THE CURE FOR THE BLUES HAS ARRIVED I have not been lucky enough to see legendary singers – such as Keely Smith, Dean Martin, or Ella Fitzgerald – perform standards live. Time and again, I am told by people who saw them what magic occurs when an original personality with a distinctive voice interprets songs…

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A CAST MAKES Let me tell you a story. A tale of two casts. Once upon a time there was a playwright whose name was Lillian Hellman. You may have heard of her. She had a taste for melodrama, it’s true, but, at her best, she wrote some of the most effective…

THE GHOSTS OF GAMBLERS PAST AND PRESENT AND NO FUTURE Someone once said that the only poet Los Angeles ever produced was Raymond Chandler. It must have been said before John Steppling came along. Steppling is the one playwright who has located the rot at the core of our city and its environs and who…

SHE’S BA-A-A-ACK Annie, the sugar-coated phenomenon that seems to have the life of an Everlasting Gobstopper, is back on the boards, courtesy of Musical Theatre West in Long Beach. The show, about comic strip legend Little Orphan Annie, keeps being remounted for a reason: this feel-good Depression-era musical has remarkably melodious tunes (music by Charles…

OTHELLO! THE MUSICAL A thousand years ago, when Los Angeles theater was still taking baby steps (1968, to be precise), an Englishman, Jack Good, had the idea of a musical version of Othello – it wasn’t the first time, of course, Verdi’s opera having quite brilliantly executed the same idea quite a few years before…