Jonas Schwartz – Arts In LA Gigi Bermingham is well-known in Los Angeles for her performances, comedic and dramatic. Recently, these have included leading roles in Terrence McNally’s Master Class at International City Theatre and Non-Vital Organs at Skylight Theatre. She also directs, lately for Antaeus Theatre Company (You Can’t Take It With You) and Sierra Madre Playhouse (An … Read more
Jonas Schwartz – TheaterMania In 2003, the Latin-American troupe Culture Clash presented Chavez Ravine, a mixture of history, comedy, and outrage, at the Mark Taper Forum. Now the group has, in its own words, “remixed, relived, reloaded” its sociopolitical piece, this time at the more intimate Kirk Douglas Theatre. 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
Pauline Adamek – Stage Raw Adam Szymkowicz’s noir comedy is set in a place of his invention — the clown underworld. Here the clowns are not those funny, entertaining party creatures but criminals with damaged psyches. Sure, there are red noses, silly wigs, painted faces and colorful costumes, but that’s almost as far as the … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly It’s easy to understand why solo performer Chris Lemmon wants to pay homage to his famous father Jack. Celebrity aside, the parent-child bond is a powerful one. Watching and listening to Jack Lemmon Returns at the Broad Stage, I could almost feel the presence of my own irreplaceable dad, who passed from … Read more
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
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.
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly If ever there were a writer dedicated to society’s subversion it was Joe Orton. Orton despised the status quo and made it his mission to wreak havoc on its precepts as thoroughly and flamboyantly as possible. In What the Butler Saw, he went after authority figures, psychoanalysis, which he regarded as … Read more
Jonas Schwartz – TheaterMania When Disney Theatricals launched an epic musical version of the 1996 animated film in Berlin in 1999, The Hunchback of Notre Dame was the first Disney production to open outside the United States. With additional songs by the original writers Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz and a book and direction by the acclaimed … Read more