Jonas Schwartz – TheaterMania No one parodies the Great White Way like Gerard Alessandrini. For 35 years, he’s made audiences sidesplittingly laugh with his Forbidden Broadway series where, through song, he’s shattered the idols of Broadway like Ethel Merman, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Mary Martin. In Spamilton, Alessandrini tightens his target to assassinate the biggest musical sensation of … Read more
Katie Buenneke – Stage Raw Mike Bartlett’s play King Charles III is, in many ways, a snapshot of an earlier era. Given that the whole thing is written in iambic pentameter, you might think it’s a throwback to Shakespeare’s time. Instead, it depicts an alternate history that diverged from our own in late 2015. This is a … Read more
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw Rogue Machine, one of the theatre companies in town I most admire, has been promoting its new show, Ruth Fowler’s bled for the household truth, as something important and shocking, and warning that easily offended people may walk out at intermission. In my experience, having specific expectations for a play or … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw This Cornerstone Production of Magic Fruit, written by Michael John Garces and directed by Shishir Kurup, is a dystopian fantasy, loosely based (oddly enough) on Mozart’s The Magic Flute. It asks the question, along with several others: Can we produce enough food to feed Earth’s ever-growing population without destroying the planet?Read more… … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw City Garage Theatre has been one of the more interesting companies in L.A., and their work has always been polished and professional. Director Frederique Michel and producer Charles Duncombe are good people. But over the years they have seemed to become more aggressively stylized in their work.Read more… Now running … Read more
Paul Birchall – Stage Raw If your concept of a fairy tale is based on Disney’s saccharine stories in which the Little Mermaid easily finds love or Belle blissfully enjoys the company of the oddly photogenic beast, playwright Mary Zimmerman’s gorgeously rendered adaptation of a number of fantastic stories will frankly blow your mind.Read more… … Read more
Margaret Gray – LA Times At first, Erin Courtney’s play “A Map of Virtue” presents itself as a quirky love story: Sarah (Megan Branch) and Mark (Sam T. West) stand side by side onstage and deliver alternating accounts of the first time they saw each other, as if answering an unseen interviewer’s questions.Read more… Now … Read more
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen It’s New Year’s Eve in Rotterdam, and Alice (Miranda Wynne) is agonizing over a drafted email she has been meaning to send for a long time—an email in which she finally tells her parents she’s a lesbian.Read more… Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Human relationships are problematic, whoever … Read more
Frances Baum Nicholson –The Stage Struck Review For the second play of their 96th season, the Whittier Community Theatre has chosen the gently comic “The Curious Savage” by John Patrick. In a time when the battle between decency and avarice is played out in the news and on all forms of media on a regular … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw Twenty-year-old Valerie Hager was down on her luck. She’d split from her boyfriend, lost her job, and owed $3500 in parking tickets which she would need to pay to retrieve her towed car. So when River, her flamboyantly self-assured BFF, suggested Valerie forget about the crummy minimum wage gig and … Read more