Wednesday, September 14, 2016
Try to remember a greener "Fantasticks," when props were leaner and sets were matchsticks ... Ah, well, memory of the original lyrics fades, and it may be hard at first to recognize the no-f…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:00PMWednesday, July 27, 2016
Reenvisioning “Twelfth Night” through millennial-tinted glasses, Coeurage Theatre Company’s revival in Burbank transposes Shakespeare’s plot and theme of cultural alienation into a c…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 01:18PMThursday, June 23, 2016
The year is 1886, the Civil War is over, slaves are free and everything is all right. That’s wishful thinking, alas, which only incites crusading abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe to bris…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:17PMSaturday, April 2, 2016
Children of alcoholics are at significantly greater risk of exposing others to an unfortunate self-penned solo show about their life experiences — at least according to a 2011 faux researc…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:18AMThursday, March 24, 2016
Who knew housecleaning could be life-threatening? The revelation may offer welcome relief to slobs everywhere, but it comes a bit too late for the hapless heroine of “Dirt,” Bryony Laver…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:44PMSunday, March 13, 2016
Purists beware: "Tempest Redux" at the Odyssey Theatre boldly transposes Shakespeare’s play to a darker, more unsettling key, but the inventive staging and solid command of source text mak…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:10PMThursday, February 18, 2016
Faith and reason, spirit and matter, head and heart — all are aspects of a division so constant throughout history that it seems to be genetically hard-wired. Exploring this inherently con…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:38PMTuesday, February 9, 2016
With so many dramas these days built around bad behavior — the worse the better, it seems — it’s a downright anomaly to come across a genuinely compelling story about ordinary people t…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:02AMSaturday, December 12, 2015
Having been more or less inundated, year after year, for good or ill, by the surplus of yuletide theatrical stagings of “A Christmas Carol,” that most ubiquitous of the literary creation…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 12:35PMFriday, October 30, 2015
Wikitheatre (wik-i-thee-¿-ter) is a newly-coined term for a subgenre of stage docudrama, characterized by slender fictional narrative and dialogue threading various quotes and biographical …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:44AMFriday, October 23, 2015
A signature unease with the facile promises of the American Dream — and its inherent moral contractions — runs through the plays of Arthur Miller. Where Miller’s iconic salesman Will…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:58AMThursday, July 2, 2015
"A normal person is just someone you don't know well enough," playwright Tracy Letts once said.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:13PMFriday, June 19, 2015
Consider this a well-deserved Like for "As You Like It" at Will Geer's Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga. As part of the company's Americana-themed summer repertory season, the production rese…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 02:02PMWednesday, June 3, 2015
Back in ancient Greece, Oedipus set the gold standard for mommy issues. Nowadays, though, his story can seem to hit the stage lugging three millennia worth of psychological baggage — a Dr…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 02:43PMMonday, May 25, 2015
Amid the updated dialogue, some of the retained verse is an awkward fit at times, but assured delivery by Stehlin, Strong and London ensures the poetic resonance.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:58PMThursday, April 30, 2015
For nimble minds seeking a more cerebrally challenging alternative to the commercialized platitudes that tend to crop up around Earth Day, the Theatre@Boston Court’s West Coast premiere of…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00PMThursday, April 9, 2015
In the aftermath of a mass shooting, the sole survivor narrating Neil LaBute’s “The Break of Noon” at City Garage resolves to mend his selfish ways, attributing his escape to divine in…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00PMThursday, April 2, 2015
To tell the truth or not? That question proves the splintering wedge for a young couple who find themselves stuck in “A Dog’s House” of their own making.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00PMWednesday, February 18, 2015
The creation of brilliant music counterpoints the tormented amorous lives of three prominent composers in “Fugue,” Echo Theater Company’s edgy historically based meditation on genius, …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:00AMThursday, January 29, 2015
Talk about burning a candle at both ends: Jason Robert Brown’s semi-autobiographical 2001 two-character musical, “The Last Five Years,” is a song cycle about a youthful love affair go…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00PMFriday, January 23, 2015
“Time Stands Still” more than it should in an earnest but only intermittently engaging revival of Donald Margulies’ 2009 drama at North Hollywood’s Secret Rose Theatre.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:00AMFriday, October 17, 2014
When it comes to the heartbreaking silences between parents and children, Australian playwright Andrew Bovell observes that “having nothing to say is just another way of having so much to …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:00PMThursday, October 2, 2014
“Hard to believe, but totally true!” That's how Time, our mythical narrator, sums up the fanciful events in “Melissa Arctic,” Craig Wright’s modern-day transposition of “The Wint…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:30PMThursday, September 18, 2014
“Conviction” is the flip side of “Doubt” — in more than a semantic sense.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00PMThursday, September 11, 2014
To likely audiences for “O’Neill’s Ghosts,” the late Jovanka Bach’s biographically-based drama about playwright Eugene O’Neill, it shouldn’t come as any great surprise that her…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:30PMThursday, July 31, 2014
Neil LaBute’s “In a Dark Dark House” begs the immediate question: why bother with the redundant title? Any residence where Mr. LaBute comes knockin’ is not likely to sit on the sunny…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:30PMWednesday, July 23, 2014
The line of succession from Samuel Beckett to playwright Will Eno runs through the Irish actor Conor Lovett.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:30AMThursday, July 17, 2014
They whine, they can’t share, they’re pathologically needy … all the familiar complaints about child rearing surface in “Family Planning,” but not in the way you might expect.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:00PMThursday, June 12, 2014
The grim aftershocks of South Africa’s racist apartheid regime will be with us for some time to come, which makes the cautionary social relevance of Carole Eglash-Kosoff’s docudrama “T…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:23PMThursday, May 1, 2014
Trying to be a better person might seem an unlikely motivator for the protagonist in a Neil LaBute play. Nevertheless, it’s the fulcrum on which “Fat Pig” pivots in a Hudso…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:30PMThursday, April 17, 2014
Thanksgiving dinner can often be a recipe for disaster, but it proves especially problematic for the workaholic chef who finds her familiar familial dysfunction laced with far grimmer ingred…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:32PM 
