Los Angeles

PAGING DR. DRAMA, STAT! VITALS NOT STABLE Nursing Is My Life was a heart-breaker for me. Charley Karlotta has spent decades as a registered nurse, raising her family, and dreaming of one day doing a show proclaiming how “nursing is her life.” Karlotta is a petite elfin of a person, and you cannot but be…

NICAEA TRY Oh, Constantine! at the Zephyr Theatre is an odd nut to crack. Or I should say review. One of the best-produced shows at the Fringe, this is the brainchild of playwright / director / producer Jan-David Soutar, with producers Athena Rethis and Clent Bowers, production designer Courtney Stepleton, lighting designer Miles Berman, and finally…

HOW TO RAISE A DAUGHTER (AND YOURSELF) Woven from his essays featured in Cosmopolitan and O The Oprah Magazine, gay Armenian-American Haig “Hike” Chahinian recounts his humbling and oft-time hilarious adventures as he fumbles through fathering a bouncing biracial baby girl. A compassionate contemplation of all the hardships and hazards the heart is willing to endure for the joy of…

A DUPLEX THAT’S GOING TO THE DOGS Those who flocked to the “Sunshine State” during the population boom of the 1920s and ’30s, were mostly “easterners” who had only known tenement living, cut off from the world outside on the upper floors of some aging brownstone and reduced to the numbers of their apartment door….

ACTING WHILE ASIAN: A SURVIVAL GUIDE IN ONE ACT Kung Fu, Sidekick, Wise Man, Dead: The Hollywood Starter Pack. Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die pulls no punches in its portrait of two Asian-American actors navigating Hollywood’s tangled machinery—one a hardened veteran, the other freshly idealistic. Set in the late 1980s but pulsing with…

A NEW MUSICAL HAS ARRIVED TO PUMP UP PATRONS FOR DECADES TO COME Allen Moyle’s 1990 film Pump Up the Volume starred Christian Slater as Mark, a graceless, socially awkward high school student in Phoenix, Arizona, a town so conservative that even the Saguaro cactus wore Bush/Quayle campaign buttons. Unable to fit in, Mark resorts…

PIPPIN GOES HOLLYWOOD Pippin, with music and lyrics supplied by Stephen Schwartz,  and book penned by Roger O. Hirson  (who was best known for writing the script to the war flick The Bridge at Remagen) may have been an oddity when it opened on Broadway in 1972, given the choice of the central character, but…

A REQUIEM FOR THE ERASED Written and directed by Soo Chyun, To Be Liberated is perhaps the most exquisite show the Hollywood Fringe has to offer. Running a mere half an hour, there is a clarity and brevity that complement each other while strengthening the production as a whole. It is August 15, 1945, the…

SOBER TRUTHS AND SLIPPERY MEMORIES IN A COMIC, CHAOTIC QUEST FOR CLARITY Alcoholism and Alzheimer’s. What a combo. Sounds serious, right? They both are, of course. But in the hands of playwright Jake Brasch, The Reservoir at Geffen Playhouse pulls off a theatrical magic trick: a powerfully moving and poignantly funny play, melding millennial angst…

WHEN THE ONLY TENSION IS IN THE CORSET: GASLIGHT IS ALL DIM AND NO SPARK AT PRT Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, Gas Light (now known as Gaslight) is a melodrama which follows a young woman whose husband slowly manipulates her into believing she is descending into insanity. This one-time taut psychological thriller is set in Victorian…

SEAGULL INTERRUPTED An extraordinarily well-written play—and a perfect choice for the Hollywood Fringe—Steven Dietz’s 75-minute one-act, The Nina Variations, takes the final scene of Chekhov’s The Seagull—that charged, heartbreaking reunion between Nina and Treplev—and explodes it into 43 compact riffs, each a new lens on longing. Dietz isn’t attempting parody or pastiche; instead, he digs…

FIRE AND BRIMSTONE FATIGUE One must admire Antony Zioni for his aspirations with Tales of the Ancient East, which, regrettably, makes the failure of this production all the more lamentable. Tales of the Ancient East is a tribal experience. Entering the Hudson Guild Theatre one is confronted by an environment cloaked in a primitivism that…

A GAME OF HEARTS PLAYED FACE DOWN There is no question that Ann Noble is one of the most talented actresses gracing the stages of Los Angeles. There are moments in her bitter-sweet, two-person clown show 52 Pick-Up at the Broadwater Studio, where this shines through. However, the show itself does not work. At the…

ALL IN ONE AND ONE IN ALL With Except Myself at the Broadwater Black Box, playwright Drew Petriello has achieved a clever, slick, and absolutely entertaining deconstruction of the solo show concept. Using the template of the classic absurdist play Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello, Petriello has fashioned his own “five…

THE GOOD ANDREW BYRON CREATES A LONG AND WINDING RUSSIAN Andrew Byron frames his one man show The Good Russian within the historical context of 2018, when Sergei Skripal, a Russian expatriate who had worked as a double agent for MI6, the British Intelligence Agency, was found poisoned along with his daughter in his home in…

SHAKESPEARE GOES BRAT PACK The trouble with tribute plays is that not all audiences are necessarily as knowledgeable about the subject of the homage as the creators are.  In the case of Phil S. Gould’s faux Shakespearian The Club of Broken Fasts, the object of his retooling is the 1985 coming-of-age teen comedy-drama The Breakfast…

PULP FRICTION Reservoir Dolls is a witty, sharp satire of several sociological concerns currently occupying center stage in the cultural consciousness of both “tinsel town” and the nation: the exploitation of women in films and their limited access to roles in an image-driven industry; the institutional gender inequality and barriers facing women in the studio…