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THE LONELY FEW at Geffen Playhouse

Lauren Patten. Photo by Jeff Lorch.
March 18, 2023Patrick Chavis – LA Theatre Bites World Premiere: The Lonely Few @ Geffen Playhouse – 8 out of 10 – Good Show! LA Theatre Bites Recommended! More…  

LA EGOISTA at Skylight Theatre

Lys Perez and Chanel Castañeda. Photo by Jenny Graham.
March 17, 2023Patrick Chavis – LA Theatre Bites West Coast Premiere: La Egoista @ Skylight Theatre – 8.2 out of 10 – Good Show! LA Theatre Bites Recommended! More…  

HAROLD AND MAUDE at Group Repertory Theatre

Clara Rodriguez and Landon Beatty. Photo by Doug Engalla.
March 17, 2023Rob Stevens – Haines His Way. GRT’s production uses projections on the back wall and on smaller screens that come and go from the wings in an attempt to open up the action. Unfortunately, they don’t add much to the show and Larry Eisenberg’s lackadaisical direction lets the production drag on. Most scenes just meander
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SNOWHITE at Santa Monica Playhouse

Photo courtesy of Santa Monica Playhouse
March 15, 2023Lara J. Altunian – Stage Raw When it comes to classic fairy tales, there’s always room for updated adaptations — particularly when it comes to introducing one with antiquated values to a new generation of audiences. Santa Monica Playhouse’s rendition of the Brothers Grimm’s Snow White spins the narrative of a helpless young girl into
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MEAN GIRLS at Segerstrom Center for the Arts

Photo by Jenny Anderson
March 13, 2023Dana Martin – Stage Raw …Mean Girls is updated from the movie in order to reflect an era of smartphones and selfies but still manages to feel dated. Even the most feared book in school, the almighty Burn Book, loses a bit of its sting. Yet — Mean Girls doesn’t talk down to its audience
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LOVE AND INFORMATION at Antaeus Theatre Company

Photo by Jenny Graham
March 9, 2023Katie Buenneke – Theatre Digest Through some unlucky combination of script, direction, cast, set design, and video design, this felt more like sitting through a scene study class than a professional play. Somehow, I hadn’t seen a play by Caryl Churchill before, but I’m in no rush to see another. Read more… Patrick Chavis –
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HAPPY BIRTHDAY MCKENNA at the Hudson Backstage Theatre

Photo by Steven Silverman
March 7, 2023Martίn Hernández – Stage Raw Playwright-director Steven Silverman’s dark yet amiable comedy offers up a multi-ethnic family whose members, despite living or being raised in racially turbulent Chicago, have no apparent animus over each other’s skin colors. No, these folks are dealing with more explosive issues common to many a kith and kin, regardless of
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Archive for The Broadwater

MONIECE CLARK by Barker Room Rep at The Broadwater

By LADCC critics · Comments (0)
Wednesday, September 28th, 2022
Ekeme Ekanem in Moniece Clark. Photo courtesy of Barker Room Rep.

Ekeme Ekanem in Moniece Clark. Photo courtesy of Barker Room Rep.

Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw

LaShea Delaney’s drama, Moniece Clark is about the media’s exploitation of crimes against women and the tendency of law enforcement to downplay those crimes if the victim is a woman of color. You don’t have to look far to uncover the deplorable statistics behind those concerns, to be found in the Department of Justice’s National Missing and Unidentified Persons System or UN Women (an agency affiliated with the United Nations) which will inform you that such crimes are “under-reported, under-investigated, and under-prosecuted.” Read more…

Through October 2

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NOT THAT ILLEGAL at the Broadwater – Hollywood Fringe Festival

By LADCC critics · Comments (0)
Tuesday, June 28th, 2022
Photo courtesy of the artists

Photo courtesy of the production

Rob Stevens – Haines His Way

Yusuf Yildiz’s Not That Illegal started life as a 15-minute work at the 2019 Strawberry One-Act Festival in New York City where it received a Best Play nomination. Now he has expanded it to a 90-minute one-act at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. It’s about 60 minutes too long in its present form. His story is of Ali Can (Yildiz), a Turkish immigrant whose company legally fired him shortly before he was eligible for his Green Card, and his efforts to remain in the USA. Deportation is 30 days away. Read more…

Through June 26

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THE LEGEND OF D.C. COLORADO at The Broadwater – Hollywood Fringe Festival

