Melinda Schupmann – Showmag.com Garnering numerous awards at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2011, it has been re-worked as a full-scale production and is McCoy Rigby Entertainment’s first world-premiere musical. Fresh and imaginative, it takes the finest features of Jane Austen’s classic novel and musically highlights the love stories of its principal characters. Read … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly In Michael Kearns’ Bang Bang, there’s a psycho-sexual serial killer named Dr. JackL and MisterHide&Seek (David Pevsner in a bravely unrepentant performance) whose fetish is to stand nude with his head masked in leather, to make Internet contact with his hitherto unknown male victims before meeting them (ostensibly for a … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw Improvisation in the theatre is hardly a new thing, and more and more it seems to become a useful part of the movie-making process. Improvised comedy has become downright ubiquitous, and was practiced with glorious expertise by Mike Nichols and Elaine May way back in the 1950s. But improvised opera? Read … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw There have been a number of plays in which the action occurs at a funeral, but now, Liz Shannon Miller’s Clutch is being staged in a venue actually dedicated to funerals, weddings, and bar mitzvahs. We’re asked to believe, however self-consciously, that we’re at the real funeral of former football star and … Read more
Paul Birchall – Stage Raw “The whole world’s in a state of chassis!” said Jack Boyle, the iconic Irish lotus-eating blackguard of Juno and the Paycock, Sean O’Casey’s great drama about the tragic flaws of an Irish family. Read more… Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Corktown 57 unfolds entirely in the Irish-quarter grocery-shop basement of Frank Keating (John … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly In Break of Noon, Neil LaBute departs from his typical preoccupation with gender warfare and builds a story around the sole survivor of a mass murder, who claims to have heard God. Read more… Now running through May 10.
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Writer-director Michael Phillip Edwards drew inspiration for his spooky comedy Blood from a Jamaican storyteller he knew in childhood, a man named Parsons, whose wild tales mixed moral imperative, ominous foreboding and pitch-black humor. Read more… Now running through May 30.
Jenny Lower – LA Weekly The basis for the much beloved, happily-ever-after musical My Fair Lady, George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion takes a much firmer tack on questions of class distinctions and female independence. Those themes, so dear to Shaw’s progressive heart, end up rather charmingly watered down in the 1964 Audrey Hepburn film version. Read more… Jonas … Read more
Jenny Lower – LA Weekly The Game Against Bobby Fischer, a new play written by Dennis Richard and directed by Gregory Fuller at the Secret Rose Theatre, purports to enter the troubled mind of renowned American World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer (Robert Weiner) as he approaches his final days in his adopted home of Reykjavik, … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Off the Rails, Randy Reinholz’s engaging adaptation of Measure for Measure, interweaves strands of American history, chiefly the Native American struggle to preserve tribal identity, with the themes and cadences of Shakespearean comedy. The play is presented by Native Voices, the country’s only equity company devoted to plays by Native Americans. Read … Read more