Jonas Schwartz – Arts In LA Musical Theatre West accentuates everything best about the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic South Pacific. Director Joe Langworth has acquired a talented cast, enhanced the naturalistic script so that the songs emerge from the actors conversationally, and made sure the Pulitzer Prize–winning book scenes are as enticing as the enchanting songs. Read … Read more
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw Argentinian theater auteur Mariano Pensotti returns to REDCAT three years after his remarkable The Past is a Grotesque Animal with an even more intricately woven tapestry of tales. Cineastas, which closes this weekend, is incontrovertibly one of the essential stage productions of 2015. Read more… Now running through Feb. 21.
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw Last year, Teatro De La O and writer/director/couturier Octavio Carlin produced a show called Hollywood Party. It was set in Hollywood in the Silent Era, and featured campy, not very convincing impersonations of the famous divas and male stars of the era. There was a confusing and improbable plot, involving an … Read more
Margaret Gray – LA Times Ruskin Group Theatre has revived the Canadian classic “Leaving Home,” David French’s heavily autobiographical first play. It’s in some ways an odd choice for the little Los Angeles theater. Although its theme—intergenerational misunderstanding—is universal, the story is rooted in a specific and remote cultural context, the concerns of which seem … Read more
Dany Margolies – Arts In LA This Conor McPherson script fits squarely within his oeuvre—of poetic plays about souls seeking human connection in the midst of supernatural forces. However, unlike other Los Angeles productions of his works—including the Geffen Playhouse’s The Seafarer in 2009 and Geffen’s The Weir in 2000—this version lacks a feeling of something deeper and more … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly A fugue, in music, is a melody repeated in complex patterns. In psychiatry, it’s a dissociative state of mind. Playwright Tommy Smith infuses both meanings into his ambitious new play, Fugue. Read more… Dany Margolies – Arts In LA This show has quite the pedigree. Its playwright, Tommy Smith, wrote last year’s … Read more
Bob Verini – Arts In LA The singular feature of this vest-pocket staging by the DOMA Theatre Company—and the most compelling reason for attending—is the timeless score by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice. Read more… Paul Birchall – Stage Raw A spirit of youthful rebellion suffuses director Marco Gomez’s delightfully earnest and powerful … Read more
Paul Birchall – Stage and Cinema In playwright Stephen Karam’s touching and funny drama, characters are frequently spotted quoting the great Lebanese poet-philosopher Khalil Gabran. “All is well,” they say, often in the midst of the most odious adversity. Of course, all is not well at all: Indeed, all is rather, as the Yiddish expression … Read more
Margaret Gray – LA Times Enter Laughing,” Carl Reiner’s semi-autobiographical 1958 novel, has had nearly as varied a career as its author. Playwright Joseph Stein (“Fiddler on the Roof”) turned it into a Broadway play (1963), a film (1967), a Broadway musical that famously flopped (1976) and then, with director Stuart Ross, a successful off-Broadway … Read more
Paul Birchall – Stage Raw In today’s world of “Fifty Shades of Blech,” where young ladies of intelligence and means agree to be subjected to dominating brutes who whack them with neck ties and do terrible things with handcuffs and strings of beads, what a pleasure it is to be reminded of more civilized times, … Read more