Photo by Jenny Graham
Katie Buenneke – Theatre Digest
Through some unlucky combination of script, direction, cast, set design, and video design, this felt more like sitting through a scene study class than a professional play. Somehow, I hadn’t seen a play by Caryl Churchill before, but I’m in no rush to see another. Read more…
Patrick Chavis – LA Theatre Bites
Love and Information @ Antaeus Theatre Company – Review. More…
Geoff Elliott, top, with L-R Stanley Andrew Jackson III, Rafael Goldstein, and Trisha Miller. Photo by Craig Schwartz.
Don Shirley – Angeles Stage
‘Animal Farm’. ‘Sanctuary City’. ‘Everybody.’ ‘Oedipus.’ ‘Jagged Little Pill.’ ‘Oklahoma!’
How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the ‘Farm’, after they’ve seen…Pasadena?
Yes, I’m paraphrasing the lyrics of an ancient pop song to make the point that Pasadena and nearby neighborhoods constitute the hottest cluster of locally-produced theater right now.
The creatures who liberate themselves from servitude in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” at east Pasadena’s A Noise Within, as well as the human audiences there, might also want to check out “Sanctuary City” at Pasadena Playhouse and “Everybody” at Antaeus in nearby Glendale. Read more…
Harry Groener and Nicole Erb in Everybody. Photo by Jenny Graham.
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has been one of the most promising new playwrights of the past decade. His plays are widely produced and he’s been a Pulitzer finalist twice. I’ve loved about half (Neighbors and Gloria) of the five shows of his I’ve seen, was mildly entertained by another (Appropriate) and underwhelmed by the other half, one of which was An Octoroon and the other of which unfortunately is Everybody. This rewriting of the 15th-century morality play Everyman feels more like an academic exercise than actual drama. The talented cast of Antaeus Theatre Company’s new production of the show can’t quite give it the desired emotional resonance that isn’t present in Jacobs-Jenkins’ prose. Read more…
Rob Stevens – Haines His Way
Everyman is a late 15th century morality play that uses allegorical characters to examine the question of Christian salvation and what Man must do to attain it. That text might be a bit too dry and pedantic for today’s audiences. In 2017, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins gave it a more modern spin and retitled it Everybody. Antaeus Theatre Company in Glendale is currently presenting the 90-minute dramedy. If morality plays are your thing, you should check it out. The cast of nine features some stand out performers. Read more…
Katie Buenneke – Theatre Digest
This production is the definition of a mixed bag. When it’s great, it soars, but when it fumbles, it’s tough. Much of this, I suspect, comes from the text, an adaptation of a centuries-old play of unknown origin, which, in playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ retelling, obliterates the fourth wall. Read more…
Harker Jones – BroadwayWorld
EVERYBODY, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ contemporary riff on a 15th-century morality play, is a creative and chaotic allegory about Christian salvation which is, in the end, an uneven production for the usually consistent Antaeus Theatre Company.
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Through October 17
Photo by Jenny Graham
Don Shirley – Angeles Stage
Why didn’t the LA Times review the hilarious “Tiger Style!” or “Our Town” at South Coast Repertory? Plus thoughts on “Man of God,” “Metamorphoses,” and more.
“Tiger Style!” deserves the exclamation point in its title. Mike Lew’s satire is the funniest new play I’ve seen since theaters started re-opening last year, after vaccinations began.
At first, “Tiger” is a no-holds-barred satire of two Chinese-American young-adult siblings with acute anxiety, stirred up by other Americans who seem to bar no holds in their treatment of these exemplars of the so-called “model minority.” Then it also finds a lot of laughs as these third-generational siblings belatedly blame their problems on their parents, who used “tiger style” child-rearing techniques.
