Joan Marcus
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
“The saddest thing in life is wasted talent, and the choices you make will shape your life forever.” A Bronx Tale, a musical based on the play of the same name, opened at the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles this week after a nearly two year run on Broadway.
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Now running through November 25
Lily Kravetz
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw
In Bayou Blues, part of the 2018 Solo Queens Fest at Bootleg Theatre, writer/performer Shaina Lynn mixes storytelling and spoken word to relay her experience as a woman of color from New Orleans.
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Now running through November 18
Mae Koo Photography
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw
Although Bliss (Or Emily Post is Dead!), is set in North Orange, New Jersey in the 1960s, a rudimentary knowledge of Greek mythology is helpful in fathoming the themes of Jami Brandli’s ambitious but muddled satire, directed by Darin Anthony.
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Now running through December 2
Craig Schwartz
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
Two immigrant families, one Mexican and one Japanese-American, have lived peacefully as neighbors on a ranch in the Santa Clara Valley for years, working together in the fields. The oldest children from each family have even fallen in love with each other—and then Pearl Harbor happens, and soon World War II, and their lives will never be the same.
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Dany Margolies – The Daily News
Sweet, timely and picturesque, “Valley of the Heart” tells of an earlier chapter in in American history when our nation behaved badly. From writer-director Luis Valdez comes this tale of two immigrant families — one Japanese and one Mexican — living in the then-agricultural town of Cupertino during World War II.
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Frances Baum Nicholson –The Stage Struck Review
As someone who has taught history for a few decades, there is no doubt that the ugliness of the Japanese Internment is one of the several inexcusable black marks on our American story.
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Jonas Schwartz - TheaterMania
The image of innocents trapped behind the barbed-wire fences of American internment camps still burns in the minds of anyone absorbed in current affairs. Luis Valdez’s Valley of the Heart reminds audiences that the latest drama taking place at our Mexican borders reflects a shameful period during World War II…….
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Now running through December 16
Geoffrey Wade Photography
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
The actual “cost of living” can take on many forms—physical, emotional, financial. In Cost of Living, Martyna Majok’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning play now in its west coast premiere at the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles, two very different relationships between people with disabilities and their caregivers are examined through a universal lens of privilege, loneliness, and how both affect us all.
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Now running through
Ellen Dostal – Broadway World
New work is the lifeblood of the theatre and it is also the sole focus of LA-based SkyPilot Theatre Company. Going one step further, SkyPilot’s niche is “producing only original plays, created by LA playwrights,” which they have done consistently since 2010.
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Now running through November 18
Mauricio Gomez
Ellen Dostal – Musicals in L.A.
Maureen Huskey’s new one act play with music takes place wholly in the moment before death. Conceived as a 90 minute suspension of time in which Alice B. Sheldon (Betsy Moore) watches her life pass before her eyes, it blends music, movement, sound, and text to create as enigmatic a piece as the life of its central character. That’s not necessarily a good thing.
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Rob Stevens – Haines His Way
Alice B. Sheldon was a Chicago debutante who was never completely comfortable in her body or her life.
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Now running through November 18
Geoffrey Wade Photography
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
Sometimes, family can bring out the worst in us—especially if your relatives would do anything to get to the top.
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Terry Morgan - Talkin’ Broadway
Sometimes a play simply works within its own era, and exists later simply as an accurate representation of that time. But other times a play is prescient, and seems as if it was written directly to comment on today. Although Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes is a period piece, its portrait of dreadful people doing awful things in the pursuit of money and power feels particularly pointed now…Read more…
Margaret Gray – LA Times
Say your husband, whom you had never liked, suffered from an ill-defined but dangerous heart condition. And say he happened to mention — in not a very nice way — that he was about to take a step that would scuttle all your hopes and dreams and leave you penniless. And imagine that at that very moment, overexcited by triumph, he reached for his medicine bottle and found it empty.
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Rob Stevens – Haines His Way
Lillian Hellman was a playwright, screenwriter, memoirist whose most famous piece of writing may well be the letter she wrote in 1952 to the House Un-American Activities Committee stating “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions..”
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Now running through December 1o
Margaret Gray – LA Times
There’s nothing scary, at first, about Rudolph, the elderly gentleman who shows up at Albert and Bettina’s house one Christmas Eve in “Winter Solstice,” a 2013 play by the German writer Roland Schimmelpfennig, translated by David Tushingham, which is having its West Coast premiere at City Garage.
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Katie Buenneke – Stage Raw
It is abundantly clear that Roland Schimmelpfenig, the playwright of Winter Solstice, currently making its West Coast debut at City Garage in Santa Monica, wishes he were a novelist, or perhaps an experimental filmmaker like the characters in the play.
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Now running through November 25
Michael Lamont
Terry Morgan - Stage Raw
Translating personal experiences or family history into theatre can be a tricky proposition. On the one hand, simply recounting events as they happened doesn’t necessarily create fascinating drama. On the other hand, fictionalizing things too much may betray the truth of the story.
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Now running through November 18
Craig Schwartz
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
What happens when a popular television personality finds himself in the middle of a scandal? This topical question is at the center of Quack, a world premiere play by Eliza Clark currently playing at Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre.
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Dany Margolies – The Daily News
When Neel Keller directs a play, the audience is sure to see two elements. One is memorable scenic design, with settings and scene changes we could only have imagined. The other element is atypical characters with something of import to say. In the case of “Quack,” they have a bit too much to say, and that puts a damper on an otherwise intelligent script.
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Jonas Schwartz - TheaterMania
Male entitlement sits at the forefront of Quack, the salty new satire by Eliza Clark now playing at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. At the crux of the comedy is an institutionalized resistance to growth as a society.
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Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw
Eliza Clark’s new play, directed by Neel Keller at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, disappoints at the top but broadens and deepens as the story develops. It’s about a celebrity doctor with a long-running TV show whose career begins to fracture after his careless comments lead to the death of two children.
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Now running through November 18
David Rodriguez
Terry Morgan - Stage Raw
It could be said that Sam Shepard perfected the strain of poetic realism that runs in American playwriting, particularly in works such as True West and Buried Child. Symbols abound, from characters representing civilization and wilderness to bushels of corn growing from a dead field.
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Now running through November 9