Theater

TARANTINO IN THE STICKY SWAMPS OF SADNESS Tom Jacobson’s Tar is from his The Ballad of Bimini Baths, a triad of works playing concurrently in Los Angeles. For half a century (1902-1951), the hot springs resort actually existed here in L.A., and Jacobson means to examine how far society has, or hasn’t, come by setting…

SWEETER THE SECOND TIME AROUND It’s like kicking a puppy dog to dislike Charity Hope Valentine. Charity is the heroine of the 1966 musical Sweet Charity — a strange amalgam of high hopes and low blows. The show once made famous by Gwen Verdon’s slinkiness and Bob Fosse’s choreography is pocked with terrific tunes by…

ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH Eugene O’Neill twice turned his troubled youth into all-absorbing drama. His family first appeared as a happy tangle of eccentric loved ones in Ah, Wilderness!, a halcyon 1933 comedy that revealed no greater family rifts than a generation gap and a father’s worry about his son’s preference for “decadent” poets….

ON CONFORMING AND CHRIST Ah, what better fodder for drama is there than the dysfunctional American family? You know the ingredients: accusations hurled back and forth by the walking wounded; recriminations for offenses committed years before; and — for good measure — a reunion with plenty of alcohol and mental illness. With her  Cult of Love,…

HALLUCINOGENS, MAN-WHORES & CHINA PEOPLE I’m not sure why Steve Chang chose to call his world premiere one-man show at the 2018 Hollywood Fringe Festival A Complete Waste of Time. It isn’t. He isn’t. And his aim doesn’t seem to be anything as trivial as what the title suggests. Chang tells a number of stories…

FLY TO THIS NEST Boy oh boy, if you like immersive theater, than check yourself into the madhouse over in Burbank. When the rebellious, charismatic and playful Randle McMurphy gets reassigned from penal labor on a prison farm to assessment as an asylum inmate, he gathers that the mental institution will be a more lenient…

SORRY TO BURST YOUR BABBLE In this unfortunate world premiere, the winsome cast begins with angry pessimistic post-millennial Benji (Will Choi), an Asian-American comic book artist whose boss — not seeing a need for the twentysomething’s Asian Superhero — has given a well-deserved promotion to a white dude instead. Benji wants to self-publish his character…

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…

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…

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,…

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,…

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…

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…