Darrett Sanders
Terry Morgan - Stage Raw
Not every work of art is designed with the mass audience in mind. Some are experiments or explorations, or maybe just a diverting goof. All these terms might apply to John O’Keefe’s All Night Long, a kaleidoscopic fever dream of a play that revels in erudition and silly humor but doesn’t hew to a traditional dramatic structure or feature a standard resolution.
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Now running through October 7
Jeff Lorch
Ellen Dostal – Broadway World
Ammunition Theatre Company ventures into the wacky world of fractured fairy tales for its latest production, FAIRY TALE THEATRE 18 & OVER: THE MUSICAL.
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Now running through October 7
Darrett Sanders
Jonas Schwartz - TheaterMania
Life and death have always been intertwined. People spend much of their life worrying when they will pass away, how their beliefs will protect them in the next realm, and if they’ll be able to share experiences with those who have already died.
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Now running through October 7
Corwin Evans
Ellen Dostal – Broadway World
How much rage would a person need to feel to kill two people with 29 whacks of an axe? The short answer is, a lot. That’s the number Andrew Borden and his second wife Abby actually sustained in 1892 – not the 81 immortalized in this haunting nursery rhyme.
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Now running through September 29
Gina Long
Frances Baum Nicholson –The Stage Struck Review
When a play being produced locally has a long history of excellence, that can be both a blessing and a curse for a theater company, especially a comparatively small one.
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Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
We don’t usually think of friendly card games as battles to the death, or near it, except perhaps in the Wild West. But as playwright D.L. Coburn suggests in his Pulitzer Prize play, when it comes to super competitive men like Weller Martin (Alan Blumenfeld), anything can happen.
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Now running through October 7
(Photo, courtesy Australian Theatre Company)
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw
In Swansong, Irish playwright Conor McDermottroe drafts a portrait of a disturbed and angry man unable to quell his sudden fits of rage or find balm for the inner wound that’s been festering since his childhood.
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Now running through October 7
Frances Baum Nicholson –The Stage Struck Review
It is quite remarkable how many times the Victor Hugo novel, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” has been dramatized, in film, on television, and on the stage.
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Now running through September 22
Joan Marcus
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
Jukebox bio-musicals are seemingly a dime a dozen these days—Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations is currently playing at the Ahmanson Theatre, and the Pantages Theatre was recently home to On Your Feet, the Gloria and Emilio Estefan musical. But Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, which just reopened at the Pantages in Los Angeles after a successful run in 2016, feels a little different and more special.
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Rob Stevens – Haines His Way
Carole King is the most successful female songwriter of the latter half of the 20th century, having written or co-written 118 pop hits on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1955 and 1999.
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Now running through September 30
Jenny Graham
Frances Baum Nicholson –The Stage Struck Review
There is a fine line between humor which skewers privilege and prejudice by making its claims sound as ridiculous as they are, and writing which pronounces the same beliefs and then does a kind of wink to indicate that, really, it was said to be funny.
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Jonas Schwartz - TheaterMania
The pursuit of happiness and property is embedded in the American dream. Thomas Jefferson even added it to the Declaration of Independence as an inalienable right. Unfortunately, with property come neighbors and the frustration of sharing a fence with a stranger. Playwright Karen Zacarías’s comedy Native Gardens demonstrates what happens when you must battle your neighbor for your own land. Read more…
Now running through September 30
Mandi Moss Holmes
Terry Morgan - Stage Raw
There’s a reason that Shakespeare’s Cymbeline doesn’t get produced very often. It’s not that it’s bad per se, but that it’s familiar without being extraordinary.
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Now running through October 14
Jordan Kubat
Margaret Gray – LA Times
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a stage or screen adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, however well-intentioned, must be unfavorably compared to the original.
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Now running through September 30
Angel Origgi
Ellen Dostal – Broadway World
When writer/director Stan Lai has an idea for a new play, people take notice………Now, he brings a breathtaking new play to the Huntington Library’s Chinese Garden, the Garden of Flowing Fragrance, Liu Fang Yuan.
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Now running through October 26