Neal Weaver – LA Weekly
This farce by Paul Storiale kicks off with the Logans, Joanne (Elyse Ashton) and Dean (Rob Schaumann), planning to sell their house, ship Grandpa Logan off to a nursing home and move to Florida. They’ve invited their three misfit children home for one last family Christmas. Just when the kids are due to arrive, they discover that Grandpa has died in his sleep; they decide to conceal the fact in order to not spoil the holidays.
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Now running through December 21.
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly
Photo by Christina Harris
What made Ebenezer Scrooge such a miserable old coot? Adapter-director Christina Harris elaborates on this aspect of Dickens’ cautionary tale in Sierra Madre Playhouse’s amiable musical production of A Christmas Carol, embellished with songs and upbeat ensemble dancing. Scott Harris portrays the tight-fisted miser as less an icy capitalist than a bad-tempered old man with chronic indigestion (my take).
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Now running through December 22.
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly
Photo by Rob Cunliffe
The opening stanza of Lewis Carroll‘s poem “Jabberwocky” goes like this:
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves;
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Perhaps such nonsense verse and satirically inverted logic, also found in Carroll’s books such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, stemmed from his vocation as a mathematician. It’s not difficult to speculate on the tension between math’s pristine rationality as an explanation of natural phenomena and the senseless and pointless misery of so much human behavior.
Now running through December 22.
David C. Nichols – LA Times
“In the Heights” is currently irradiating Casa 0101, where it fits as felicitously as cinnamon in café con leche. This galvanic chamber edition of the 2008 Tony winner about the denizens of a Washington Heights barrio has enough heartfelt energy to alleviate a citywide power outage.
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Photo by Ed Krieger
Now running through December 22.
Les Spindle – Frontiers L.A.
“Come look at the freaks!” sings a grotesque carnival barker, introducing a bizarre contingent of sideshow performers—hardly a typical opening scene for a Broadway musical. The adventurous Side Show, which bowed in New York in 1997 to critical acclaim and four Tony nominations, closed following a three-month run. It was apparently too edgy for Broadway audiences whose idea of a sufficiently envelope-pushing musical at that time was probably Victor/Victoria.
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Now running through December 15.
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly
Suitable for the kindergarten set, writer Scott Martin’s benign adaptation of the classic children’s story features Caitlin Gallogly as a friendly and cherished little girl, whose mom (Bonnie Kalisher) just isn’t a good cook. Searching for adventure, the tyke stumbles upon the three bears’ habitat and, after sampling their food and furniture, makes off with the recipe for Mama Bear’s delicious porridge
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Photo by Thomas Mikusz
Now running through March 1.
Pauline Adamek – LA Weekly
A despondent fellow, Doug (Pete Caslavka), is disillusioned by how he has ended up, stuck in a depressingly menial job working the graveyard shift at a gas station’s convenience store. Packing a handgun, he decides to end it all at the conclusion of his shift at dawn.
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Photo by Jessica Sherman
Now playing through December 21.
David C. Nichols – LA Times
A noteworthy degree of high-performance gusto attends “¡Ser!” at Los Angeles Theatre Center. This deeply personal coming-of-age account from writer-performer Karen Anzoategui reveals a ripely burgeoning talent. Read more…
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly
Latino Theater Company pulls out the stops for Karen Anzoategui’s solo performance ¡Ser!, about a queer Latina who flees Huntington Park with her mom and brothers for a new life in Buenos Aires, only to return to California — Moreno Valley — then back to Argentina, until resettling, with some bittersweetness, in California, this time L.A.’s Boyle Heights. Read more…
Now running through December 8.
Dany Margolies – Arts In LA
Photo by Simon Annand
In the good old days, Sleeping Beauty was a ballet choreographed, in its first incarnation, by Marius Petipa. In it, we meet Princess Aurora, first in a prologue when she is a baby—represented by a doll, or more likely a bundle of cloth—swaddled beyond recognition and housed in a froufrou cradle upstage, then, in Act One, as a 16-year-old who meets and by Act Three marries Prince Désiré.
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Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA
With its Gothic theme, reflected in lavish costuming and majestic sets (both elements designed by Lez Brotherston), and a lush score by Tchaikovsky, “Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty” promises to be a magical evening of fairy tale and ballet. Instead, on Thursday night LA audiences were presented with cacophonous and insultingly unsubtle show that suffers from heavy-handed, exaggerated gestures and uninspired, pedestrian choreography—more synchronized movement than dance. Minus the grace and ethereal nature of classical ballet and the sensitivity of a live orchestra, “Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty” is a braying and disappointingly earthbound production. Read more…
Now running through December 1.
Terry Morgan – LAist
Photo by Moses Umbeke
Audience identification is an interesting phenomenon. It’s the fact that audiences will have sympathy for a possibly repellent character simply because he or she is the protagonist in a story—perhaps it’s an artistic variant of Stockholm Syndrome? This explains the continual fascination with characters such as Richard III, Sweeney Todd and Medea. Speaking of the woman who never won the mother of the year award, Marina Carr’s By The Bog of Cats is loosely inspired by the old Euripides play.
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Now running through December 8.
David C. Nichols – LA Times
A comforting mix of the familiar and unexpected floats the smooth 25th anniversary revival of “Aspirin & Elephants” at the Santa Monica Playhouse. Despite some formulaic aspects, playwright Jerry Mayer’s boulevard comedy about intergenerational marital issues on a cruise ship is a surefire date show, a high-end sitcom with flashes of emotional heft. Read more…
Photo by Cydne Moore
Now running through January 26.
Photo by Michael Lamont
Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA
Striking a perfect balance between scares and laughs, Play Dead delivers plenty of delicious thrills, macabre chills and giggles. The one-act show features Todd Robbins as our ghoulish host and runs through December 22 at the Geffen Playhouse.
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Bob Verini - ArtsInLA
Back in the heyday of the great movie palaces—roughly the Depression until TV conquered all sometime in the 1960s—many a management would supplement the regular bill of double-feature and selected shorts with late-night live magic shows. These last gasps of vaudeville, known as “spook shows,” proved to be a great training ground—for illusionists who yearned to practice their skills before an audience….
Sharon Perlmutter - Talkin’ Broadway
Sure, I could nitpick Play Dead—the cross between a play and a magic show, sprinkled with a bit of haunted house, currently playing in the small Audrey Skirball Kenis theatre at the Geffen. But every time I start to do so, I keep coming back to the inescapable fact that I spent the great bulk of the show’s 80-minute running time with a great big smile on my face and my pulse racing—and I’m pretty darned sure that’s exactly what the show’s creators, Todd Robbins and Teller, were aiming for.Read more…
Now running through December 22.
