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.
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly
Writer Betty Tokudani’s cliché-ridden comedy centers on four elderly women whose curmudgeonly cluelessness we are supposed to find endearing. Vain, stylish Tomi (Jeanne Sakata) is mourning her middle-aged son, a mama’s boy who for years gobbled her high-cholesterol food, then died young of a heart attack. Her friends strive to be sympathetic but struggle to handle Tomi’s drama-queen antics.
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Now running through December 8.
Neal Weaver – LA Weekly
Irish playwright Fionnuala Kenny’s Elvis’s Toenail is set in Dublin in 1961, when the Catholic Church still maintained its stranglehold on Irish society — but the first signs of resistance and rebellion were beginning to appear. Rita (played with touching simplicity and conviction by Lenne Klingaman) is pregnant but unmarried. She desperately wants to keep her baby, but both her family and the church want to force her to take refuge in the local convent, where the baby would be taken away and put up for adoption.
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Now running through December 8.
Pauline Adamek – LA Weekly
Young and naive, Girlie (Sandy Yu) has moved from her Philippines village to the city to train at a regional call center for a major American airline. Obsessed with the TV soap Dallas, Girlie fantasizes about moving there to live a dream life. But her single-minded pursuit and ultimate triumph have a price.
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Now running through December 9.
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly
Actor John Barrymore, star of theater and screen for a quarter of a century until his death in 1942, was thrown out of prep school after having been seen entering a brothel. This detail isn’t in William Luce‘s 1996 two-person show based on the actor’s reminiscences, Barrymore, though the play does have the title character mention a scene in which young John fetched his own father home from a brothel. Read more…
Photo by Kimberly Fox
Melinda Schupmann – Arts In LA
Known as The Great Profile, John Barrymore was considered one of the finest actors of his time. With a handsome visage and notable theatrics, he was praised by all and emulated later by a succession of actors including Laurence Olivier and Alec Guinness.
In playwright William Luce’s tribute to Barrymore’s legend, actor Gordon Goodman takes on the daunting task of capturing the essence of this man whose brilliance was legendary and whose alcoholism and profligate ways destroyed his career.
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Sharon Perlmutter - Talkin’ Broadway
Barrymore initially seems like an odd choice for Good People Theater Company. At first glance, it looks like a complete departure from the company’s initial venture, a fully staged version of A Man of No Importance. Why follow up a big musical production with a (nearly) one-man show? And yet, as the evening progresses, certain similarities emerge. Read more…
Now playing through December 1.
Neal Weaver – LA Weekly
When playwright Tom Dudzick was growing up in Buffalo, N.Y., in the 1950s, one local landmark was a 20-foot shrine for the Blessed Virgin, beside a small barbershop. According to local legend, the shrine was erected by the barber after the Blessed Mother appeared in his shop one Christmas Eve. Dudzick latched onto the story and used it as the basis for this fictionalized account.
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Photo by Michael Lamont
Now running through December 16.