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
Paul Birchall – Stage Raw Deaf West Theatre’s passionate staging of Steven Sater and Duncan Shiek’s musical (based on Frank Wedekind’s play) was one of 2014’s local small-theater hits, and now the production has been remounted in the grander environs of the Wallis Annenberg Theater. Read more… Jonas Schwartz – TheaterMania Last year’s production of Spring … Read more
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw “Nothing human disgusts me,” goes the famous quote from Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana, and Steven Fechter’s play The Woodsman puts that credo to the test for theater audiences. It deals with the difficult subject of a pedophile trying to resist his baser urges and to become a better man, and it … Read more
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw Allen Ginsberg may not have quite been Walt Whitman, but he was certainly the Walt Whitman of our lifetimes. To paraphrase Andrew Sarris on Orson Welles, while he could be a great bravura poet, he was an incomparable bravura personality. Read more… Now running through June 7.