The Daily Breeze

BELLEVILLE at the Pasadena Playhouse

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Terry Morgan  –  Talkin’ Broadway Labeling a work of art as being one particular thing can often be problematic, creating expectations that the piece doesn’t fulfill. Amy Herzog’s play Belleville is being promoted as a Hitchcockian thriller, which it is not. It’s only a thriller in the sense that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a thriller, in that … Read more

SIGNIFICANT OTHER at the Geffen Playhouse

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Jonas Schwartz –  TheaterMania Joshua Harmon’s Significant Other, now playing at the Geffen Playhouse, explores friendship as a buffer, a support system, and a crutch when navigating the precarious world of love. Often funny, the comedy will remind audiences of their own singlehood, past or present. Unfortunately….Read more… Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze What … Read more

MOUSETRAP at Crown City Theatre

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Frances Baum Nicholson – The Daily Breeze Agatha Christie’s play “The Mousetrap” has been running, interrupted, in London’s West End since 1952, making it the longest-running play in the English language anywhere in the world. With that kind of longevity (66 years and counting), traditions and tales are inevitable. A favorite story, perhaps apocryphal, says … Read more

JACKIE UNVEILED at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

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Ellen Dostal – BroadwayWorld In Act 1 of JACKIE UNVEILED, Tom Dugan‘s new solo play about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, she repeats a single phrase over and over. “I’m no good alone.” The chain smoking, alcohol indulging former first lady has just learned that her brother-in-law (and secret lover) Bobby Kennedy has been assassinated. Now, in the wee … Read more

ALLEGIANCE at the Aratani Theatre

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Ellen Dostal – Musicals in LA After nearly nine years, Allegiance has come home to Southern California. The co-production by East West Players and the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center opened to a sold out crowd on Wednesday night, less than half a mile from the Japanese American National Museum where it had its … Read more

THE FLYING LOVERS OF VITEBSK at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

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Margaret Gray – LA Times Sometimes it’s fun to sashay into a theater cold, without the slightest notion of what you’re in for. But before seeing “The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk,” the Kneehigh Theatre production now at the Wallis in Beverly Hills, you might want to refresh your memory of the art of Marc Chagall.Read … Read more

NICE FISH at the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles

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Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly “Think of the prose poem as the box, perhaps the lunch box dad brought home at night,” writes down-to-earth poet Louis Jenkins in the program notes to Nice Fish, a unique (and to my mind brilliant) collaborative work by Jenkins and renowned performer Mark Rylance.Read more… Dany Margolies – The Daily … Read more

HENRY V at A Noise Within

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Ellen Dostal – BroadwayWorld By the time Shakespeare gets to the last of his history plays concerning the Wars of the Roses*, HENRY V, the party boy who would be king has become a man. Gone are the indiscretions of youth seen in the earlier HENRY IV plays, which follow young Prince Hal on his … Read more

WATER BY THE SPOONFUL at the Mark Taper Forum

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Katie Buenneke – Stage Raw Though Quiara Alegría Hudes’ trio of plays is called the “Elliot trilogy,” Water by the Spoonful, isn’t really about Elliot. The middle work in the triad, it’s a stark change from its predecessor, Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, currently playing at the Kirk Douglas in Culver City. Here, Elliot (Sean Caravajal) is no … Read more