Photo by Ron Vignone
Margaret Gray – LA Times
Henry Jaglom’s “Train to Zakopané,” premiering at the Edgemar Center for the Arts, is based on an incident in the life of his father: a rich, complex, heartbreaking story of doomed lovers in Poland between the wars.
Photo courtesy Geffen Playhouse
Bob Verini - Stage Raw
Jerome Kern, no mean tunesmith, had a famous retort when asked about Irving Berlin’s place in American music. He has none, the Show Boat composer replied; “he is American music.” In a similar vein, one might say that Hershey Felder has no place among performers of musical biographical monologues. Read more...
David C. Nichols – LA Times
“I wrote for love. I wrote for my country. I wrote for you.”
Now running through December 21.
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw
Bekah Brunstetter’s newest play is about brothers: what it means to live with a sibling you’re not compatible with, and what it’s like to long for one who may not exist. Read more…
Now running through December 14.
Photo by Ed Krieg
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
In the middle years of the 20th century, Terrence Rattigan (1911-1977) was perhaps England’s most important playwright. (Noel Coward was in a state of temporary eclipse, though he would experience a triumphant resurgence a few years later.) Rattigan specialized in genteel, conventional well-made plays, but his skill and his talent for capturing the flavor of English middle-class life redeemed him. Read more…
Now running through December 14.
Photo by Shari Barrett
Dany Margolies - Arts In LA
Traditional fairy tales begin with characters who have far to travel, while the promise of adventure perfumes the story. And at the conclusions of these tales, the righteous get their rewards, while the wrongdoers are punished or worse.
Now running through December 20.
Photo by Erica Brown
Bob Verini - Arts In LA
First things first: Dirty is by no means dirty, at least insofar as habitues of Melrose Avenue’s Zephyr Theatre might expect. That particular venue has hosted more than its share of full-frontal nudity and simulated sex acts over the years. Read more…
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly
In its rather earnest way, Andrew Hinderaker’s Dirty calls into question how the word “obscene” often applies to pornography but not to, say, mergers and acquisitions. In fact, the play strongly implies that sex is a kind of merger and acquisition, so why not profit from it? Read more…
Now running through December 21.
Photo by Craig Schwartz
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly
If ever there were a writer dedicated to society’s subversion it was Joe Orton. Orton despised the status quo and made it his mission to wreak havoc on its precepts as thoroughly and flamboyantly as possible. In What the Butler Saw, he went after authority figures, psychoanalysis, which he regarded as a predatory evil, and the hypocritical and repressed British attitude towards sex. Read more…
Hoyt Hilsman - Huffington Post
Photo by Craig Schwartz
British playwright Joe Orton, who rose from a working class background and a stint in prison to a short but prolific life as one of Britain’s most outstanding playwrights, never lived to see a production of his brilliant farce What the Butler Saw. Read more…
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw
Joe Orton (Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot) was certainly a consequential force in the mid-century English language theater with his groundbreaking transgressions of social and sexual mores through his new breed of comedy of very bad manners. When murdered by his lover in 1967 at the age of 34, he had finished What the Butler Saw, generally regarded as his best work, although having never seen it performed, presumably it was not subject to the improving rewrites that would be a customary part of the process. em>Read more…
Jonas Schwartz - TheaterMania
Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw has been shocking audiences since 1969. It deals openly with homosexuality, incest, insanity, and government incompetence — and contains male nudity. It takes the conventions of the genre and blows them up. While most farce is frivolous, Orton’s is subversive — not merely fast-paced, but anarchic. Morality standards have evolved since the play first opened, but as evidenced by the production at the Mark Taper Forum, this hilarious comedy has lost no steam. Read more…
Now running through December 21.
Photo by Alex Berry
Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA
Photo by Joseph Will
It takes a highly talented actor to emulate a real-life theater legend. Born 1856, Gabrielle Réjane (her stage name) was a remarkable French actress and innovative theater impresario who altered French culture, its fashion and socio-politics during the late 19th Century. Conceived and written by Ilana Turner, a new play about this striking French icon, O Réjane, is now playing at the Bootleg Theater. Read more…
Now running through December 6.
Photo by Michael Lamont
David C. Nichols – LA Times
A high degree of skill and individuality accompanies “Takarazuka!!!” at East West Players. In its elegant West Coast premiere, Susan Soon He Stanton’s very promising albeit still-forming play with music uses the famed all-female troupe in the titular Japanese city as a backdrop to an intriguing study of gender roles, intergenerational schisms and the cost of success. Read more…
Now running through Dec. 7.
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw
Master marionettiste Ronnie Burkett pays homage to vaudeville and its indefatigable performers in his latest piece, which played all too briefly this past week as part of UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance Program. The name Daisy Theatre derives inspiration from the underground puppet cabarets that flourished in Prague during the Nazi Occupation. Read more…
The production is closed.
Photo by Lucie Jansch
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw
One of my seminal experiences in 40 years of Los Angeles theatergoing was the single performance in 1977 at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre of the first local exposure to the work of Robert Wilson, I was sitting on my patio this guy appeared I thought I was hallucinating, a collaboration with Lucinda Childs. Beyond being transfixing and innovative, it embodied a transformative vision for a total theater in which every constituent creative element – movement, text, light and sound and set design, tempo – was marshaled toward an unique sense of charged space and time. Read more…
Photo by Brian Perez
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
Apparently playwright Tom Yewell wanted to provide a male variation on The Vagina Monologues. The title might suggest that the show is a bit of pornography or an exercise in sensationalism, but the play is neither, despite a brief interlude of male nudity. It is, rather, a series of eight engaging and provocative monologues, dealing with male vulnerabilities and sexual dilemmas. Read more…
David C. Nichols – LA Times
The Penis Chronicles” has extended at the Coast Playhouse, which is understandable, and, given that venue’s long-dark status, heartening. Tom Yewell’s study of the male experience isn’t necessarily the counterpart to Eve Ensler’s “Vagina Monologues” that its obviated title suggests. Less political or variegated, this series of eight single-person accounts nonetheless reveals noteworthy writing ability and features solid, credible acting from a well-chosen cast. Read more…
Now running through January 11.