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Los Angeles
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Los Angeles Theater Review: BIG NIGHT (Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City)
A STAR IS BORN Paul Rudnick’s bright new comedy takes place on Oscar night. Michael (Brian Hutchison) is a journeyman actor with a career and life-changing Best Supporting Actor nomination. After years of steady theater work and occasional television guest shots, he is on the verge of becoming a star. His trans nephew Eddie (Tom…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: WALKING TO BUCHENWALD (Open Fist at Atwater Village Theatre)
‘SELF DEPORTATION’ OR SIX STAGES OF AMERICAN GRIEF Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In life, death, and in playwright Tom Jacobson’s world view, these familiar five stages to acceptance are missing the one that is most important for survival: Laughing. Life is funny. People are funny. If God exists, He, She, They, or It…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC IN CONCERT (Colony Theatre)
A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC; A VERY SHORT RUN; A MOST ACCOMPLISHED CAST Get ready for the wit, sophistication, and gentle eroticism of this most worldly and elegant of American musicals. The story is worldly, charming, and rueful—emotions eloquently displayed by Stephen Sondheim’s score, and abetted by Hugh Wheeler’s astounding book. A Little Night Music is an…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE GYNECOLOGIC ONCOLOGY UNIT AT MEMORIAL SLOAN KETTERING CANCER CENTER OF NEW YORK CITY (Geffen)
DON’T ARGUE WITH ME, I HAVE CANCER As the play begins, two women are asleep in hospital beds in a shared room with a curtain drawn between them. A tightly wound young woman, Karla (Halley Feiffer) is on one side of the curtain, with the younger of the two patients. She is an aspiring comedian,…
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San Diego Theater Review: WILD GOOSE DREAMS (La Jolla Playhouse)
FLYING WITH BROKEN WINGS It’s amazing. Thousands of billions of electronic messages are delivered every month globally, but it doesn’t feel like a small world after all. For many, these missives—texts, e-mails, IMs—are the illusion of connecting, and so the world feels more pummeling, pushy and precarious than ever. To wit, survey after survey indicates…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: FOOTLOOSE (Glendale Centre Theatre)
FOOTLOOSE AND FANCY FREE Based on the 1984 film Footloose, this eponymous musical opened on Broadway in 1998. Both adaptation and jukebox musical, in which songs sometimes land willy-nilly without thought to plot advancement and character (that’s SO old-fashioned, isn’t it?), this fish-out-of-water, stranger-changes-stuffy-town dance show doesn’t have to be examined too closely. It’s a…
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San Diego Theater Review: THE EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS ON MAN-IN-THE-MOON MARIGOLDS (Cygnet)
THE EFFECT OF GOOD THEATER “You know, maybe someday you will be pretty,” says Beatrice to her teenage daughter Tillie. Gee, thanks, Mom. Ah, mothers. The Glass Menagerie. Ordinary People. Carrie. Where would theater and film be without the power of dysfunctional mothers? Who better to yield fascinating children, be they adult or still young,…
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San Diego Theater Review: KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN (Welk Resorts Theatre in Escondido)
ALONG CAME THIS SPIDER Defying torture and humiliation in a Latin American prison, two cellmates—seeming enemies—build a passionate friendship and a larger loyalty. Hollywood visions become escapist illusions, binding dramatic opposites: an apolitical gay window-dresser and devoted mama’s boy named Molina—serving eight years for sex with a minor—and Valentin, a straight, unrepentantly newly jailed idealistic…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: DAYTONA (Rogue Machine at the Met Theatre)
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT One of the brilliant things about Oliver Cotton’s Daytona, is how his dialogue both reveals and conceals at the same time. “Billy, are you in trouble?” Joe (George Wyner) asks his younger brother (Richard Fancy). “I’m 72 now,” is Billy’s answer, a response that says both everything and nothing. Upon learning…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: PIPE DREAM (Musical Theatre West in Long Beach)
A DREAM TO SEE THIS MUSICAL As Musical Theatre West will no doubt prove on Sunday, March 12 at 7, even a flop Rodgers and Hammerstein musical has its surefire appeal. Get ready to discover a score that was lost on the American public because the show itself was a turkey. With a live 14-piece orchestra,…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: IPHIGENIA IN AULIS (Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades)
