Sex, Lies and Harold Pinter @ ODYSSEY THEATRE

Ed Rampell – Hollywood Progressive Pinter’s slyly subversive 30-ish minute piece does to those veddy British drawing room plays what The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface does to human beings. Although I hasten to add that this is not to say that Party Time is a horror production per se, but rather that it Pinteresquely piquantly … Read more

The Adding Machine @ THE ACTORS’ GANG THEATER

Ed Rampell – Hollywood Progressive As The Wall Street Journal reports “Jeff Bezos is in early talks to raise $100 billion for a new fund that would buy up manufacturing companies and seek to use AI technology to accelerate their path to automation,” which would likely trigger an avalanche of mass unemployment, and right on … Read more

All My Sons @ THE ANTAEUS COMPANY

Travis Michael Holder – TicketHoldersLA Arthur Miller often tackles the universal themes of morality vs. what his great classic’s everyman anti-hero Joe Keller calls “practicality,” but this time out the author leaves just a tad room for his audience to discover things for ourselves without incessant preaching about how dastardly our world operates. Read more… … Read more

Luca & Uri @ PLAYWRIGHT’S ARENA/VICTORY THEATRE CENTER

Travis Michael Holder – TicketHoldersLA The first scene in Nicholas Pilapil’s intriguing new two-hander is actually what normally would be the last, depicting the end of a beautiful decade-long relationship and leaving us an entire play to unravel what went wrong. Director Jon Lawrence Rivera stages the mercurial colliding events smoothly and often playfully, keeping … Read more

The Typist @ HUDSON THEATRE

Travis Michael Holder – TicketHoldersLA Playwright Shem Bitterman has an uncanny knack for evoking a mood both untraditional and yet familiar—sometimes uncomfortably so. As with last year’s breakout hit “The Civil Twilight” from the same producing team, his newest two-hander, now debuting at the Hudson, again proves his provocative storytelling is a treasure. Read more… … Read more

Brownstone @ OPEN FIST THEATRE COMPANY

Patrick Chavis  – LA Theatre Bites Podcast  8.5 out of 10! Great Show! LA Theatre Bites Recommended! Listen more…   Deborah Klugman  – Stage Raw The plots are predictable, though the drama picks up in the second act as the stakes for each character get higher, and the final scene does carry some poignancy. Read … Read more

Izzard: The Tragedy of Hamlet @ MONTALBAN THEATRE

Travis Michael Holder – TicketHoldersLA The accessibility of Suzy Eddie Izzard’s performance as Shakespeare’s most notorious prince is unquestionably on display in her jarringly unique delivery of Hamlet’s most well-known speech, the character’s often caricatured third soliloquy, presented simply and with great warmth and humanity instead of spouted in grandly theatrical style filled with rage, … Read more

Kid Gloves @ SKYLIGHT THEATRE

Katie Buenneke – Stage Raw Kid Gloves’s biggest struggle is that it doesn’t feel like it wants to be a stage show. The plot is comprised of dozens of scenes that switch locations regularly, so the show gets bogged down in scene changes, as we switch from onstage to backstage and back. The scene changes … Read more

An Inspector Calls @ THEATRE 40

Ed Rampell – Hollywood Progressive British socialist J.B. Priestley’s “An Inspector Calls” is a clever dramatization of the British class system. Especially worth seeing as staged at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. Read more… Harker Jones – BroadwayWorld A classic of mid-20th-century English theater, Priestley’s script has complexity. He gives each of his characters … Read more