Photo by Frank Ishman
Terry Morgan – Arts Beat LA
At this point, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a theatrical peak so frequently attempted that you can see, as on Everest, the frozen bodies of thespians who chanced and failed the perilous ascent on the way. And yet this dissuades absolutely no one to take on the challenge, seemingly again like Everest in the words of mountaineer George Mallory, “Because it’s there.” Thankfully in the new production of Hamlet by the Antaeus Theatre Company the summit is impressively attained, due to Ramón de Ocampo’s brilliant lead performance and Elizabeth Swain’s assured direction. Read more…
Tracey Paleo – Gia On The Move
It is a badass, nail-biting event akin to a Celebrity Death Match of iambic pentameter gone wild as Ramón de Ocampo takes the stage in the lead role as the Prince of Denmark. Never – have you seen Antaeus Theatre Company quite like this. Read more…
Now through June 20
Geoffrey Wade Photography
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
It is rare to see a play written in 1908 that can be described as feminist, but Diana of Dobson’s, currently playing at Los Angeles’s Antaeus Theatre Company in a rare production, is a delightful surprise.
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Now running through June 2
It was a great night at the 50th Annual Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards at Pasadena Playhouse on Monday, April 8th. Congratulations to all of the award recipients and to everyone whose outstanding work received a nomination. We are proud to recognize your accomplishments. Thank you to everyone who attended the show and thanks to photographer Meredith Adelaide for capturing the excitement. For additional photos, visit our Facebook page.
Yvonne Bell, our inaugural Theater Angel Award winner
Brian Kite, Cathy Rigby, Tom McCoy and B.T. McNicholl celebrate their Joel Hirschhorn Award
Jean Bruce Scott and Randy Reinholz representing Native Voices at the Autry, winner of the Gordon Davidson Award
Artists representing Celebration Theatre’s win for their revival of Cabaret
Jennifer Chang, award winner for her direction of East West Players’ Vietgone
Daisuke Tsuji, outstanding Featured Performance in Cambodian Rock Band at South Coast Rep
Padraic Duffy, Aviva Pressman and Bruno Oliver celebrating Sacred Fools Theater Company’s Margaret Harford Award
Jim Steinmeyer, winner for Illusions, Stagecraft, and Magic Carpet in Aladdin at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre
John Iacovelli, Set Design winner for Antaeus Theatre Company’s The Little Foxes
Jeff Gardner, Sound Design winner for Native Son at Antaeus Theatre Company
Stephen Gifford, Set Design winner for Cabaret at Celebration Theatre
Thomas McCurdy, Thomas Isao Morinaka and Aaron Aoki, Fight Choreography winners for Vietgone, East West Players
Janet Roston, award winner for her outstanding choreography for Cabaret at Celebration Theatre
Rob Nagle, award winner for his Featured Performance in The Little Foxes at Antaeus Theatre Company
Artists representing the winning ensemble of Antaeus Theatre Company’s The Little Foxes
Echo Theater Company’s Chris Fields, Lindsay Allbaugh, Rachael Zambias and Molly Smith Metzler celebrate receiving the Polly Warfield Award
Jessica Hird from The Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles accepts Tom Hanks’ award for Lead Performance in Henry IV
Rithy Hanh and Pita Huot accept the Ted Schmitt Award on behalf of Lauren Yee and her new play Cambodian Rock Band
Kasey Mahaffy, Paul David Story, Geoff Elliott and Wesley Mann celebrate their award for A Noise Within’s revival of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Allison Dillard, double winner for her Costume Designs for Celebration Theatre’s Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Moving Arts’ BLISS (or Emily Post is Dead!)
Alex Nee, award winner for his Lead Performance in Cabaret at Celebration Theatre
Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. Thompson, CGI winners for their work in Vietgone at East West Players
Anthony Zediker celebrates his award for Music Direction for Celebration Theatre’s Cabaret
Molly Smith Metzler, Writing award winner for Cry It Out at Echo Theater Company
Kasey Mahaffy, award winner for his Featured Performance in A Noise Within’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Geoffrey Wade Photography
Jonas Schwartz – Arts In LA
Playwright Martin McDonagh has mastered the art of slamming razor-sharp dark humor into sentimentality. The humor is always fierce, but he allows the audience to connect with the characters even in his works’ most perverse moments.