By LADCC critics · Comments (0)
Wednesday, June 15th, 2022

The Legend of D.C. Colorado2

Rob Stevens – Haines His Way

If you are seeing a new musical at the Hollywood Fringe Festival that starts off with a character known as Cockman who wakes up the sleepy town every morning singing about choking his chicken, you would think you were in for a wild and fun time. Unfortunately, those first few minutes of The Legend of D.C. Colorado are the highpoint of its 90-minute run time. It’s strictly downhill from there. There are a few laughs garnered about a mother who feeds her two idiot bastard sons slop every meal and makes them shuck corn every day. Read more…

Now through June 22

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GRIEF: A ONE MAN SHITSHOW at The Broadwater – Hollywood Fringe Festival

By LADCC critics · Comments (0)
Tuesday, June 14th, 2022
Photo by Rebecca Asher

Photo by Rebecca Asher

Steven Leigh Morris – Stage Raw

“There are no words . . .”

This phrase is among the platitudes that writer-performer Colin Campbell excoriates in his solo performance about people straining to offer comfort in the aftermath of his losing his two teenage children in a car crash, on the other end of a drunk driver with already one DUI conviction who T-boned Campbell’s car. (Campbell was driving, and his wife, a fellow passenger, also survived.) There are in fact plenty of words, and Campbell has them at his disposal in his Spartan performance, directed by Michael Schlitt. “They’re in a better place,” is another. No, they’re not, he points out. They’re in a wooden box six feet underground.

There is nothing maudlin in Campbell’s colloquial, animated approach to what might be called an unimaginable horror, except that Campbell imagines it in detail, working through a multitude of aspects that accompany such heartbreak. Is losing a family so instantaneously better or worse than losing them slowly to cancer? Is it better to be present, to watch them die, as he did, or to learn about it through a phone call?
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Now through June 25

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MR. CHONKERS at The Broadwater – Hollywood Fringe Festival

By LADCC critics · Comments (0)
Tuesday, June 14th, 2022

Mr Chonkers

Dana Martin – Stage Raw

John Norris is a serious actor who doesn’t take anything too seriously and the outcome is very funny. Mr. Chonkers defies definition. It’s a late-night rendezvous with the absurd — a completely ridiculous and thoroughly enjoyable 50 minutes.

The evening is full of good old-fashioned silliness. Mr. Chonkers emerges from the shadows in a cheap monk costume, a nylon sock on his head and with a giant googly eyeball in the center of his nyloned face. He performs uncanny celebrity impressions, superior hand puppetry, an Italian pasta story in a variety of styles, a curtain speech remix, a tiny hat gag, and so much more. Read more…

Now through June 25

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BEAUTIFUL MONSTERZ at The Broadwater – Hollywood Fringe Festival

By LADCC critics · Comments (0)
Saturday, June 11th, 2022
Hollywood Fringe Festival, Beautiful Monsterz

Photo by John Lauri

Rob Stevens – Haines His Way

A friend recently returned from his first trip to Paris. Among the many sites he visited was the grave of Oscar Wilde. I need to ask him if the gravesite looked very disturbed. I would think it would be nearly uprooted with all the spinning in his grave Mr. Wilde surely has done over the past decades as one horrific adaptation after another of his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray has been foisted on the public. Read more…

Now through June 21

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DOG at The Broadwater – Hollywood Fringe Festival

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Wednesday, June 8th, 2022
Photo by Paul Holmes

Photo by Paul Holmes

Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw

Ben Moroski won a Best of Fringe award in 2012 for The Vicious Minute and a Top of the Fringe award in 2014 for his solo performance of The Wake. This year he’s back at The Fringe with his latest solo piece, Dog— a downer of a tale nonetheless presented with the same singular, mesmerizing intensity he brought to his earlier ones.

This time his character —we never learn this character’s given name but his yesteryear buddies call him Dog — is a 30-something alcoholic, prone to blackout bouts of drinking and other diverse forms of destructive behavior.  “Dog” has recently been given the heave-ho by his girlfriend Diane after their small pet dog somehow fell — or leapt! — from their balcony to his death. Read more…

Tracey Paleo – Gia On The Move

It’s been quite the decade for playwright and performer, Ben Moroski. Since his 2012 debut of his autobiographical one-man show, “This Vicious Minute”, Moroski has been a notable solo story creator in Los Angeles theater.

Delivering one deliciously bizarre narrative after another, his award-winning Hollywood Fringe hits like, “The Wake” (HFF14) and “TILT” (HFF16), and now a new solo play have all but proclaimed a rising trajectory that doesn’t seem to be letting up anytime soon. DOG, written and performed by himself and directed by Jordan Lane Shappell, confirms that Moroski’s inspiring genius has further evolved. His skills, edge, enthusiasm for storytelling, and intensity in the work have not wavered.
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Now through July 30

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