Los Angeles

SCHOOLED BY CALLAS; ENTERTAINED BY HENNESY If you’ve ever been to a master class, then Terrence McNally’s Master Class will seem very familiar. If you haven’t, then you’re in for a real eye-opener. A master class, as its name suggests, is a class given by an expert (or master) to students in a particular discipline,…

EXIT TRAGEDY Fierce, funny, and relevant under Deena Selenow’s choreographic direction, Ike Holter’s entertaining but uneven melodrama takes place in a Chicago high school that’s suffering from an image problem and a 40% graduation rate. There, a feckless assistant principal, five diverse, overloaded teachers and an intelligent, social media-savvy, system-fighting student will suffer triumph, defeat,…

SHUFFLE ALONG Is stuff magical only because it can’t be explained? Perhaps it’s more than just the absence of logic, probability, or reason. There’s a presence too: Magic evokes a child-like sense of wonder in the oldest adults, rewarding their imagination more than their ignorance. But in a world where Vegas-styled, hi-tech acts abound, nothing…

A FINE PRODUCTION OF A MINOR  ORGAN Midway through playwright Julia Lederer’s feather-light, yet rather droning romantic comedy, a character literally reaches into her own chest and pulls out her heart, which thumps and pumps and leaks blood into the padded envelope she shoves it into. The lovesick woman then leaves it in a New York…

THE UNBEARABLE CURSE OF BEING I remember reading Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker review of Gypsy when Tyne Daly first starred as Mama Rose. She described the experience of not being sure beforehand whether she had ever seen the show. The songs were so familiar’”of course she had seen some production or other at some point….

GOD THE FATHER AND THE MOTHER OF ALL GODS I will remember Phylicia Rashad’s performance in Head of Passes until the day I die. She is an emotional hurricane, often still, even funny’”while in the eye of the storm’”but then raging and howling with a pain rooted so deeply inside the love and bondage of…

MISERY LOVES COMPANY In referring to August Strindberg’s 1900 play The Dance of Death as a foreshadowing of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, director Ron Sossi is on firm ground. Strindberg’s mordant characters (Alice, a former actress, and Edgar, an artillery captain) are certainly waltzing to the same music as George and Martha….

STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES The Road Theatre Company, one of L.A.’s most dependable companies for original material, amazing casting, steadfast directors, and terrific production values, presents the first show of its 2017-2018 season, Stupid Kid, which plays  September 22 through November 12, 2017 at Road’s Magnolia Boulevard location. This world premiere, written by one of…

AN EXTRAORDINARY FIVE-COURSE MEAL Course One (Primer Plato): The Story. Two unnamed political prisoners, languishing in an Argentine maximum security prison, are allowed only one hour each Sunday to congregate: the inmates make use of storytelling, specifically Cervantes’  Don Quixote, as a means to find solace under great duress. This course feeds the spirit, for it…