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Theater Review: THE IMMIGRANT (Sierra Madre Playhouse in Los Angeles)
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…
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Theater Review: BELLEVILLE (Pasadena Playhouse)
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…
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Theater Review: THE BABY DANCE: MIXED (Rubicon Theatre Company in Ventura)
AN UPDATED BABY IS STILL CAPTIVATING THEATER For all its melodrama, Jane Anderson’s The Baby Dance has always been one of my favorite plays since I first saw it at Pasadena Playhouse in 1990. Revisiting the show again at Actors Co-op years later only cemented my sentiments. A poor couple living in a Louisiana trailer…
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Theater Review: HONEYMOON IN VEGAS (Musical Theatre Guild in Los Angeles)
A HONEYMOON IN GLENDALE More fun than walking away a few bucks ahead from a black jack table, this pell-mell, silly-sweet, old-fashioned musical comedy (ya know, gangsters, lovers, Elvis impersonators, a curse) just couldn’t find an audience when it landed on Broadway in 2015. But that’s why we have Musical Theatre Guild, which takes rarely…
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Theater Review: BLUES IN THE NIGHT (The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
A BLUES REVUE A female-centric revue from 1980, Sheldon Epp’s Blues in the Night celebrates the melancholic but often very humorous songs of black American folk origin. The blues as we know them today developed in the rural southern US toward the end of the 19th century, finding a wider audience in the 1940s as…
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Theater Review: SCHOOL OF ROCK THE MUSICAL (National Tour at the Hollywood Pantages)
KIDS RULE IN ENERGETIC ROCK There is an announcement before the start of School of Rock The Musical. After the expected exhortations against using electronic devices, we are assured that yes, indeed, the children are playing their own instruments live on stage. Cluing us in is smart, because once those kids get a chance to…
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Theater Review: SOUTH PACIFIC (La Mirada Theatre)
NO MUSICAL IS AN ISLAND Whenever it’s revived, it’s hard to imagine a more necessary musical than this 1949 Pulitzer Prize winner. 72 years after the Japanese surrender, it remains a healing tribute to resilience in adversity and tolerance in the thick of war. Consummate showmen, Rodgers and Hammerstein knew just why Americans need to…
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Theater Review: THE MADRES (Skylight Theatre in L.A.)
STAGING A DIRTY WAR It’s 1979 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where people are disappearing right off the street. The so-called “Dirty War” waged by the military Junta against its own people is in full-swing. Josefina (Denise Blasor), a staunch homemaker in her 60s, and Carolina (Arianna Ortiz), her militant daughter, are searching for “Caro’s” pregnant daughter…
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Theater Review: HEAD OVER HEELS (Pre-Broadway San Francisco Premiere)
GO-GO SEE THIS SHOW Head Over Heels is an exhilarating and seemingly improbable musical mash-up of Sir Philip Sidney’s sixteenth-century work The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (libretto by James Magruder, adapting from an original book conceived by Jeff Whitty) and the songs of the iconic 1980s’ female rock band, The Go-Go’s (and a few tunes from…
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Theater Review: SAINT JOAN (Bedlam Theatre Company on tour at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica)
SAVING FAITH Even with a few blemishes, Bedlam’s revival of George Bernard Shaw’s 1923 masterpiece Saint Joan is an immersive and ultimately gratifying theatrical experience. The story, told in six scenes and an epilogue, concerns the last two years of Joan of Arc’s life (1429-31): arrival at court and the discovery of the dauphin; leadership of sieges…
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Theater Review: PRETTY WOMAN: THE MUSICAL (Pre-Broadway World Premiere)
PRETTY UNLIKELY WOMAN When worlds collide: A celluloid fantasy about an L.A. call girl suddenly thrust into affluence, the much-loved 1990 film Pretty Woman starred a suave, salt-and-pepper-coiffed Richard Gere and Julia Roberts’ all-American Cinderella. The film drew on the wishful feeling of an inexhaustible fairy tale — and for good measure also referenced My Fair Lady, Educating Rita,…
