

BECAUSE IT’S THERE What if Dr. Martin Luther King was a down-to-earth, simple, vulnerable human being like the rest of us? What if human existence could be viewed from another dimension, one that allowed the viewer to weigh the pluses and minuses of the greater good versus personal choice, or the math of one human…

BOY OH BOYS With a fun and intermittently funny score by Hal Hackady (lyrics) and Larry Grossman (music), perky, adorable, enterprising direction by J. Scott Lapp, and some shining performances, Musical Theatre Guild’s concert-staged production of the more-than-rarely produced flop Minnie’s Boys turned out to be a pleasant and occasionally hilarious outing. This had some…