Bob Verini – Arts In LA As surely as the Rockettes annually turn out to Occupy Radio City, Troubadour Theater Company uses December to command Burbank’s Falcon Theatre for a celebratory holiday mash-up of some sort of Christmas tale and a particular pop songbook. The Snow QUEEN, the sixth such expression of wassail I’ve encountered, is … Read more
Bob Verini – Arts In LA Ill-advised, intrusive direction plagues the Chance Theater’s She Loves Me, and the casualty is the easy, unforced enjoyment traditionally associated with this jewel box of a musical, adapted from the 1940 Lubitsch classic The Shop Around the Corner. Read more… David C. Nichols – LA Times The three essential qualities invoked in … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Noel Coward is said to have written Blithe Spirit in less than a week. The play premiered a couple of months after he completed it, in 1941, when the Germans were bombing London, and audiences, no doubt desperate for distraction, stepped gamely over the rubble on their way to the theater. Why … Read more
Jonas Schwartz – Arts In LA Noël Coward’s songs should be standards, heard often, like those of his contemporaries Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. Coward’s cabaret tunes and show numbers are just as witty, his melodies just as harmonious. Read more… Now running through December 21.
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw John Cariani’s play is, in fact, a collection of nine short sketches, mostly duologues, and mostly comic with some serious overtones. Much of Cariani’s comedy is rooted in the notion of taking figures of speech literally. In “Her Heart,” a woman (Natalie Avital) had her heart broken by her recently … Read more
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw While institutions and their procedural processes may be the backbone of our social organization, they can also tend to compound the dysfunctions they confront with systemic failings of their own, whether they be the police, schools, courts, or in the case of Rebecca Gilman’s engrossing drama Luna Gale, child protective services. Read … Read more
Pauline Adamek – Stage Raw What follows the “happily ever after” conclusion of most fairy tales? That’s what composer-songwriter Stephen Sondheim and book-writer James Lapine examine in their sophisticated 1986 Broadway musical based on Grimm’s fairy tails and composed expressly for adults. (Lapine directed the musical’s eventual debut on Broadway, after it premiered at San … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly As in Aaron Posner’s beguiling Stupid Fucking Bird, which played at Boston Court earlier this year, David Bucci’s Possum Carcass riffs on The Seagull, transporting Chekhov’s story into the 21st century while holding on to the fundamentals of character, theme and plot. While nowhere near as brilliant or textured as Posner’s play, Bucci’s parody is … Read more
Les Spindle – Frontiers L.A. Gifted New Zealand-based actress Lucy Lawless, known for her larger-than-life television roles, steps into yet another this December, courtesy of the Pasadena Playhouse. In the theater’s annual holiday season panto extravaganza, Sleeping Beauty and Her Winter Knight, the gay-favorite actress—who triumphed locally as ball-busting prison matron Mama Morton in the Hollywood Bowl’s Chicago last … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw Levy Lee Simon’s play celebrates the life and times of The Dunbar Hotel, on Los Angeles’s Central Avenue. As a luxury hotel serving the African-American community at a time when poverty and discrimination made most black-oriented hotels shabby and lacking in even basic amenities, it soon became a revered institution … Read more