AULIS WELL AT THE GETTY Check out the production of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis by Chicago’s Court Theatre, and you’ll see why I rave about theater in the Windy City. Guided by the scholarship of translator Nicholas Rudall (founding artistic director of Court Theatre from 1971 to 1994), director Charles Newell has crafted a powerful…
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San Diego Theater Preview: ACCOMPLICE (Scripps Ranch Theatre)
ACCOMPLISHED ACCOMPLICE Rupert Holmes’s Accomplice is the wittiest and most accomplished fooler play since Ira Levin’s Deathtrap. Each time you think you know what is unfolding you find yourself fooled again. As with Deathtrap, I have seen Accomplice more than once, and I still get swept along on a theatrical thrill ride that rivals the twists and turns…
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Los Angeles Opera Preview: CARMEN (LA Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion)
AN EXTRA PERFORMANCE AND A SIMULCAST: SHE JUST KEEPS ON GIVING This isn’t the first time LA Opera has opened a season with Carmen, but it is the first time that ticket sales are so great that an extra performance has been added before performances began. The run remains as September 7 through October 1,…
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San Diego Theater Preview: LAST OF THE RED HOT LOVERS (North Coast Rep in Solana Beach)
HE WHO LAUGHS AT LAST LAUGHS BEST Barney Cashman is a neurotic, shlubby, well-intentioned if somewhat misguided seafood restaurateur who feels his life and marriage have become too predictable, and attempts to spice both up with some hot action on the side. He sets up a makeshift bachelor pad at his ma’s place while she’s…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’ (La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts)
IN HARLEM’S WAY “One never knows, do one?” That’s the favorite catchphrase of Fats Waller (1904-1943), an irrepressible master of music. The 285-pound, cherubic-cheeked jokester genius is the powerhouse presence and driving dreamer behind Ain’t Misbehavin’, the still irresistible 1978 tribute revue from Murray Horwitz and Richard Maltby Jr. In this happy case, well, one do…
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Los Angeles Music Preview: CARMINA BURANA & CHICHESTER PSALMS (Los Angeles Master Chorale on September 23 & 24, 2017, at Disney Hall)
WHERE DO YOU GET ORFF..? There are some entertainments that bear repeating: Los Angeles Master Chorale has visited Carl Orff’s pagan-fest, Carmina Burana, under each of their music directors, but the splendid, massive, exultant and squeaky-clean rendering four years ago under Grant Gershon made me want to toss off my clothes and march triumphantly towards my smoke-filled sky of destiny,…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: RHINOCEROS (Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice)
LIFE IS AN ABSURD BUSINESS It’s an absurdist masterwork, yet it is rarely produced in the States. A disquieting parable which warns against herd mentality, Eugène Ionesco’s three-act play is a boiling-hot indictment of fascism, written in 1959 on the heels of WWII and the McCarthy hearings. The denizens of a French town transform one-by-one…
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Los Angeles Dance Review: EMOTIONS (Blind Dance Company)
THE BLIND DANCE COMPANY’S EMOTIONAL VISION Hydeia Muhammad’s Blind Dance Company premiered its first show, Emotions, in the Los Angeles Fashion District to a well-deserved roar of applause. Performed at a building called The Lazarus Experience, the company’s production proved that an all-blind ensemble was no miracle, but rather came to life from CRE Outreach…
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Los Angeles Dance Review: LA FATE IN ITALIA and DANCES FROM LAKMÉ (World Premiere Ballets from American Contemporary Ballet)
ACB’S MODERN THROWBACK American Contemporary Ballet’s final production of the season reworks an old favorite and breathes life into once forgotten characters from another well-known ballet. The combination of singing and dancing was an innovative conclusion to a trilogy’s worth of education in the classics. Aside from a few logistical problems, the show was very…
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Theater Interview: CLINTON LEUPP (MISS COCO PERU: THE TAMING OF THE TENSION)
SHE WHO CAN’T BE TAMED Clinton Leupp may not aspire to self-help guru status, but his upcoming appearance as Miss Coco Peru in The Taming of the Tension is driven by a definite sense of mission. “I want to unify people,†he says. “We can’t truly get together as human beings until we understand how…
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