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BEST OF BEST OF THIS WEEK THIS WEEK, Open Fist Theatre Company at Atwater Village Theatre

Photo by Chris Phipps
March 22, 2023Martίn Hernández – Stage Raw Following in the satirical footsteps of Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show, this Open Fist Company production takes the past year’s cream of the crop of its Thursday night comedy sketch show, This Week This Week, and skewers our calamitous society with mostly hilarious results. Creator and director Ron
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TWELFTH NIGHT At The Broadwater Studio Theater

Photo courtesy of Foolish Production Co.
March 22, 2023Tracey Paleo – BroadwayWorld Notwithstanding that they fell into many textbook Shakespeare traps, and that there was zero chemistry between any single one of the characters, the Foolish Production Company cast actually knew what they were doing. And mostly their 1-hour rendition of TWELFTH NIGHT (playing in rep with MEASURE FOR MEASURE at The Broadwater)
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CARDENIO at City Garage Theatre

Photo by Paul Rubenstein
March 22, 2023Rob Stevens – Haines His Way City Garage, the resident theatre company at Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station Arts Center, built their thirty-plus year reputation for doing heavy lifting with productions of Greek tragedies and the works of Brecht and Beckett among other dramatists. With their latest offering, Cardenio, they prove they can let down their
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THE THIN PLACE, Echo Theater Company at Atwater Village Theatre

Caitlin Zambito. Photo by OddDog Pictures.
March 22, 2023Harker Jones – BroadwayWorld Tony-nominated playwright Lucas Hnath’s THE THIN PLACE is an eerie meditation on grief, regret and the need for closure, though it is undermined by the lack of a satisfying conclusion… Obie Award- and Outer Critics Circle Award-winning Hnath (“Red Speedo”; “A Doll’s House, Part 2″) carefully delineates each character with precise
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ONCE at Laguna Playhouse

Photo by Jason Niedle
March 22, 2023Socks Whitmore – Stage Raw In Dublin, a struggling Irish musician bumps into a young Czech woman and his life changes forever. This is the premise of the 2007 musical film Once, and likewise the stage musical of the same name, both featuring songs by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová (including the infamous “Falling Slowly”),
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TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES, 1992 at the Mark Taper Forum

Sabina Zúñiga Varela. Photo by Craig Schwartz Photography.
March 22, 2023Dana Martin – Stage Raw Center Theatre Group meets the moment with Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, conceived, written and revised by Anna Deavere Smith. The original production premiered on Broadway in April, 1994. Smith wrote it as a solo piece, which she developed from hundreds of interviews following the 1992 L.A. uprising. This updated version
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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… Jonas Schwartz-Owen – Theatermania The Lonely Few, a world premiere rock musical at the Geffen Playhouse, does away with conventional narrative. It immerses its audience in rock clubs
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Archive for the Road Theatre

ACCORDING TO THE CHORUS at The Road Theatre

By LADCC critics · Comments (0)
Tuesday, October 25th, 2022
Photo by Peggy McCartha

Photo by Peggy McCartha

Harker Jones – BroadwayWorld

The world premiere of Arlene Hutton’s ACCORDING TO THE CHORUS is a lively slice-of-life look at the backstage antics of an unnamed Broadway show (that’s been running longer than CATS) in 1984. Set in a quick-change room devoted to six chorus girls and their three dressers, the makeshift family squabbles, complains, and supports each other over the course of 15 tumultuous months-tumultuous in the women’s personal and professional lives as well as in the world swirling around them-touching on domestic abuse, AIDS, social stratification, and eating disorders. Read more…

Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw

Arlene Hutton’s new dramedy, According to the Chorus, promises much. Set in 1984 and billed as a fly-on-the-wall peep at the rivalry between a group of Broadway chorus dancers and the women who dress them, the play also touches on the loss and grief of the AIDS epidemic, as well as the heartache of its central character, KJ (Samantha Tan) a woman grieving her broken marriage to a man she still loves. Read more…

Through December 11

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BRIGHT HALF LIFE at the Road Theatre on Magnolia

By LADCC critics · Comments (0)
Wednesday, April 20th, 2022
Photo by Elizabeth Kimball

Photo by Elizabeth Kimball

Terry Morgan  -  ArtsBeat LA

Plays that chart the course of a romantic relationship have long been a staple of theater. Stories told in a nonlinear way are less common but not unheard of. When you take the previous two structures and apply them to the topic of a lesbian interracial marriage, the result is a work that one doesn’t often see in American theater, which is refreshing. What’s better is that Tanya Barfield’s Bright Half Life is more than the sum of its diverse parts…. Read more…

Harker Jones – BroadwayWorld

Pulitzer Prize nominee Tanya Barfield‘s brilliant BRIGHT HALF LIFE is smartly and artfully realized by director Amy K. Harmon at the Road Theatre on Magnolia. With just two actors, the energy never flags, but it does fluctuate, veering as it does from high comedy to pathos to heart-rending drama… Read more…

Tracey Paleo – Gia On The Move

BRIGHT HALF LIFE at The Road Theatre in North Hollywood is nothing less than exhilarating; genuine theater baddassery in your face – empathetic and very personal.  Sit up front… Read more…

Now running through May 8

 

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THINGS BEING WHAT THEY ARE at The Road Theatre

By LADCC critics · Comments (0)
Friday, May 15th, 2015
Photo by Michelle Young

Photo by Michelle Young

Neal Weaver  – Stage Raw

Young and personable Bill (Bernie Zilinskas) works in the sales department of Seagram’s Whiskey. He has just purchased a suburban condo, and he’s waiting for the delivery of his furniture, and for his actress wife (Stephanie Erb) to join him. Read more…

Margaret Gray – LA Times

For introverts of a certain stripe, a guest who won’t leave is essentially a horror-movie monster. Wendy McLeod’s comedy “Things Being What They Are,” now at the Road Theatre, plays with the primeval terror of this scenario — then subverts it. em>Read more…

Now running through June 21.

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SOVEREIGN BODY at the Road Theatre

By LADCC critics · Comments (0)
Friday, April 11th, 2014

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Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly

What happens when an illness of tsunami-like proportions lays waste to your life?

In Emilie Beck’s family drama Sovereign Body, Anna (Taylor Gilbert), a chef and restaurateur, lives happily with her husband (Kevin McCorkle), mom (Bryna Weiss) and two daughters: 20-year-old Callie (Dani Stephens), bursting to be out on her own, and Evie (Hannah Mae Sturges), a brainy opinionated teenager.  Read more..

Steven Leigh Morris – Stage Raw

Don’t let Emilie Beck’s new play fool you. It looks and sounds like it’s about a Pasadena family who happen to be atheists, but its poetical tentacles reach so much further beyond the tropes of the play’s squabbling upper-middle-class tribe. After all, the play isn’t just set in Pasadena, it’s set in Pasadena during “a time of drought.” That’s the first hint that this play has theology in its heart. Read more…

Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter

Susan Sontag, in perhaps her most consequential work, argued with terminal persuasiveness that our drive to characterize illness as a symptom of moral culpability disables our ability to grapple with its reality, which is incontrovertibly oblivious to whether or not we comprehend it. Emilie Beck in her world premiere play, Sovereign Body, manages with some success both to invoke our need to confront fears of debilitation with symbolic fancies and to drive home the inexorable facts of mortality. Read more…

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