Theater

A TWIN-TWIN PRODUCTION In Elizabethan England the entertainments that closed the Christmas season (the Twelfth day) completed the festivities with a topsy-turvy role reversal, peasants pretending to be princes, the sexes switching appearances. Shakespeare’s  Twelfth Night,  with its disguised lovers and mistaken identities ’” and Actors Co-op’s color-blind, gender-fluid revival ’” honor this irreverence. Love, especially in…

WOMEN AND SPACE: THE JOURNEY SO FAR The World Premiere of Singularities or the Computers of Venus, written and directed by Laura Stribling, runs through Sunday, June 2 at The Road Theatre in North Hollywood. Set in three different time periods from 1789 through the present, it examines the lives of women astronomers as they…

IT’S MAN AGAINST AI IN MAINTENANCE With the current threat of AI-generated digital characters taking over roles portrayed by human actors, it’s timely for Peter Ritt  to comically explore this hot topic in his new play High Maintenance at The Road Theatre Company in North Hollywood Directed with insightful clarity by Stan Zimmerman this world premiere…

HOPE IS A WAKING DREAM — Aristotle Close-up magic by master illusionist, storyteller and seeming mind-reader Helder Guimarí£es is mesmerizing and dazzling  in The Hope Theory, an 80-minute wonderment which opened last Friday. This is his fourth collaboration with EGOT award-winning director/producer Frank Marshall at Geffen Playhouse in Westwood (Invisible Tango, The Present streamed during the…

IS THE RAILSPLITTER A LOG-SPLITTER? Written by Terry Ray, The  Lincoln  Debate — based on factual information provided in letters and biographies — concerns the debate about the romance of the 16th president and his friend Joshua Speed. Now being remounted (so to speak) by The Bent at The Palm Springs Cultural Center, Mr. Ray also appears…

THE DECONSTRUCTED PLAY’S THE THING William Shakespeare’s Hamlet recounts the story of the ghost of Denmark’s murdered king who wants his son, Prince Hamlet, to kill his uncle Claudius, the man who murdered the king to seize the throne and marry Hamlet’s mother. Long considered one of the world’s greatest tragedies, it delves into Hamlet’s…

MEAN GIRLS MEETS THE THIRD REICH Three teenage girls sit at a table in a bunker of some kind bored out of their minds tasting food three times a day before it is sent off to Hitler. They have clearly been convinced that this job is a privilege, for if one should die of poisoning…

KINK SHAME: AN ENTERTAINMENT FOR THE MASSES In North Hollywood, the audience’s senses were assaulted, mainly by each other, in the reception room before we even got into the theater for the return of Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group‘s signature production Urban Death, a cornucopia of short, and I mean brief, minutes-long scenes of the…

A MONSTER MASH Like most boomers, I was raised watching black-and-white horror movies. Both frightening and amusing, those giant ants, grasshoppers and spiders attacking some innocent town were the best action movies back in the day. And once seen, the major  monsters  — King Kong, Godzilla, The Blob, Frankenstein, Dracula, et al. — are not forgotten. In…

A ROYAL KING From the moment Irish actor extraordinaire Pat Kinevane appears out of the darkness as if in a dream, his lithe body moving as seductively as a snake into a sexy Argentine Tango, you will be entranced to meet Luther, a lonely Elvis Impersonator looking for love in all the wrong places. Taking…