Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Big Night is one of those sitcom-like stage comedies that tries super hard to tackle big themes but trips on the very glibness it purports to satirize. Read more… Katie Buenneke – Stage Raw Big Night is a play with aspirations bigger than it can deliver on. The new work by playwright Paul … Read more
Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze In their West Coast premieres, two one-act radio plays by Anthony Minghella grace the smaller stage at Pacific Resident Theatre. Though the two are produced as radio plays, the actors speaking from music stands, Michael Peretzian directs with enough subtext and reactions to start the audience’s imagination moving and … Read more
Paul Birchall – Stage Raw In playwright Arun Lakra’s quick-witted, if perhaps overly cerebral piece, it isn’t a rabbit’s foot or a four-leaf clover that makes someone lucky — it’s genetic predisposition. Or perhaps it’s an evolutionary adaptation that allows people to peer into the future, quantum physics-style, and somehow bring about their future happiness.Read … Read more
Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze How can people be rhinoceroses? Ask that in the literal and figurative senses and you have Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 landmark play, “Rhinoceros.” Read more… Lovell Estell III — Stage Raw It’s difficult to imagine a timelier and more fitting play for the “Make America Great Again,” era than Eugène Ionesco’s … Read more
Frances Baum Nicholson – The Daily Breeze Perhaps the two greatest dangers in producing an original work of theater is either directing your own performance or directing your own play. In either case, the absolutely necessary second opinion — the critique needed to make sure the thing is the best it can be — is … Read more
Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze What happens in other people’s homes behind closed doors? That’s the stuff of so much Great American Theater. Read more… Now running through October 1
Katie Buenneke – Stage Raw Fans of the fourth wall — that imaginary wall separating performers from their audience — should steer clear of Lauren Yee’s new play King of the Yees, now playing at the Kirk Douglas in Culver City. But for more adventurous folks, those willing to throw caution (and conventional theatrical tradition) to … Read more
Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze In days gone by, people made names for themselves by doing something useful for society. María Irene Fornés wrote plays that broke old rules, broke barriers and taught something, whether to other playwrights or to audiences. Read more… Now running through June 25
Jonas Schwartz – TheaterMania Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride juxtaposes homosexuality in both the repressed world of 1958 London and the more liberated 2008. Whether people are trapped by society’s morality or by their own self-sabotaging instincts, love proves to be a true test of wills. Though the script can be didactic and overlong, the new production … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Capital & Main Written and directed by Diane Rodriguez, The Sweetheart Deal is an amiable blend of political agitprop and audience-pleasing melodrama that unfolds against the backdrop of the struggle to empower the United Farm Workers union. Read more… Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze In 1970, when Americans had causes to fight for, we … Read more