Photo by Matthew Murphy
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw
…James Lecesne conjures up a community in his a guest production in a brief run at the Kirk Douglas after a successful New York run, winning this year’s United Solo Special Award. Read more…
Now running through January 31
Photo by Michael Lamont
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw
…Will Eno’s acclaimed Thom Pain (based on nothing) arrives in Los Angeles after a decade of playing virtually everywhere else. Read more…
Jonas Schwartz - TheaterMania
Thom Pain is antagonistic toward his audience. He shouts at them, starts tangents that he suddenly drops, draws seemingly interminable pauses, and rambles on about stories that lead nowhere. This Pulitzer Prize finalist, written by Will Eno, will invigorate or infuriate one depending on their perspective but it is doubtful audiences have seen anything resembling this monologue before. Read more…
Now running through February 14.
Margaret Gray – LA Times
It happens so often in Iowa that the housewives have come to expect it: Moments after their husbands and children head off to the state fair, hunky photographers arrive, asking directions to picturesque bridges. The photographers have drifters’ souls and hide from true intimacy behind their cameras. Read more…
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw
A runaway bestseller like Robert James Waller’s romantic novel, The Bridges of Madison County, must be irresistible to adapt to more popular media. What’s intriguing is that both as a movie, and now as a Broadway musical, first-rank creative talent have been enticed to tackle the purplish passion as a challenging technical exercise. Read more…
Now running through January 17.
Photo by Craig Schwartz
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw
As a theater critic, I find myself writing perhaps disproportionally about plays with race, gender and sexuality issues — those subjects being responsible for a disproportionate amount of the most meaningful work being created — for which I am arguably ill-equipped to discuss, falling back on the presumptive faith that art is still art.
Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA
Three adult brothers gather at their Dad’s home for Christmas and goof around. When the youngest brother Drew (Frank Boyd) is overcome with emotion during their Christmas Eve takeout Chinese meal, the others struggle to understand what’s bothering him.
Now running through December 20.
Photo by Michael Lamont
Bob Verini - Stage Raw
The committed theatergoer, confronted with the prospect of a play set in Ireland, may well inquire, “First of all, is it one of the light ones or one of the dark ones?” Read more…
Jonas Schwartz - TheaterMania
Outside Mullingar feels like a memory play of the distant past that is set in modern times. The farming territory of Killucan, Ireland, has a timeless aura. Into this delicate setting, Shanley beautifully tells a quiet tale of unrequited love, where the characters are not so much repressed, but gloomy about what they think they can’t have. Read more…
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw
Bob Verini’s Stage Raw review of John Patrick Shanley’s Outside Mullingar places the show squarely within its proper context, and though much of his take is unassailable, I regard the play with more susceptible affection — though in the Irish manner, all such sentiment and despair are to be doubted in equal measure. Read more…
Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA
Now running through December 20
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw
Since its founding in 2010, The Industry, under the daring leadership of artistic director Yuval Sharon, has pursued a new media makeover meant to shake up not merely the Los Angeles opera world but the world at large. Its extraordinary coup de theatre, 2013’s Invisible Cities, commandeered Union Station as singers and dancers and audience wandered about as alien invaders amongst the real-life travellers, apprehending the orchestral music through Sennheiser headphones. Read more…
Photo by Ed Krieger
Bob Verini - Arts In LA
Greenway Court Theatre’s Breathing Room is a 70-minute metaphysical self-help session, scored to electric violin and synthesizer and incorporating quantum theory. It insists that people are debilitated by overwhelming technological change, and it recommends an extended time-out to develop a fresh perspective on the natural world. Read more…
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw
Most properly a performance piece rather than either a play or a musical composition, Breathing Room could be seen as both an extension and a contraction of the talents of Mary Lou Newmark, who if naught else pursues assiduously her own muse.
Now running through October 25.
Photo by Craig Sschwartz
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw
…it is piquantly paradoxical that such a determined ironist as Jean Anouilh (Becket, Waltz of the Toreadors, The Lark), the most commercially and critically successful French playwright internationally immediately following the Second World War, now can be seen to exemplify some of the pitfalls of logical colloquy. Read more…
Now running through November 20.
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw
First Date, with songs by Alan Zachary & Michael Weiner and book by Austin Winsberg, completed a modest 200-performance Broadway run in 2013, perhaps largely buoyed by the presence of a television star. Read more…
Now running through October 11.
Photo by Lindsay Schnebly
Les Spindle – Frontiers L.A.
Featuring an appealing score by Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Pippin) and a charming though rather thin book by Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof, Zorba), based on a 1931 French film, this 1976 musical remains more a cult favorite than a classic. Read more…
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw
Among the most gratifying of musicals being presented in the region has been here before, in appreciably different form: Stephen Schwartz (songs) and Joseph Stein’s (book) The Baker’s Wife, based on the hit 1938 film by Marcel Pagnol from a novelette by Jean Giono and starring the immortal Raimu. Read more…
Now running through October 25.
Photo by Craig Schwartz
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw
Object Lesson, created and enacted by Geoff Sobelle, is a determinedly odd amalgam of performance art and clowning, an extended existential joke deploying self-aware empty gestures, obsessive materialism and well-established gags consciously stranded in the context of a litter-strewn vacuum. And yes, a desire to be loved. It’s as if a contemporary Emmett Kelly did an evening-long solo show, capped by the bottomless box trick. Read more…
Now running through October 4.
Photo by Craig Schwartz
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw
… on to Georges Feydeau, a ubiquitous influence as the prime shaper of boulevard farce to the percussive opening and closing of doors, less often seen in actual performance stateside. Read more…
David C. Nichols – LA Times
Farce is a tricky thing to sustain, especially sex farce. Too much lewdness risks vulgarity, over-restraint loses the fizz.
No such issues afflict “A Flea in Her Ear” at A Noise Within. In its Southern California regional premiere, playwright David Ives’ wittily risqué 1950s update of Georges Feydeau’s farcical classic, the grand-père of them all, strikes precisely the right notes. Read more…
Now running in rep through November 22.