Areas We Cover
Categories
Los Angeles
-
Theater Review: VIOLET (Actors Co-op in Hollywood)
NO SHY VIOLET Based on The Ugliest Pilgrim, a short story by Doris Betts, Violet — with book and lyrics by Brian Crawley and music by Jeanine Tesori — takes place in 1964 and follows the 25-year-old Violet (Claire Adams) as she travels by bus from her home in the hills of North Carolina all…
-
Theater Review: THE LAST SCHWARTZ (West Coast Jewish Theatre in Santa Monica)
BUT IS IT GOOD FOR THE JEWS? I love Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. It feels a bit highfalutin putting it that way, as if I sit around reading Victorian classics when not appreciating the high art of “theatre” (not “theater”). My first experience with it was not the book but the 2001…
-
Theater Review: THE GIANT VOID IN MY SOUL (Ammunition Theatre Company at Pico Playhouse)
FILLING THE VOID IN L.A. THEATER Neither my friend nor I were looking forward to this play — I mean, good grief, when I heard that it was about a couple of “fools” going on a journey to fill the void in one of the best friend’s soul… Well, frankly, it just sounded like forgettable,…
-
Theater Preview: DO RE MI (Musical Theatre West Reiner Reading Series in Long Beach)
GIMME THAT DO-RE-MI, BOYS The 1960 musical Do Re Mi is about a would-be big shot named Hubie Cram, a wheeler dealer who just can’t make the big time. As his wife Kay says, they have 400 hula hoops in their garage and the phase has already passed. This time Hubie has acquired 300 jukeboxes;…
-
Music Review: SEMYON BYCHKOV, LABÉQUE SISTERS, & THE LA PHIL (Ravel, Bruch and Dvořák)
LABÉQUE TO THE DRAWING BOARD Forty years since they made their U.S. debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, French sisters  Katia & Marielle Labèque returned for a program that seriously needed to rethink its programming. After the duo’s take on Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite for four hands (1908), the French pianists — led by Marielle’s husband,…
-
San Diego Theater Review: SOUTH PACIFIC (San Diego Musical Theatre)
SOME ENCHANTED EVENING, INDEED Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1949 Broadway hit South Pacific is so full of familiar, classic numbers that it almost feels like a Broadway review in itself − what a coup to have song after song that we recognize beyond its most familiar piece, Some Enchanted Evening. Overall, characters are likable and the…
-
Los Angeles Theater Review: DIE, MOMMIE, DIE! (Celebration Theatre at the Kirk Douglas in Culver City)
“I’M NOT ALONE ANYMORE, I HAVE ME!” Charles Busch once said he thought of himself as the Loretta Young of drag, specializing in creatures of artifice, vanity, and soulful, often unrequited longing. Even as far back as playing the ingénue haunted by a terrible secret in Psycho Beach Party, you could see the leading lady…
-
Theater Review: FOREVER BOUND (Atwater Village Theater in Los Angeles)
WHEN METAPHORS BECOME MONSTERS Art thrives when it dances on the edge of a razor — flaunting itself and teasing us — fully embracing the risk of toppling over at any moment and smashing itself to smithereens. In Forever Bound, a world premiere at the Atwater Village Theatre, playwright Steve Apostolina, director Anne Hearn Tobolowsky,…
-
Theater Review: THE IMMIGRANT (Sierra Madre Playhouse in Los Angeles)
BLENDING BANANAS AND BORSCHT Mark Harelik’s 1985 play The Immigrant is based on the story of his grandparents, Haskell and Leah Gorehlik, immigrants from Russia who settled in the tiny central-Texas town of Hamilton in 1909, and were the only Jews there. Haskell has arrived in America to escape the pogroms; now, he must gather…
-
Theater Review: BELLEVILLE (Pasadena Playhouse)
SPLITSVILLE Five years after its world premiere, L.A. is just now getting Amy Herzog’s disturbing domestic thriller. Both praised and not, the controversy with this one-act has been more over the playwright’s construction — Herzog writes herself into a corner — than the subject matter. Was it worth the wait? For the first hour and a…
-
Theater Review: THE BABY DANCE: MIXED (Rubicon Theatre Company in Ventura)
