Theater

COCTEAU CALLING A disheveled bed, letters strewn across the floor, a woman quaking by the phone awaiting her lover’s last call: Jean Cocteau’s 1930 play about the need for human communication is strangely poignant in our contemporary world of pervasive cell phones, e-mail, and Facebook. A Bunch of Artists’ Los Angeles premiere of Anthony Wood’s…

GLORY DAYS GETS ITS GLORY BACK Glory Days is legendary among contemporary musical theater fans. With book by James Gardiner and music and lyrics by Nick Blaemire, this youthful musical received rave reviews in its initial run at Signature Theatre, transferred to Broadway in 2008, and promptly opened and closed in a single night. What…

SON OF A HORROR FLICK How lucky we Angelenos are that Re-Animatorâ„¢ The Musical a funny, campy, thoroughly entertaining gore-fest, opened here before splattering itself on legions of cult-loving audiences around the country. Horror fans will love the grisly story, theatre fans will prick up their ears to an exciting composer/lyricist, and cultists will love…

COWARD ON THE BEACH Noël Coward’s oft-produced classic Private Lives is indeed, as one of his characters states, jagged with sophistication. The story is of a divorced, fiercely contentious, and veddy British couple who, having reconnected on the honeymoon night of their new marriages, run off with each other to Paris, abandoning their respective spouses….

YOUNG IN L.A. For self-proclaimed losers Sarah and Meaghan, a post-college move to Los Angeles promises a total break from the past, if not fame and fortune as well. In Sofia Alvarez’s provocative new play Between Us Chickens, these small-town East Coast friends must face up to LA’s devastating fantasies of self-(re)invention. One of SoCal’s…

LOVELY STAGING, BUT PERFORMANCES LACK FINESSE Since its premiere in c. 429 BC, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King has been considered the Mount Olympus of Greek Tragedies, largely because it humanizes the theme of fate, a subject that fascinated the Greek culture; personally, I warrant that a story which contains patricide, unholy incest, self-mutilation and not…

CATESCHISM, OR A HOST THAT IS HARD TO SWALLOW What a curious play. Well, it’s not really a play, it’s a stand-up act. No, it’s a one-person show with two people. Hang on’¦I’ll get it. It’s fringe theater without the edge. No, it’s a showcase that inadvertently does not showcase the titular character (a Catholic…

MAGIC STAGING; SAFE CASTING A Midsummer Night’s Dream at South Coast Rep may lack innovative subtext, but director Mark Rucker has assembled a team of co-creators who inject such a flurry of imagination and creativity into the Bard’s most accessible comedy that you may find yourself floating out of the theatre like a fairy in…

ADULT CHILDREN’S THEATRE If Hyperbole: Origins were to be reviewed as a play, I would tell you that I had no idea what the playwright was trying to say; since no writer is credited, we’ll just assume that the Rogue Artists Ensemble is merely musing over the origins of things, such as music, fire, sin…

IT’S NOT NICE TO FOOL WITH MOTHER NATURE Tacky commercials for Global Cytodynamics play on large video screens as we enter Theatre of NOTE, advertising improved lifestyles through genetic alteration, including that of learning, memory, pleasure and belief systems. Projection designer Steven Calcote and the always extraordinary sound designer Cricket Myers brilliantly take us into…

IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT THE TITLE OF THE SHOW MEANS BY THE END OF THE SHOW, THEN SOMETHING AIN’T RIGHT. Intríngulis is Carlo Albán’s true-life solo show about his family’s move from Ecuador to the U.S. and his life growing up as an illegal alien, even while starring in Sesame Street as a kid….

LIFE GOES ON, DOESN’T IT? The cemetery is the home of the nameless and it is strewn with pebbles and bits of garbage that serve as headstones. The keeper of the cemetery lives next to it in a shed that is equipped with not even the barest essentials. In this world of death, one does…

THE FONTS THAT CHANGE THE WORLD It takes a lot of brass to write a futurist play about a not-so-distant time when print is dead and it is necessary to learn to write again. It takes even more brass to start the play with a thirty-five minute lecture on the history of typography and the…

TOLSTOY NEVER MADE ME SO HOT In his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Anna in the Tropics, Nilo Cruz created the role of striking, velvet-voiced, Cuban lothario Juan Julian, a lector who is hired to read books to the workers in a 1929 Tampa cigar factory — it alleviates tedium, inadvertently educates them, and, in this case,…