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Theater Review: EVOLUTION OF A SONERO (Los Angeles Theatre Center)
THE SONERO, THE BETTER Here’s what tipped me off that we were about to see something special: Pianist Carlos Ordiano enters with four band members (“The Razor Blades”) at Los Angeles Theatre Center, and plays a gorgeous — and I mean GORGEOUS — piano solo, molto melodic and introspective. Then the quintet broke into a…
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Theater Review: THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE (Pacific Opera Project at Forest Lawn, Glendale)
PIFFLING PIRATES OF PENZANCE POPS WITH POP The plot of The Pirates of Penzance, a satire so cutting in Victorian days, will likely come off as inane to today’s spectators. Still, Arthur Sullivan’s music is superb and the lyrics delicious, though it takes a sharp ear to follow W.S. Gilbert’s rapid-fire libretto. The score almost…
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Theater Review: THE BOTTOMING PROCESS (IAMA Theatre Company and the Los Angeles LGBT Center)
PILAPIL POPS HIS CHERRY IN HIS PLAYWRITING PREMIERE “Why won’t you let me top you? Is it because I am Asian?!” This ear-catching line is decried robustly by the very passionate protagonist Milo (the expressive George Salazar), a Filipino neurotic social media account manager to his lover, young adult book writer and celebrity, John (Rick…
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Theater Review: THE CONFESSION OF LILY DARE (New Conservatory Theatre Center)
YOU MUST SEE J. CONRAD FRANK — IF YOU LILY DARE New Conservatory Theater is finishing their exciting 2022-23 season with actor, playwright and drag performer Charles Busch’s The Confession Of Lily Dare. The show is set during the era of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, when the city had a Red Light District filled with…
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Theater Review: A NEW BRAIN (Celebration Theatre)
CELEBRATION THEATRE GOT IT RIGHT! (BUT THEY DIDN’T) When William Finn‘s autobiographical musical A New Brain opened at Lincoln Center in 1998, I couldn’t understand why the reviews were so higgledy-piggledy. True, I hadn’t actually seen the production, but the original cast recording had me hooked. I was champing at the bit to see why his…
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Theater Review: CHICAGO (National Tour)
ALL THAT JAZZ AND MORE Bandstand, shining lights, and sexy murderers in lingerie. Chicago celebrates 25 years of razzle dazzle with this national tour featuring the original New York production directed by Walter Bobbie and choreographed by Ann Reinkingin the style of Bob Fosse. With the bandstand as the centerpiece of this City Center’s Encores!…
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Theater Review: XANADU (San Diego Musical Theatre)
XANA-DOOZY OF A MUSICAL Playwrights of musicals have frequently, with varying degrees of success, taken a successful non-musical movie and worked it into a staged musical. Billy Elliott, Waitress, and Mean Girls are among many movies given a whole new life on stage through song and dance. What makes 1980s’ Xanadu a very different case,…
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Theater Review: THE CHRONICLES OF KALKI (Moxie Theatre in San Diego)
VISHNU WERE HERE First, a little history lesson: In the Hindu religion, the god Vishnu incarnated ten times as different “avatara,” which can be interpreted different ways, including “descendent.” The final incarnation, calling himself Kalki, came to end a long period of darkness, degeneration, and chaos. While knowing this is not critical to following Aditi…
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Theater Review: AVAAZ (South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa)
A TRAILBLAZING VOICE EMERGES It is tough to capture what Avaaz is in writing. On the surface, it is a one-person play in which author Michael Shayan plays his mother, Roya, a Jewish-Iranian woman who is quite a character. The narrative journey can be traced back to Roya’s father, Shayan’s grandfather, who was jailed for…
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Theater Review: SHE LOVES ME (Palm Canyon Theatre)
I LOVES SHE LOVES ME Palm Canyon Theatre closed their 22/23 season this past week with a warm-hearted, inspired mounting of She Loves Me, one of the most romantic musicals ever written. She Loves Me is the 1963 melt-your-heart musical based on Hungarian playwright Miklós László’s Parfumerie and features one of the most adorable pairs…
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Theater Review: ASSASSINS (Long Beach Landmark Theatre, First Congregational Church of Long Beach)
