Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Kate Benson’s A Beautiful Day in November On the Banks of the Greatest of the Great Lakes takes place on Thanksgiving and revolves around a family’s collective preparation of the traditional holiday meal. Read more… Now running through December 11
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly The relative from hell: Surely every family has one. It’s the person who talks nonstop, who has zero tolerance for other people’s points of view, who perceives her own needs as trumping every other problem on the horizon. Read more… Now running through July 24
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly If you’re in need of a diversion in these terrible, wearisome times — and surely we all are — might I suggest Theatre of Note’s uproarious staging of Bill Robens’ western parody Rio Hondo, under the imaginative direction of Jaime Robledo. Read more… Terry Morgan – Stage Raw Even a fan of … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Ground Control to Major Tom: David Bowie, Richard Nixon, the Cold War, the women’s liberation movement, early Steven Spielberg movies and a staff-impaired NASA space program from 1973 all combine into a Mel Brooks aesthetic in Bill Robens’ world-premiere farce Entropy, which just opened at Hollywood’s Theatre of NOTE. Read … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly As in Aaron Posner’s beguiling Stupid Fucking Bird, which played at Boston Court earlier this year, David Bucci’s Possum Carcass riffs on The Seagull, transporting Chekhov’s story into the 21st century while holding on to the fundamentals of character, theme and plot. While nowhere near as brilliant or textured as Posner’s play, Bucci’s parody is … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly The West Coast premiere of Brian C. Petti’s Banshee at Theatre of NOTE looks like an old play — it’s an Irish fable, but set in New York, in 1981. Sad sack Junior (Bill Voorhees), now 40, unemployed and recovering from a nervous breakdown, lives with his Irish mother, Kit (Lynn … Read more
David C. Nichols – LA Times Coincidences are the universe’s way of being lazy” is one recurring motif in “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” at Theatre of NOTE, though it’s hardly the only metaphor. Erik Patterson’s promising dramedy pulls multiple similes toward coping with the aftereffects of a ruptured brain aneurysm. Read more… Now running through … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly While the overarching message in playwright Steve Yockey’s fractured farce Disassemblyisn’t quite clear, its clever irony is nonetheless unmistakable. Each of the comedy’s daft desperate-for-love characters spins in his or her own idiosyncratic orbit. One exception to this needy bunch would be Evan (Alexis DeLaRosa), an accident-prone jock worshipped by both his … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly The office dork smitten with the comely gal in the next cubicle is a familiar comic setup. In Alex Dremann’s strained satire, the unhappy swain, Colin (Trevor H. Olsen), has much bigger problems than the simple disregard he engenders from the willowy Fran (Jennifer Flack): He is literally disappearing!Read more… … Read more
Hearts Like Fists by Adam Szymkowicz. Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA A chop-socky cartoon on stage, Hearts Like Fists, written by Adam Szymkowicz, is an action-packed adventure romance set in the surreal world of female crime-fighting superheroes. Nurses by day, skilled warriors by night, a band of ferocious and feisty femmesbattle the dastardly and elusive Dr. X and his deadly war against romance. Read … Read more