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Rob Stevens – Haines His Way
Irish writer Martin McDonagh is now a well-known and well-respected screenwriter and film director after 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri as well as his earlier films In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths.
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Now running through March 2
Geoffrey Wade Photography
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
Sometimes, family can bring out the worst in us—especially if your relatives would do anything to get to the top.
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Terry Morgan - Talkin’ Broadway
Sometimes a play simply works within its own era, and exists later simply as an accurate representation of that time. But other times a play is prescient, and seems as if it was written directly to comment on today. Although Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes is a period piece, its portrait of dreadful people doing awful things in the pursuit of money and power feels particularly pointed now…Read more…
Margaret Gray – LA Times
Say your husband, whom you had never liked, suffered from an ill-defined but dangerous heart condition. And say he happened to mention — in not a very nice way — that he was about to take a step that would scuttle all your hopes and dreams and leave you penniless. And imagine that at that very moment, overexcited by triumph, he reached for his medicine bottle and found it empty.
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Rob Stevens – Haines His Way
Lillian Hellman was a playwright, screenwriter, memoirist whose most famous piece of writing may well be the letter she wrote in 1952 to the House Un-American Activities Committee stating “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions..”
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Now running through December 1o
Geoffrey Wade Photography
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
Love has a tendency to make fools out of people, and that is certainly the case in Three Days in the Country, Patrick Marber’s condensed adaptation of Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, now in its west coast premiere at Antaeus Theatre Company in Los Angeles.
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Jonas Schwartz - Arts In LA
Three Days in the Country, Patrick Marber’s adaptation of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, makes its West Coast premiere at Antaeus Theatre Company in Glendale. A comedy of sexual compulsion, the play should explode. The gunpowder has been poured, but due to miscasting of a vital character, the director forgot to light the fuse.
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Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw
Ivan Turgenev published A Month in the Country in 1855 under the title Two Women, a reference to two of his main characters — a disgruntled married woman and her teenage ward, who both fall passionately in love with a young student living in their home. Read more…
Rob Stevens – Haines His Way
According to the Director’s Note in the program for the current Antaeus Theatre Company’s production of Patrick Marber’s Three Days in the Country, his version of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, Turgenev’s play inspired Anton Chekov to write for the theatre.
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Now running through August 26
Geoffrey Wade Photography
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
It’s Christmas Day at a psychiatric hospital, and its director is having a stressful morning. Patient 6457 has unexpectedly died and patient 6459 has given birth, and neither event looks very good for the institution. As the day progresses, things only get more and more out of control as it becomes increasingly apparent that the staff is perhaps more volatile and dangerous than the patients. Read more…
Terry Morgan - Stage Raw
Often when an artist dusts off a work that he or she put aside a long time ago and presents it to the public, one can see why it was shelved in the first place. But sometimes you can’t. Read more…
Rob Stevens – Haines His Way
Harold Pinter wrote The Hothouse in 1958 but put it away until 1980 when he dusted it off and it was given its first production. The essences of the later and greater Pinter plays are here, they just are not as sharply refined.
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Now running through March 11
(Photo by Geoffrey Wade Photography)
Jenny Lower – Stage Raw
Antaeus announced Christopher Hampton’s 1987 adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses as the debut of its current season all the way back in June. The director’s note in the program discusses how this pre-revolutionary tale of French aristocratic depravity speaks to our era of the one percent.
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Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a story that would be best served with popcorn and red wine. Written by Christopher Hampton and based on Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel of the same name, Liaisons opened at the Antaeus Theatre Company in Los Angeles this weekend in a sexy, provocative production that explores the despicable behavior of what we would now refer to as “the one percent” in a modern, stylized fashion.
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Margaret Gray – LA Times
Are Americans today better off than the aristocrats of pre-revolutionary France? Spandex has simplified couture, wigs no longer require powder and, thanks to social media and smartphones, epistolary romances can be conducted in real time.
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Now running through December 10