ASSASSINS SINGS! BUT THE COMPEXITY OF ITS THEMES GO MISSING ALONG WITH THE GUNS Assassins, with music and lyrics by the late Stephen Sondheim and a book by John Weidman, opened Off-Broadway at the Playwrights Horizon in the winter of 1990 and played seventy-three performances. Reviews were mixed to poor, applauding the music but questioning…
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Theater Review: ANGELS IN AMERICA: PART ONE (Bedlam and Central Square Theater in Cambridge, MA)
THE MILLENNIUM HAS COME AND GONE, BUT THE THEMES REMAIN THE SAME Central Square Theater’s collaboration with Bedlam of Tony Kushner’s still-relevant masterpiece Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is thrilling. Despite the three-hour run time, the intensity of Part One: Millennium Approaches is inspiring and moving. The acting is terrific. Eddie Shields…
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Theater Review: JOY & PANDEMIC (Huntington Theatre Company in Boston)
FAITH, HOPE AND SCIENCE I found myself thinking of Henrik Ibsen and Lucille Ball as I watched this world premiere of acclaimed playwright and performance artist Taylor Mac. Ibsen and Ball are not two names normally associated in my mind, but the early twentieth-century interior setting (Philadelphia, not Norway) — in which the commanding figure…
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Theater Review: A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC (Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena)
A LUMINOUS NIGHT MUSIC I’m a little dizzy, bubbly’”not from any reception champagne, mind you, but from seeing my very first production of A Little Night Music. It’s left me floating. (The music, I confess, is still coursing through me; I hope they don’t ask for it back.) With its 20 cast members and 22-piece…
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Theater Review: THE REALISTIC JONESES (Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach)
NOTHING IS MORE REAL THAN NOTHING — Samuel Beckett Dramatist Will Eno doesn’t make it easy on the audience in his 2012 play The Realistic Joneses at the Laguna Playhouse. Viewers are asked to decide whether the play is primarily a comedy or a sober view of the human condition salted with bits of the…
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Theater Review: BOYS IN THE BAND (The Bent at Camelot Theatres in Palm Springs)
A BAND TO BEAT THE BAND Coachella Valley’s new queer theater company The Bent — in partnership with the Palm Springs Cultural Center — closes its wildly successful inaugural season with Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, running through May 7. Artistic Director Steve Rosenbaum and Managing Director Terry Ray moved quickly to fill…
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Theater Review: COLEMAN ’72 (South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa)
A LOVE LETTER TO AN IMMIGRANT FATHER Coleman ’72 is getting a fantastic world premiere production from South Coast Repertory. It is a melodrama about nostalgia, the immigrant experience, cross-generational trauma, and familial love. Told through the unreliable accounts of three siblings, this trip down memory lane brings up complicated family dynamics between each sibling…
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Theater Review: SCINTILLA (Road Theatre Company)
SCINTILLATING Every generation has its gap. Currently millennials are annoyed that baby boomers wrecked the planet and baby boomers are annoyed that millennials are, well, annoying. Add to the mix the annoying offspring who see their role as having to be the boss of an aging parent and you have the ingredients for the new…
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Theater Review: THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG (Desert Theater Works in Indio)
GOES WRONG GOES RIGHT The Play That Goes Wrong running through Sunday, April 30 at Desert Theater Works (DTW) in Indio is the only comedy to ever win both a Tony and Olivier award. It is a hilarious, farcical masterpiece of human and technical stage malfunction — by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields…
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Theater Review: MURDER ON THE LINKS (North Coast Repertory Theatre)
THIS SHOW IS MURDER The latest production at North Coast Rep is a stage adaption of Dame Agatha Christie’s 1923 detective novel Murder on the Links. Originally titled The Murder on the Links, it was the second novel to star the Belgian private detective Hercule Poirot. The eccentric Poirot became one of the most popular…
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