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
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
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
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
Paul Birchall – Stage and Cinema This fascinating drama by playwright Zayd Dohrn is set in the bizarre subculture of women who buy dolls that eerily resemble actual babies. Can this possibly be enough material here for a play? Read more… Bob Verini – Arts In LA Roger Ebert once opined, “It’s not what a movie … Read more
Les Spindle – Edge on the Net Stephen Sondheim’s groundbreaking 1970 musical, “Company,” about romance and loneliness in the big city, remains a quintessential snapshot of the era in which it bowed, as viewed through the eyes of a commitment-phobic young bachelor. Read more… Jonas Schwartz – Arts In LA Launching a version of Company, Stephen Sondheim’s groundbreaking 1970s … Read more
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw During the notoriously doomed 1984 coal miners’ strike against Maggie Thatcher’s determination to destroy the union and its jobs, motherless 11-year old Billy Elliot (Mitchell Tobin) ditches his 50-pence afterschool boxing classes for ballet lessons, unbeknownst to his picketing father (David Atkinson) and firebrand older brother Tony (Stephen Weston). Read more… … Read more