LADCC Critics 
Neal Weaver – Arts In LA This grimly hilarious dark comedy by Irish playwright Enda Walsh (The New Electric Ballroom, The Walworth Farce) puts a snarky, post-modern spin on the Greek myth of Penelope, faithful wife of Odysseus. Odysseus sailed away to fight in the Trojan War and hasn’t been heard from since. Read more… Myron … Read more
Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA At the beginning of his one-person play The Wake, Ben Moroski — posing as ‘Pete Harrisburg’ — rushes in, introduces himself with a self-deprecating “I’m the asshole doing this play,” and then hands audience members flyers for this show. Moroski thus places an important distance between him — the writer and performer … Read more
Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter Given the omnipresent influence of Anton Chekhov on the theater of the past century, it seems surprisingly irresistible for playwrights to frankly filch his templates and spin their own variations. After Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, and mere weeks before the opening of Stupid Fucking Bird! at the Boston Court, … Read more
Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter If one cares about the movies, and about comedy (and what can life be without them?), the soul of Buster Keaton (played here by French Stewart) needs must be spliced into one’s DNA. One cannot help but feel proprietary about one’s personal relationship to the bottomlessly expressive, impassive Keaton, … Read more
Dany Margolies – Arts In LA Most Westerners of a certain age, certainly most Catholics, recall the startling day in 1978 when we learned that Pope John Paul I had died 33 days after the puff of white smoke announced his election to the papacy. Very few people, if anyone, knew the exact cause of … Read more
David C. Nichols – LA Times The title of “Flower Duet,” in its West Coast premiere at the Road Theatre on Magnolia, refers to Leo Delibes’ celebrated “Lakmé” air for soprano and mezzo. It is being rehearsed by two Vermont-based frenemies, for a mutual friends’ wedding, though the musical component is at best a device. … Read more
Les Spindle – Frontiers L.A. A new theatre company called Queer Classics lives up to its name with its unabashedly gay adaptation of the classic Oscar Wilde farce The Importance of Being Earnest, premiering at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. As with most of Wilde’s plays, there is something intrinsically queer about the sensibility of the original … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Tarell Alvin McCraney’s tender, poetical drama The Brothers Size (Fountain Theatre) and Billy Van Zandt & Jane Milmore’s meta-theatrical farce Drop Dead! (presented by Theatre 68, at North Hollywood’s NoHo Arts Center) share one salient commonality: Each production has moments when the actors recite stage directions about their own characters. Tarell Alvin McCraney’s … Read more
Dany Margolies – Arts In LA Shakespeare’s King Lear has its potencies. Simply described, it follows the downfall of a once-powerful leader and the dysfunction of his family. Pondering his retirement, the monarch asks his three daughters to avow their love. The elder two, Goneril and Regan, lavish empty words on papa. The youngest, Cordelia, refuses to … Read more
Jonas Schwartz – Arts In LA In one of the famous lines from The Godfather, Don Corleone tells his eldest son, “Never tell anyone outside the family what you are thinking again.” The don would have burst a gut if he had seen what Brooke Wyeth, the protagonist of Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, has written about her family in … Read more