AN UPDATED BABY IS STILL CAPTIVATING THEATER For all its melodrama, Jane Anderson’s The Baby Dance has always been one of my favorite plays since I first saw it at Pasadena Playhouse in 1990. Revisiting the show again at Actors Co-op years later only cemented my sentiments. A poor couple living in a Louisiana trailer…
-
Theater Review: HONEYMOON IN VEGAS (Musical Theatre Guild in Los Angeles)
A HONEYMOON IN GLENDALE More fun than walking away a few bucks ahead from a black jack table, this pell-mell, silly-sweet, old-fashioned musical comedy (ya know, gangsters, lovers, Elvis impersonators, a curse) just couldn’t find an audience when it landed on Broadway in 2015. But that’s why we have Musical Theatre Guild, which takes rarely…
-
Cabaret Preview: UNPLUGGED WITH SUSAN EGAN (Pasadena Conservatory of Music)
EAGER FOR EGAN It was sheer luck that I’ve been able to see Broadway Baby Susan Egan in over 10 shows since the mid-1980s. From intimate stages (Babes at the Matrix; Hello, Again at the Blank) to national tours (Bye Bye Birdie as Kim) to Broadway (Thoroughly Modern Millie and as the original Belle in…
-
Cabaret Preview: CHITA RIVERA and SETH RUDETSKY (The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
WEST SIDE GLORY It’s a relief that Chita Rivera, one of the last great holdovers from the Golden Age of Broadway is still performing today, and you’ll get only one-night — Thursday May 10, 2018 at The Wallis in Beverly Hills — to see her as she reminisces and sings songs from her Broadway shows…
-
Theater Review: BLUES IN THE NIGHT (The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
A BLUES REVUE A female-centric revue from 1980, Sheldon Epp’s Blues in the Night celebrates the melancholic but often very humorous songs of black American folk origin. The blues as we know them today developed in the rural southern US toward the end of the 19th century, finding a wider audience in the 1940s as…
-
Theater Review: SCHOOL OF ROCK THE MUSICAL (National Tour at the Hollywood Pantages)
KIDS RULE IN ENERGETIC ROCK There is an announcement before the start of School of Rock The Musical. After the expected exhortations against using electronic devices, we are assured that yes, indeed, the children are playing their own instruments live on stage. Cluing us in is smart, because once those kids get a chance to…
-
Theater Review: SOUTH PACIFIC (La Mirada Theatre)
NO MUSICAL IS AN ISLAND Whenever it’s revived, it’s hard to imagine a more necessary musical than this 1949 Pulitzer Prize winner. 72 years after the Japanese surrender, it remains a healing tribute to resilience in adversity and tolerance in the thick of war. Consummate showmen, Rodgers and Hammerstein knew just why Americans need to…
-
Los Angeles Theater Review: AMERYKA (Critical Mass Performance Group at the Kirk Douglas in Culver City)
O, BEAUTYFUL AMERYKA After a successful run in 2016, Ameryka has arrived for a short run at the Kirk Douglas Theatre as part of CTG’s Block Party. It’s a testament to writer/director Nancy Keystone and her collaborative Critical Mass Performance Group that at 160 minutes (with intermission) their informative and spectacularly theatrical production never loses…
-
San Diego Theater Review: NOISES OFF (Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado)
ONE COULD GO ON AND ON FOR OFF Half the fun of theater is in the performance; the other half is in the rehearsal. Rehearsal is the time for experimenting, bonding, and watching everything come together. Except when it isn’t. On those occasions, perhaps not so rare, it’s a time of tongue-biting, panic, and blame….
-
Theater Review: THE MADRES (Skylight Theatre in L.A.)
STAGING A DIRTY WAR It’s 1979 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where people are disappearing right off the street. The so-called “Dirty War” waged by the military Junta against its own people is in full-swing. Josefina (Denise Blasor), a staunch homemaker in her 60s, and Carolina (Arianna Ortiz), her militant daughter, are searching for “Caro’s” pregnant daughter…
Search Articles
Please help keep
Stage and Cinema going!
