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 … Read more
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.Read more… Now playing … Read more
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 … Read more
Dany Margolies – Arts In LA 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 … Read more
Terry Morgan – LAist 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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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.Read more… Bob Verini – ArtsInLA Back in the heyday of the great movie … Read more
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 … Read more
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. … Read more
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 … Read more