Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly So you’re a theater having a hard time getting audiences. A new plan under way by the ever-tempestuous L.A.-based theater website Bitter Lemons allows you to pay the website directly for a published review, with the reviewer receiving the lion’s share of that payment — no guarantee of a good review, … Read more
Les Spindle – Edge on the Net First presented in 1980, “Marry Me a Little” offers an entertaining compilation of songs by master composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, which he originally wrote for other musicals. Each song was dropped, for one reason or another, from its premiere production. Read more… Now running through June 28.
Bob Verini – Arts In LA “Waterfall,” the new cross-cultural, lushly romantic tuner at the Pasadena Playhouse, has admirable ambition, visual splendor and patchy dramaturgy. Working from a Thai source novel, stage veterans Richard Maltby Jr. (words) and David Shire (music) seek to explore cultural identity in personal and political contexts, set against a complex historical backdrop. Read more… Melinda Schupmann … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Katharina Bora was a Cistercian nun who fled the convent and ended up married to Martin Luther. She bore him 6 children and adeptly managed their estate while he took on the business of revolutionizing Christian theology and with it, the whole of Europe. Read more… Now running through June 27.
Margaret Gray – LA Times Here’s a deal, L.A. theaters: We’ll happily watch all the liquored-up-dysfunctional-family-reunion dramas you care to stage, as long as you cast Anne Gee Byrd as the mother. Read more… Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw Like his other plays, Samuel D. Hunter’s A Permanent Image is set in the arid cultural wasteland of northern Idaho. Read … Read more
Jonas Schwartz – TheaterMania La Mirada Theatre presents a truncated version of the hit Broadway musical Mary Poppinsunder the direction of Glenn Casale. Audiences can hear the songs they remember from the movie, like “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” and “A Spoonful of Sugar,” but this production exorcises the magic from the production. Read more…
Shirle Gottlieb – Gazette Newspapers I can’t count how many productions I’ve seen of “Death of a Salesman” over the years — including, of course, the inevitable movie that packs the theater whenever or wherever it plays. Read more… Now running through June 20.
Bob Verini – Arts In LA Smack dab in the middle of our current, if not our ongoing, theatrical austerity crisis comes Murder for Two, a musical whodunit whose bold, albeit thrifty, conceit is to have all the roles played by two actors. Read more… Jon Magaril – CurtainUp This madcap musical mystery shoots a cap at … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly “Why don’t you shut up, you daft prat?” says Lenny (Jason Downs, resembling young Malcolm McDowell) to his father, Max (Jude Ciccolella), in Guillermo Cienfuegos’ top-flight revival of Harold Pinter’s 1965 comedy The Homecoming at Pacific Resident Theatre. Read more… Now running through July 26.
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly At 60 years old, the spry, lean, silver-haired Sal Lopez could well be Puck’s dad. And it could be argued that Lopez’s picaresque autobiographical one-man show, This Is a Man’s World at Los Angeles Theatre Center, is a memory play. That’s because it opens with Lopez screaming on a hospital bed … Read more