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's alcoholic …
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, who i…
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 indiscrim…
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 "Moby Dick…
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 …
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 had been…
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 pl…
"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 (lat…
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 "patient et…
"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?" Edgar, more …
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's gunm…
"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 the…
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…
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…
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 the…
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. Pla…
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, was …
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 unconsc…
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 a…
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…
Playwright Karen ZacarÃas 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 …
Tom Stoppard reflect on a his long playwriting career
The 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 but …
"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…
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, a patriarch…