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Los Angeles
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Theater Review: SOUTHERNMOST (Playwrights’ Arena)
VOLCANOES WITHIN AND WITHOUT When you walk into the theater for playwright Mary Lyon Kamitaki’s Southernmost, Justin Huen’s scenic design transports you immediately into another world: An indoor-outdoor ramshackle house in Naalehu, on the coast of a largely unpopulated area on the Big Island of Hawaii. It is the southernmost inhabited space in the United…
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Theater Review: MY LIFE ON A DIET (Renée Taylor at The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
TAYLOR MADE If timing is everything with comedy Renée Taylor in My Life on a Diet is proof positive. This revival of her one-woman show, based on her 1986 memoir of the same title, is a master class in getting laughs. She takes sentences that wouldn’t necessarily be funny on the page and makes them…
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Theater Review: THE MEATBALL CHRONICLES (Hudson Guild Theatre in Hollywood)
HERE’S THE BEEF What happens when you’re brought up to feel invisible? Where do you go for solace? Where do you go to find your identity? For actress Debrianna Mansini it was in cooking; this was her joy, her salvation, her escape and most importantly it was the only way she was able to communicate…
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Music Preview: MONTEREY JAZZ FESTIVAL ON TOUR (Disney Hall)
GET YOUR JAZZ ON Hooray and hallelujah! Long before her third Grammy win, I have always been a fan of jazz vocalist and song interpreter extraordinaire Cécile McLorin Salvant. But seeing her live three times now has not only cemented my opinion that this is the most exciting thing in all music ’” not just…
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Theater Review: CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (National Tour)
THE CANDY MAN CAN’T The stage musical adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — Roald Dahl’s beloved children-of-all-ages’ story — has spun into town just, it seems, to make your teeth ache. Directed by Jack O’Brien, this already extended national tour arrives to a city near you even though it flopped on Broadway (27…
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Theater Review: CHAPS (Lamb’s Players in San Diego)
CHAPSCHTICK It’s 1944. The war is raging across the English Channel and the Germans could invade at any moment. Britain needs levity to get through these tough days. Miles (Charles Evans, Jr.) is the station manager for a BBC program and he’s got the solution. BBC has announced that a famous, beloved American country band…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: ROALD DAHL’S MATILDA THE MUSICAL (5-Star Theatricals in Thousand Oaks)
A VAULTING MATILDA Imagine Annie with psychokinetic powers, Nancy Drew as a mind-reader, or Cinderella acting as her own fairy godmother. Self-empowerment fuels this upbeat, knock-down, pell-mell 2011 musical. A multi-Tony and Olivier award winner, Matilda the Musical is now being given a piping-hot presentation by 5-Star Theatricals at Kavli Theatre. The much motivated heroine…
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Review: FREAKY FRIDAY (San Diego Musical Theatre)
THANK GOD IT’S FREAKY FRIDAY On the weekend of her mother’s everything-must-be-perfect second wedding, teenager Ellie (Rivers Harris) is in a funk: little brother Fletcher (John Perry Wishchuk), who talks through puppets, is driving her crazy; mother Katherine (Cassie Bleher) is bossing everyone around; her fiancé Mike (CJ Ravine) is trying too hard to get…
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Theater Review: FAITH HEALER (Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in Los Angeles)
THE BUSINESS OF FAITH The late Irish playwright Brian Friel’s Faith Healer premiered some 40 years ago and is now considered one of his greatest works. It is a memory play with three characters, told in a series of monologues. Frank is an Irish faith healer who takes his one-man show to isolated villages and…
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Theater Preview: MOMENTOS MORI (Manual Cinema)
THIS IS THE MOMENTOS I have seen the Chicago-based performance collective Manual Cinema on their home turf twice, and the theatricality is awesome. This endlessly inventive group of artists uses disarmingly simple tools — live music, paper puppets, overhead projectors — to tell transformative stories. Their enchanting works unsettle the boundaries between cinema and theater….
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Theater Review: INCOGNITO (Son of Semele)
BRAIN CRAMPS One of the brainiest plays since, well, British playwright Nick Payne’s other brainy play, Constellations, Incognito (2014) contains Payne’s usual assortment of short scenes and quantum physics-like, obfuscating construction. But I don’t buy it this time. And not because I don’t get it. (Although I don’t get it.) This is Payne showing off…
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Theater Review: THE WOLVES (Echo Theater Company)
TEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA I’m not really sure if director Alana Dietze could have done anything more with The Wolves, a dramatically inert slice-of-life one act that follows an all-female indoor soccer team over a succession of pre-game warm-ups. Playwright Sarah DeLappe’s Pulitzer-finalist (?!?!?!?!) is awash in the perfect patois of…
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Theater Review: ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST (The Actors’ Gang in Los Angeles)
ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF A PLAY Anarchy is not chaos. The former means “without law” and the latter means “without form.” This is an important distinction to consider in a play that intends to make an argument for anarchy. After a government scandal, a schizoid anarchist poses as certain government officials at a police station in…
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Concert Preview: OSCAR, WITH LOVE (Disney Hall)
OSCAR, WITH LOVE AND BEAUTY AND RESPECT AND: It’s a simple idea that could easily have caused higgledy-piggledy results. In fact, many tribute albums involving various artists contain tracks that are jarringly inconsistent and smack of commercialism. Not so with Oscar, with Love. Kelly Peterson, the widow of Oscar Peterson (1925-2007), personally produced this extraordinary…
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Theater Review: CATS (National Tour, 2019)
KITTY LITTER If I had my way, the slogan for Cats would be changed from “Now and Forever” to “Not Now, Not Ever.” Even when I saw the show back in the early 80s and again in the early 90s, I simply couldn’t make it through another act and bolted at intermission. After seeing the…
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Theater Review: NO, NO, NANETTE (Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theater in Claremont)
A YES AND NO NANETTE When the 1925 musical No, No, Nanette was revised and remounted in 1971, it was predicted to be a flop by folks in the Biz, but it was the buzz of the season with nostalgia-seeking audiences who were sick of assassinations and war; they were ready for a delightful, carefree…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: ESCAPE FROM GODOT (YARD Theater)
WE’RE STILL WAITING You’re watching a play but you have no idea what’s happening. There is no plot, the dialogue is gobbledygook, and characters are filled with despair, yet you are told that this is Theater of the Absurd, one of the milestones in modern drama. Still more maddening is that others around you can’t…
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Theater Review: THE JUDAS KISS (Boston Court)
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…
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Theater Review: TOO MUCH SUN (Indie Chi Productions at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles)
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…
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San Diego Theater Review: GABRIEL (North Coast Repertory in Solana Beach)
TENSION, HUMOR, AND INTRIGUE IN BEGUILING WWII DRAMEDY There would be much better places to live in 1943 than on the German-occupied British island of Guernsey, especially if you are sheltering your Jewish daughter-in-law Lily (Lilli Passero), who is passing for gentile. Our protagonist Jeanne (Jessica John) is not fond of Lily, but has no…
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