David C. Nichols – LA Times The delicate art of origami provides both metaphor and motor for “Animals Out of Paper” at the David Henry Hwang Theater, and it enfolds the viewer with deceptive simplicity and considerable craft. Read more… Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA The paths of three loner characters intersect in Rajiv Joseph’s Animals Out of … Read more
Margaret Gray – LA Times It may sit uneasily with our notion of Shakespeare to imagine him tackling the hot-button issues of his era like a Jacobean David Mamet. But Bill Cain’s “Equivocation” at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum takes a scholarly theory — that “Macbeth” is a coded chronicle of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw “Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them.” –Usually attributed, possibly inaccurately, to Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809-1894) in “The Voiceless” Irish playwright Ross Dungan might have had this quote in mind -– for sure he had the sentiment –- when he wrote this … Read more
Melinda Schupmann – Arts In LA A theatrical reminiscence by Joanna McClelland Glass about a time when she served as secretary to Judge Francis Biddle gets a standout production at International City Theatre. Its casting choices—Tony Abatemarco playing Biddle, Paige Lindsey White as his assistant Sarah “with an h”—make the very literate and demanding script a thoughtful … Read more
David C. Nichols – LA Times The tragically brief life and career of Charlie “Bird” Parker consumes “Bird Lives!” at the Attic. Willard Manus’ examination of the saxophone virtuoso receives an ambitious, idiosyncratic Chromolume Theatre reading. Read more… Now running through September 21.
David C. Nichols – LA Times Coincidences are the universe’s way of being lazy” is one recurring motif in “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” at Theatre of NOTE, though it’s hardly the only metaphor. Erik Patterson’s promising dramedy pulls multiple similes toward coping with the aftereffects of a ruptured brain aneurysm. Read more… Now running through … Read more
Margaret Gray – LA Times J.B. Murray, the outsider artist and subject of the musical hagiography “Visionary Man” at the Hudson Mainstage, was an illiterate Georgia farmer who at age 70, after receiving a message from the Holy Spirit, began painting pictures of unbelievers in hell, was taken up by the art world and died … Read more
David C. Nichols – LA Times The space where historical perspective and current-day attitudes crosshatch benefits “Frederick Douglass Now” at Bootleg Theater. Writer-performer Roger Guenveur Smith has done incisive, socially trenchant work before, but this is something else again. Read more… Now playing through August 24.
Neal Weaver – Arts In LA Playwright Neil LaBute is so prolific, and has created in so many different and varied media, that it’s virtually impossible to generalize about his work. (His program bio is downright intimidating.) But in many of the scripts for which he is best known—Fat Pig, In the Company of Men, … Read more
David C. Nichols – LA Times “Your – whaddyacallit – your world view? It ain’t mine. And the day it is, that’s the day I shoot myself in the head. I didn’t get clean to live like that.” That statement suggests the gravitas that drives the scabrous hilarity of “The Mother… With the Hat” at … Read more