THE GAYEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER!! at the Whitmore Lindley Theatre

Neal Weaver  – Stage Raw Joe Marshall’s zany farce zeros in on the inept and sometimes disastrous efforts of a small gay theatre company to present a Christmas pageant. The characters include the playwright Rod (Skip Pipo), who specializes in pirating the plots of better writers, the New York director Margie (Moremi Okoroh), who takes … Read more

RADITATICAL at the Ricardo Montalban Theatre

Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw Raditatical is one of those superb amalgams of music, dance and visuals whose sum eludes description. Introduced as “a journey in rhythm,” and conceived and co-directed by Bronkar Lee and Ameenah Kaplan, this family-friendly show features juggler-beatboxing impresario Lee, and five other remarkably gifted musical performers. Read more… Now running through … Read more

THE SNOW QUEEN – Troubadour Theater Company at the Falcon Theatre

Bob Verini –   Arts In LA As surely as the Rockettes annually turn out to Occupy Radio City, Troubadour Theater Company uses December to command Burbank’s Falcon Theatre for a celebratory holiday mash-up of some sort of Christmas tale and a particular pop songbook. The Snow QUEEN, the sixth such expression of wassail I’ve encountered, is … Read more

SHE LOVES ME at the Chance Theatre

Bob Verini –   Arts In LA Ill-advised, intrusive direction plagues the Chance Theater’s She Loves Me, and the casualty is the easy, unforced enjoyment traditionally associated with this jewel box of a musical, adapted from the 1940 Lubitsch classic The Shop Around the Corner. Read more… David C. Nichols – LA Times The three essential qualities invoked in … Read more

BLITHE SPIRIT at the Ahmanson Theatre

Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Noel Coward is said to have written Blithe Spirit in less than a week. The play premiered a couple of months after he completed it, in 1941, when the Germans were bombing London, and audiences, no doubt desperate for distraction, stepped gamely over the rubble on their way to the theater. Why … Read more

LOVE, NOEL at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

Jonas Schwartz –  Arts In LA Noël Coward’s songs should be standards, heard often, like those of his contemporaries Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin.  Coward’s cabaret tunes and show numbers are just as witty, his melodies just as harmonious. Read more… Now running through December 21.

ALMOST, MAINE at the Hudson Mainstage Theatre

Neal Weaver  – Stage Raw John Cariani’s play is, in fact, a collection of nine short sketches, mostly duologues, and mostly comic with some serious overtones. Much of Cariani’s comedy is rooted in the notion of taking figures of speech literally. In “Her Heart,” a woman (Natalie Avital) had her heart broken by her recently … Read more

LUNA GALE at the Kirk Douglas Theatre

Myron Meisel – Stage Raw While institutions and their procedural processes may be the backbone of our social organization, they can also tend to compound the dysfunctions they confront with systemic failings of their own, whether they be the police, schools, courts, or in the case of Rebecca Gilman’s engrossing drama Luna Gale, child protective services. Read … Read more

INTO THE WOODS – Oregon Shakespeare Company at the Wallis

Pauline Adamek  – Stage Raw What follows the “happily ever after” conclusion of most fairy tales? That’s what composer-songwriter Stephen Sondheim and book-writer James Lapine examine in their sophisticated 1986 Broadway musical based on Grimm’s fairy tails and composed expressly for adults. (Lapine directed the musical’s eventual debut on Broadway, after it premiered at San … Read more