LADCC Critics 
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw What does it take to be a caring mother? And why bear a child if you grasp beforehand that the pain, the hardships — and the apocalyptic threat of climate change! — are likely to pursue a person born today into a traumatic future? These questions arise in Hungry Ghost — … Read more
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw “I very much wanted to like Our Dear Dead Drug Lord, but even Pablo Escobar could tell that this package is suspiciously light.” Read more… Jonas Schwartz – Theatermania Children shouldn’t play with dead things. But it’s a warning that four high school teens of a banished school club … Read more
Tracey Paleo – Gia On The Move A play within a play seems to be a running theme lately at the theater. And that’s, OK. Because telling a story about the story you’re trying to tell is nothing but hysterically funny, when you come right down to it. Self-effacing, shameful and embarrassing, every “bit” in … Read more
Katie Buenneke – Theater Digest Heroes of the Fourth Turning at Rogue Machine [LA]. I first saw this play on Zoom in October 2020, when Trump was still president, and before Roe v. Wade was overturned. Though the world is quite different on those two fronts now, it still packs a tremendous punch, and I’m … Read more
Martίn Hernández – Stage Raw In the early 1950s, playwright Arthur Miller and his friend Elia Kazan pitched Miller’s dockworker-based screenplay The Hook, with Kazan as the proposed director, to Columbia Pictures’ boss Harry Cohn. When Cohn – and the FBI – wanted to change the corrupt union villains from Mafia thugs to Communist ones, … Read more
Martίn Hernández – Stage Raw This international theatre festival has winnowed hundreds of submissions down to 52 entries, all ten-minute one-act plays, 31 in English and 21 in Spanish. Audience members and a jury of industry professionals vote on the best plays, with awards and a cash prize presented to the finalist during the closing … Read more
Socks Whitmore – Stage Raw The term masochism (defined by the dictionary as “the tendency to derive pleasure, especially sexual gratification, from one’s own pain or humiliation”) is derived from the name of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian author whose association with the subject stems from the plot of his best-known work, Venus in Furs. … Read more
Harker Jones – BroadwayWorld The most Fractured of Fairy Tales, “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” is the tonic we all need right now. Read more… Katie Buenneke – Theater Digest Peter Pan Goes Wrong at the Ahmanson [LA]. When this show is good, it’s great, and has some of the most side-splitting comedic moments I’ve experienced … Read more
Terry Morgan – ArtsBeatLA In a world in which a repulsive con man can get elected president and turn the entire Republican party into a credulous and insane mob, it’s to be expected that somebody would try to write a play about how the conservative movement has become so unhinged. Will Arbery’s Heroes of the … Read more
Rob Stevens – Haines His Way Often when I see the World Premiere of a play in our local theatres, I will read in the program that the play was the winner of the so and so playwriting award. Then often after sitting through a very dispiriting piece of theatre, I begin to wonder who … Read more