Melinda Schupmann – Arts In LA We take pills to sleep, pills to stay awake, pills to diet, pills to prevent pregnancy. Why not a pill to help you like your job? Such is playwright Kate Fodor’s premise in the witty and very contemporary cautionary tale about our societal desire for chemicals to make life … Read more
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA The 10th-annual holiday show from Troubadour Theater Company, Walkin’ in a Winter One-Hit-Wonderland, proves to be the occasion for walkin’ down Memory Lane with the previous nine. There’s plenty of reminiscing; video footage of past productions; and in-jokey references to company members and past characters that invest the tight (an intermissionless … Read more
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA Having well and truly conquered James Tyrone (Long Day’s Journey Into Night), Hickey (The Iceman Cometh), Krapp (Krapp’s Last Tape), and Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman), Brian Dennehy sets up base camp at the Mark Taper Forum to take on his most daunting personal Everest yet. With its dozen or … 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 Striking a perfect balance between scares and laughs, Play Dead delivers plenty of delicious thrills, macabre chills and giggles. The one-act show features Todd Robbins as our ghoulish host and runs through December 22 at the Geffen Playhouse.Read more… Bob Verini – ArtsInLA Back in the heyday of the great movie … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Actor John Barrymore, star of theater and screen for a quarter of a century until his death in 1942, was thrown out of prep school after having been seen entering a brothel. This detail isn’t in William Luce‘s 1996 two-person show based on the actor’s reminiscences, Barrymore, though the play does … Read more
Pauline Adamek – LA Weekly Katie Rubin’s energetic solo piece presents a typical tale of the struggling actor who, yearning for success, ventures on a journey of spiritual discovery and then cobbles together a string of experiences and calls it a show. The result is a meandering yarn featuring miscellaneous miracles and offering little insight … Read more
Melinda Schupmann – Arts In LA From 1954 to the present, Reginald Rose’s Emmy-nominated teleplay on CBS’s Studio One has been rewritten as a theatrical piece, was made into an Academy Award–winning film with some of the finest actors in the business, and has been reworked by theater companies over the years, even as 12 … Read more
Bob Verini – ArtsInLA With two weekends to go until Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde vacates Actors Co-op in Hollywood, those who enjoy horror stories brought to the stage don’t have many chances to take it in. But they should make the effort. An ensemble of six sports fine accents and great versatility in bringing … Read more
Melinda Schupmann – Arts In LA Mel Brooks’s very funny 1974 film became The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein in late 2007. Receiving mixed reviews from the critics, it nonetheless played on Broadway for more than 500 performances, and it began a very successful touring show in 2009. Its appeal comes from a lively … Read more