Los Angeles

A MASTERPIECE OF MUSICAL MISCHIEF In 1911, the Louvre was the largest building in the world, containing more than a thousand rooms, spread out over 45 acres and housing over a quarter million works of art.  As it had a security force of just over a hundred guards, it is not surprising that someone was…

MOTHERFUCKER! WHAT A COLOSSAL MISSED OPPORTUNITY With heightened and relentless dialog, Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherfucker with the Hat follows Jackie, a recently paroled ex-con and recovering addict whose fragile new life teeters when he finds an unfamiliar hat in his girlfriend Veronica’s apartment. The discovery ignites suspicions of betrayal that ripple through his relationships—with…

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME A friend warned me that The Heidi Chronicles might feel dated—after all, Wendy Wasserstein’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play ends in 1987. Nothing could be further from the truth. Group Rep’s production, directed with a sure hand by Brent Beerman, proves Heidi’s journey from the late…

TIME IS OUR FRIEND A Victorian inventor travels thousands of years into the future, only to discover that humanity has evolved—and devolved—into two radically different species. The 14/48 Hollywood Company’s production of The Time Machine gleams with ingenuity, its low-budget aesthetic burnished by a fiercely imaginative ensemble and a clear reverence for the source material….

ONE UP PLAYS TO WIN– WITH A CHEAT CODE FOR CHARM One Up: The Musical, which premiered at this year’s Hollywood Fringe and returns for encore performances, is a charming, if uneven, 80s-inspired tuner about an underdog game developer trying to make her mark. Set in 1987, the book by creator Mary Bonney and Weslie Lechner takes…

WHY CAN’T A SUPERHERO CATCH A BREAK? (OR A BROADWAY RUN) Foster Cat Productions is taking a gleeful leap off the tall building that is It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman!, the 1966 Broadway musical that dared to blend comic book heroism with musical theatre razzmatazz. The result? A full-out, knowingly ridiculous, intriguingly…

Let there be no mistaking it, Mark Vigeant is so funny that if he was performing on an amphitheater set up in front of Mount Rushmore, after the first five minutes milk would be shooting out of Lincoln’s nose, Washington would be laughing so hard his cumbersome dentures would go flying out of his mouth,…

SEXLESS IN THE CITY Have you ever been with a guy who won’t shut up and just enjoy the blow job? That’s what it’s like to sit through Ashley Griffin’s new two-person play, The Opposite of Love, which premiered last year off-Broadway, and is now having its first West Coast performances at the Hudson Backstage…

DEAD BLONDES TELL NO TALES — EXCEPT THIS ONE Conspiracy theories have surrounded the death of actress and restaurateur Thelma Todd since 1935, when her lifeless body was discovered in a garage slumped behind the wheel of her parked Lincoln Phaeton convertible. Alexandra Kopko, as the actress’s ghost, presents a bio of Todd’s life to…

WAITING FOR COWDOT Normally, a surfeit of hyphens in any production assures trouble ahead, but Aaron Francis, the writer-director-designer-producer of this subversive, potent indictment of the lethal potential of passivity, has shown himself the exception that either tests or proves that rule. In Betsy & Patty Find Out at the Broadwater Second Stage, seven cows…

MÉNAGE À MEH, OR BOB & CAROL & DEAD & AIRLESS Last Saturday, I caught the world premiere of Ménage à Quatre, a play that seems to promise a farce but instead delivers a muddled mess. Written by Peter Lefcourt and directed by Ryan O’Connor, the show is a guest production at the Davidson/Valentini Theatre…

THE KIND OF SEPTEMBER YOU’LL WANT TO REMEMBER With the original opening Off-Broadway in 1960 and running an astounding 42 years, The Fantasticks is a veritable classic amongst the repertoire of musical theater. This perennially popular piece by composer Harvey Schmidt and librettist & lyricist Tom Jones is a two-act chamber piece—an eight-character, minimalistic, melancholic, commedia…

LIFE ON REWIND In a co-production with HorseChart Theatre, Rogue Machine Theatre continues its astounding season with John Kolvenbach‘s gem of a play, Reel to Reel, a heart-warming, but definitely not sappy, time-jumping story of a 55-year marriage between the determined Maggie Spoon (Alley Mills Bean), a sound and performance artist, and her more reticent…

A KNOCK AT THE HEART With her staging of Dolores, Edward Allan Baker’s two-woman drama about domestic violence, director Stephanie Feury—at the theatre that bears her name—has placed on display a small gem of immense worth. Deedee Woche is Sandra, the married sister struggling to hold her lower-middle-class Providence family together. Davonna Dehay is the…

OFFTIME Abi Watkinson’s one-woman show 5:45 is a poor receptacle for a great deal of talent—one that feels underdeveloped and not fully thought through. The trouble starts with the title. A good title should grab attention, pique curiosity, and function as either clue or bait to lure in a potential patron: The Hundred Years’ War…