Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly …With diamond studs in her horned-rimmed glasses, the purple-wigged, megalomaniac alter ego of 80-year-old Australian Barry Humphries spends much of the evening goading her Ahmanson Theatre audience. Read more… Bob Verini – Arts In LA Dame Edna! The mere title and name connote rapier wit, lightly off-color insults, and self-obsession, … 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
Margaret Gray – LA Times Michael Wilson’s revival of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful,” which has just opened at the Ahmanson Theatre, premiered on Broadway in 2013 to a bounty of praise and nominations, especially for Cicely Tyson, who won the Tony Award for her portrayal of Mrs. Carrie Watts. Originally written as a … Read more
Neal Weaver – Arts In LA This show is an exuberant, enthusiastic, unabashed homage to the rock group Queen and its lead singer, the late Freddie Mercury. It is also splashy, a little bit silly, and loud enough to rattle your ribcage, with a rock-concert-style light show that is occasionally blinding. Read more… Sharon Perlmutter – … Read more
Dany Margolies – Arts In LA Most Westerners of a certain age, certainly most Catholics, recall the startling day in 1978 when we learned that Pope John Paul I had died 33 days after the puff of white smoke announced his election to the papacy. Very few people, if anyone, knew the exact cause of … Read more
Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter Porgy and Bess (the lamentable and disingenuous branding title will not be employed again by this writer) is one of those incomparable works of art that necessarily is always somewhat imperfect in performance. It is too grand, too bold, and too low-down not to be. Read more… Neal Weaver – ArtsInLA … Read more
Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA An exuberant celebration of language is the most apt description for actor Christopher Plummer’s self-created one-man show. A Word or Two is playing through February 9, 2014 at the Ahmanson Theatre, downtown LA. Early on in the show, Plummer selects a book from a heap and begins to read from a lectern. But this … Read more
Pauline Adamek – LA Weekly Much like the dastardly pirates terrorizing the high seas in his fun Peter and the Starcatcher, playwright Rick Elice has ransacked the best of British kids lit, giving us plucky, pint-sized sleuths fresh from the Boy’s Own adventures and larger-than-life characters straight out of rowdy pantomimes. Based on the 2006 … Read more
Dany Margolies – Arts In LA In the good old days, Sleeping Beauty was a ballet choreographed, in its first incarnation, by Marius Petipa. In it, we meet Princess Aurora, first in a prologue when she is a baby—represented by a doll, or more likely a bundle of cloth—swaddled beyond recognition and housed in a … Read more
Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA Legendary comedy writer Neil Simon’s 1972 play The Sunshine Boys has an excellent premise: two old vaudevillian stars who worked together for over 40 years, but who haven’t spoken in over a decade, are reunited for a TV spot. (In fact, it was a good enough premise for Fellini to copy for Ginger e … Read more