Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly This year was a noisy and divisive one in local theater, punctuated with threats, real and imagined — from sources allegedly ranging from the IRS to the state’s Labor & Workforce Development Agency to…
Don Shirley – LA Observed I don’t believe in year-end Top 10 lists, especially if the components are listed in order of best to, say, tenth best. Why is it necessary to draw such distinctions between creations with very different…
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…
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw If you’re an American woman, chances are that at some point in your life you’ve struggled against the onslaught of media images aimed at persuading you that beauty-wise, you just don’t measure up. Read more……
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…