SWEET SONGS UNSUPPORTED Tarell Alvin McCraney’s 2012 Choir Boy is a tantalizing, underdeveloped play-with-music not entirely improved by Trip Cullman’s direction, now at the Geffen a year after the production’s Manhattan Theater Club bow. Jason Michael Webb’s tasteful vocal arrangements sound terrific via Fitz Patton’s crisp sound design, but the very assurance and gravity of…

REAWAKENING In one of the bios for Deaf West’s production of Spring Awakening, actress Ali Stroker thanks the company for stepping out of the box, and turning what some may think as a ‘limitation’ into an opportunity. The “limitation” here refers to her wheelchair as well as deafness’”particularly, her cast mates who are deaf appearing…

COME HOME TO THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL The Trip to Bountiful, Horton Foote’s plaintive 1953 teleplay (adapted for Broadway and for the 1985 film with Geraldine Page), paints a picture of rural America in the 1940s that gently reminds us that there was (and may still be) a place in this country where people tip…

POP DOES OPERA  BIG, INTIMATELY Under Artistic Director Josh Shaw’s hands-on guidance, Pacific Opera Project has become L.A.’s most exciting new opera company. In just three years since POP began with the teeny-tiny production of Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, I sensed that this would be the company to make quality opera more accessible, approachable, and affordable….

COLD DEAD HANDS America’s bittersweet love-and-hate affair with guns is the target of playwright Victor Kaufold’s thought-provoking but lopsided satirical revue, which premiered in 2000 at the Blank Theatre’s Young Playwright’s Festival, their annual showcase of works by teen authors. The play was an immediate response to the massacre at Columbine High School, where a…

YOU’LL GET THIS GOAT Martin is an architect at the top of his profession; he and his wife Stevie and their son Billy live at, or on, the crest of civilization: rich, successful, smart, loving, happy. Their journalist friend Ross is, if not an Olympian, a dweller on the slopes; they are all cultivated, delightful,…

HERE’S CHARLEY This Sunday, September 21, Musical Theatre West will begin the Reiner Staged Reading Series fifth anniversary season with a one-time only performance of Where’s Charley? (1948), based on Brandon Thomas’s wildly successful Charley’s Aunt (1892), which had an original London run of 1,466 performances. Where’s Charley?, Frank Loesser’s first Broadway score, is one…

STRANGE BUT WATCHABLE BEHAVIOR Let’s see if I got this right. A tongue-in-cheek bio-musical and pseudo-adventure tale about John Broadus Watson’”wannabe preacher-turned-behavioral scientist-turned-ad man’”includes anthropomorphized barnyard animals, family drama, a love story, a talking lab rat, and a vaudevillian, Weill-esque score (from oompah and jazz to spirituals) : and this hydra-headed musical doesn’t suck?! Credit…