Bryan Carpender
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw
Ryan O’Connor is a personable entertainer, and Vote, Pray, Love, directed by Marissa Jaret Winokur at the Celebration Theatre, is a personable play. A bit of a hodgepodge, it’s one of those shows whose rough edges are immaterial when measured against the generosity and charm of its writer and lead performer.
Read more…
Now running through April 16
Photo by Melissa Mollo
Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze
Farce. It’s that theatrical plot in which a character — apparently always male — tells a lie and gets wound up in it. Then, somehow, over the course of two hours, he manages to unwind himself and earn the forgiveness of his fellow characters. Read more…
Now running through February 8.
Photo by Kevin Parry
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.
Photo by Ed Krieger
Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter
The new intimate room at the old Beverly Hills post office has been nostalgically configured as a vintage supper club with alcohol and food service for this sentimental yet substantial cabaret performance of Noel Coward‘s words and music by a pair of genuine theatrical stars, John Glover and Judy Kuhn. In a satisfyingly full 90 minutes (including the de rigeur intermission to refill cocktails), Glover assumes the role, if not the persona, of the incomparably talented Coward, while Kuhn reads from the letters of his eminent female intimates. Read more…
Bob Verini - ArtsInLA
While the depths of the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts are given over to a magical reinvention of Noël Coward’s bourgeois romantic melodrama Brief Encounter, a black-box studio space on the ground floor brings out his brittle, witty, demimonde side in Love, Noël. Read more…
Now running through February 23.
Tracy Martin / Segerstrom Center for the Arts.
Teatro ZinZanni: Love, Chaos & Dinner by Norman Langill, Kevin Kent, Joe de Paul, Mat Plendl, Juliana Rambaldi, Duffy Bishop, Manuela Horn, Hans Teuber and Jane Langill.
David C. Nichols – L.A. Times
Federico Fellini and Toulouse-Lautrec meet Garrison Keillor and Wolfgang Puck by way of Bricktop and Bob Fosse in Teatro ZinZanni’s “Love, Chaos & Dinner,” now catapulting its way around the collective id of Costa Mesa. This latest high-concept spectacle from the iconoclastic company serves up an immersive, uniquely enchanting theatrical repast. Read more…