Los Angeles

BOOGIE WOOGIE BUGLE GIRLS OF THE U.S.O. Deanna Durbin is all but forgotten now, but there was a time when her movie musicals were so popular, they were said to have literally saved Universal from bankruptcy. In 1936, before Durbin became famous, MGM was choosing between two young singers under contract, and decided to drop…

TRIPLE-LAYERED CAKE Thirty-something Jen (Shannon Lucio) is torn. She wants her deceased  mother’s best friend, Della (Debra Jo Rupp), a talented but struggling baker, to create her wedding cake. So with her betrothed she returns from New York to her hometown in conservative North Carolina, and finds that Della is tickled pink to honor her wish’”until…

JACQUES IN THE BOX I think if I had been alive and living in New York in 1968, I would have been beguiled by Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. Eric Blau and Mort Shuman translated some 25 of the Belgian singer/songwriter’s lyric-driven French songs and created a four-person revue. Its…

LETTER FROM A NUTTY CRITIC Dear Mr. Ted L. Nancy: You are a funny letter writer. In fact, you are the best letter writer who reads his own letters in a show with an actress reading replies to his letters and a mute clown waving a flag to national anthems that I have ever seen….

MY DAUGHTER, THE CABARET SINGER This year’s Hollywood Fringe Festival has given me new hope for the art of cabaret: Black and White  in Paris offered standards dripping in style; Psychosical deliciously revived oft-heard songs by casting singers  as denizens of  a loony bin; and now comes Hello Again!, Linden Waddell’s spot-on salute to arguably America’s greatest song…

A VERY GOOD GRIEF This funny but disturbing update of Charles M. Schultz’s Peanuts comic strip first arrived at the Blank Theatre, after which  Worst First Kiss Productions wisely utilized the Hollywood Fringe Festival to create a six-performance extension. I certainly hope there are more performances to come, for  Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead  contained…

A BRUTAL TRUE-LIFE EVENT IS THE BASIS FOR  POWERFUL THEATER Katharine Cortez’ 80-minute take on the after-effects of the brutal slaying of 49 people at the LGBT dance-bar, PULSE, a year ago June 12th has been sensitively and provocatively directed by veteran Elina de Santos as part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival. In The Valley of…

PARALLEL UNIVERSES AND THE PHYSICS OF LOVE I have a brother-in-law who is a mathematician and a brother who’s an astrophysicist. Both have tried to explain to me what they do, with little success. Solar winds, dark matter, and pure math remain as impenetrable to me as fantasy football. So, I approached Nick Payne’s Constellations…

THE WAR WITHIN THE WAR As sturdily written and swiftly moving as it was in 1982, Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play remains an enduring testament to the home front battles that African-American soldiers fought during World War II, within their ranks as well as with white comrades in arms. It’s a kind of upfront, downhome…

ELEMENTARY BUT AMUSING Unbound Productions takes original material and sets it in vaguely similar settings using  carefully-chosen actors and company directors; the company has been producing site-specific plays since 2008. Their latest concoction is an amusing mash-up (as they describe it) of three Conan Doyle short stories starring Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, Inspector Lestrade, Irene Adler…

LOVING YOUR OPPRESSOR The audience is delighted when a character in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s beautifully written play The Pride tells another, “Stop sucking the dick of your oppressor!” It’s a moment of explosive clarity, in a work that never stops asking questions. Is it possible a gay man in closeted London of 1958 might live…