LADCC Critics 
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
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Actor John Barrymore, star of theater and screen for a quarter of a century until his death in 1942, was thrown out of prep school after having been seen entering a brothel. This detail isn’t in William Luce‘s 1996 two-person show based on the actor’s reminiscences, Barrymore, though the play does … Read more
Neal Weaver – LA Weekly When playwright Tom Dudzick was growing up in Buffalo, N.Y., in the 1950s, one local landmark was a 20-foot shrine for the Blessed Virgin, beside a small barbershop. According to local legend, the shrine was erected by the barber after the Blessed Mother appeared in his shop one Christmas Eve. … Read more
Pauline Adamek – LA Weekly Katie Rubin’s energetic solo piece presents a typical tale of the struggling actor who, yearning for success, ventures on a journey of spiritual discovery and then cobbles together a string of experiences and calls it a show. The result is a meandering yarn featuring miscellaneous miracles and offering little insight … Read more
David C. Nichols – LA Times Charles Dickens meets Lewis Carroll, literally, in “A Perfect Likeness” at Fremont Centre Theatre in South Pasadena. This beautifully appointed two-hander about the authors of “Great Expectations” and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” isn’t exactly deep-dish, but it should appeal to those seeking a pleasantly literate 90 minutes in the … Read more
Melinda Schupmann – Arts In LA From 1954 to the present, Reginald Rose’s Emmy-nominated teleplay on CBS’s Studio One has been rewritten as a theatrical piece, was made into an Academy Award–winning film with some of the finest actors in the business, and has been reworked by theater companies over the years, even as 12 … Read more
Neal Weaver – LA Weekly Ketti Frings’ 1958 adaptation of Thomas Wolfe’s autobiographical novel tells the story of young writer-to-be Eugene Gant (Grant Tambellini) and his embattled efforts to break free of his grasping, controlling mother, Eliza (Alison Blanchard), and his savagely dysfunctional family, and acquire an education. Frings’ script won a Pulitzer Prize in … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Lone-Anon is, at core, an Orwellian social satire, set five years in the future, when the NSA and/or FBI has set up a watch list for people with antisocial tendencies. For instance, if you’re invited to a party on Facebook and you don’t respond, you may well land on the list and find yourself … Read more