Thursday, February 16, 2017
“New musicals are never finished, only abandoned,” director Christopher Ashley quipped by phone a few days before flying to New York for the start of rehearsals for “Come From Away,”…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 01:00PMMonday, February 13, 2017
“Zoot Suit,” the landmark 1978 play by Luis Valdez that put the struggles of Mexican Americans front and center, is back where it originated at the Mark Taper Forum in an exhilarating re…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 12:00AMSunday, February 12, 2017
Kneehigh, the seriously playful British theater company that turned the classic film “Brief Encounter” into a charmingly inventive multimedia stage play, is back at the Wallis Annenberg …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:05PMFriday, February 10, 2017
America’s widespread opioid crisis has sadly made a crucial part of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” more relatable. Mary, the strung-out mother in the play’…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 02:15PMSunday, February 5, 2017
Something miraculous happens in “Every Brilliant Thing.” Something you might want to include on your own list of life-enhancing pleasures should you follow the lead of the protagonist, w…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:35PMTuesday, January 31, 2017
Just as the short stories in collections by Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley and Alice Munro are meant to be savored one small masterpiece at a time and not gobbled up indiscr…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:40PMMonday, January 30, 2017
There’s no avoiding politics these days. Not even a thrilling stage adaptation of the great American novel set on the high seas can offer complete escape. At Saturday’s matinee of “Mob…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:10PMThursday, January 19, 2017
Last week an artistic leader greeted an opening-night audience with a spiel about why supporting theater is more important now than ever. She was referring to the new political reality, and …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:00PMFriday, January 13, 2017
Penny Fuller plays a well-coiffed widow in “13 Things About Ed Carpolotti,” a charming cabaret-scale one-act musical in which her character finds out that the husband she’s mourning ha…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:50PMMonday, December 19, 2016
For better or worse, 2016 has been a truly Shakespearean year. It has also been the year of Donald Trump, a figure who could no doubt hold his own in one of Shakespeare’s ruthless history …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 12:00PMSaturday, December 17, 2016
"Amélie, A New Musical,” which began at Berkeley Repertory Theatre last year, has brought its whimsical magic to the Ahmanson Theatre, where a retooled production starring Phillipa Soo (l…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 03:00PMSunday, December 11, 2016
I’m not sure how you spent your Saturday night but I spent part of mine in a hotel room with a bunch of strangers looking at a naked man sprawled out on his bed like T.S. Eliot’s “pati…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:00PMSaturday, December 10, 2016
“Is this the promised end?” Kent mournfully asks as King Lear carries Cordelia’s corpse on stage at the close of Shakespeare’s most harrowing tragedy. “Or image of that horror?” …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:00AMWednesday, November 30, 2016
Two major productions of “King Lear” are taking place on opposite sides of the River Thames, but for London audiences this embarrassment of Shakespearean riches is as normal as autumn’…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 02:50PMTuesday, November 29, 2016
“Merrily We Roll Along,” the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical with a checkered record in the theater, is like a safe stuffed with jewels waiting for a director who can finally crack…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 11:45AMMonday, November 28, 2016
The sorcery behind "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" - the eighth story in the J.K. Rowling series, this one written as a stage play - is of vintage pedigree. The epic tale of two boys mak…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:55PMSunday, November 20, 2016
Forgive me if I don't take this moment to congratulate the theater community on its self-congratulatory outcry against our new tweeter-in-chief Donald Trump, who used his megaphone this week…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:40PMFriday, November 18, 2016
Martin McDonagh, the British-born playwright of Irish heritage and humor, made a sensational debut in 1996 with “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” his bruising comic melodrama that announced…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 11:15AMThursday, November 17, 2016
In a Broadway season heavy on revivals, shows from another era have been given starry makeovers. But everything old isn’t new again. Classics aren’t created by crowded marquees. Plays…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:00AMMonday, November 14, 2016
California may still be counting votes, but already there’s a musical responding to the new Trump era. “Miss You Like Hell,” which is having its world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse, …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 12:35PMTuesday, November 1, 2016
A few eccentric hors d'oeuvres are served before the main surrealist dish in John Sinner’s “An Invasion of Decency!” — a wild theatrical spree that makes a direct appeal to the unc…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:30PMMonday, October 31, 2016
A play about Donald Trump set to open a little more than a week before the presidential election seemed like perfect timing — this summer. Oh, but how these last weeks of the campaign have…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:15PMTuesday, October 25, 2016
Independent Shakespeare Co., the group behind the popular Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival, has taken “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” indoors, which might seem strange given that…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:45PMMonday, October 24, 2016
Playwright Karen Zacarías was tired of the way so many dramas written by Latino authors were dismissively compared to telenovelas. Her response was to write a play that celebrates, sends up…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:25PMFriday, October 21, 2016
Tom Stoppard reflect on a his long playwriting career
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 01:44PMThe word trauma originally referred to a physical wound or defeat. Later usage, influenced by Freud, stressed an injury of the mind — invisible but no less real for being unseen. Unseen bu…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:20AM"I don't think I've ever spent half an hour in my life doing research," said playwright Tom Stoppard when asked about the impressive erudition behind his intellectually dazzling comedies. "I…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00AMMonday, October 17, 2016
The chief reason to see A Noise Within’s production of Molière’s “The Imaginary Invalid” is Apollo Dukakis’ delightfully cranky portrayal of the play’s tyrannical hypochondriac,…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:10PMMonday, October 10, 2016
Three years ago, theater artist Aaron Posner had a postmodern field day updating Chekhov in his frisky comedy with the unprintable title that we’ve taken to politely calling “Stupid … …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:45PMFriday, September 30, 2016
Monologist Mike Daisey has made his name channeling outrage on a range of contemporary issues while seated calmly behind a desk before an audience. His manner may be that of a homeroom teach…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:45PMSaturday, September 17, 2016
David Mamet once described two of New York’s leading drama critics as the syphilis and gonorrhea of the American theater. Edward Albee, whose death at age 88 on Friday marked the end of hi…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:40PM 