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Theater Review: ON YOUR FEET (National Tour)
DANCE DELIRIUM As jukebox musicals go, On Your Feet! really earns its exclamation point. No question, the music alone, which won 26 Grammy Awards, would justify this 2015 tribute to the flashdance fervor of Gloria and Emilio Estefan and their Miami Sound Machine. Their irresistible Cuban-fusion street beat is more fun than we deserve. Two dozen numbers…
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Theater Review: LOVE NEVER DIES (National Tour at the Cadillac Palace Theatre in Chicago)
THE PHANTOM NEVER DIED, BUT SHOULD HAVE Gaston Leroux knew: The original author of The Phantom of the Opera concluded his horror romance with his disfigured serial-killer as dead as Lon Chaney, while Christine Daae, stalked and sexually harassed throughout the Paris Opera House, was safe in the arms of her trusting Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny. In…
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Theater Review: SMALL MOUTH SOUNDS (National Tour at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica)
YOU LEAVE SEEKING PEACE AND A PLOT When a play comes along that is entirely different from any play that has preceded it, especially in our era of over-informative white noise and copycatting creativity, it deserves attention. Even Small Mouth Sounds — Bess Wohl’s 2016 work, now stopping at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica as…
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Theater Review: ALADDIN (National Tour)
A BROADWAY AMUSEMENT PARK THAT FLIES LIKE A CARPET “Open sesame” indeed. It’s “Abracadabra” times ten as the arrival of Aladdin in Hollywood feels as triumphant as Prince Ali’s magnificent entrance into Agrabah at the top of the second act. A theme park of a musical, Disney Theatrical Productions’ eye-popping transformation of the 1992 film…
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Theater Review: LUZIA (Cirque du Soleil on tour)
MEMORIES OF MEXICO, LUZIA UNLEASHES A RAIN OF JOY The Cirque du Soleil just made a run for the border ’” and not the Canadian one — as the Montreal-based human circus lavishes its unstoppable imagination on our neighbor to the south. Luzia, the latest (ad)venture under the redesigned white-and-gold Grand Chapiteau (its tent planted in the…
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Theater Review: BEAUTIFUL: THE CAROLE KING MUSICAL (National Tour)
MAKING YOUR MUSIC MATTER If notes make joy, these 150 minutes are the elixir of happiness. Spanning only 13 years of its creator’s career (1958-1971), Beautiful: The Carole King Musical balances life against art. Magnificently. Its wonderful songs both stand on their own and preserve the pain and pleasure that went into their making. Douglas McGrath’s…
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Theater Review: SOMETHING ROTTEN! (National Tour reviewed in Los Angeles)
SOMETHING SILLY; NOT QUITE ROTTEN BUT HARDLY FRESH What is it about William Shakespeare that inspires lesser authors (namely, everyone else) to try to take him down? George Bernard Shaw spent his life seeking to supplant or at least discount that other playwright. In Shakespeare in Love, Tom Stoppard imagines the world’s greatest writer as an opportunist who…
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Theater Review: ESCAPE TO MARGARITAVILLE (pre-Broadway tryout at the Oriental Theatre in Chicago)
A COUNTRY/CARIBBEAN ROMP AT CLUB JIMMY It’s a jukebox musical that marinates in Gilligan’s Island/South Pacific nostalgia. Plus, it’s got a feel-good love story that’s a creditable excuse for over two dozen Jimmy Buffett “beachabilly” hits. En route to a 2018 Broadway opening next February, La Jolla Playhouse’s origination of Escape to Margaritaville is elaborately likable, even…
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Theater Review: SCHOOL OF ROCK THE MUSICAL (National Tour at the Cadillac Palace Theatre in Chicago)
WEBBER RETURNS TO HIS ROCKIN’ ROOTS “Out of the guitars of babes”: The 2003 film was a four-star charmer: Jack Black, a screen actor with the chops to be richly ordinary, depicted a slob who saves himself by freeing others. He was, indelibly, Dewey: This substitute teacher rose, unexpectedly and magnificently, to an unearned occasion, liberating privileged…
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