Taking stock of Center Theatre Group on the occasion of the Music Center's 50th anniversary is a bit like trying to summarize an up-and-down marriage. So many reasons to leave, so many cheri…
The busy afterlife of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," Victor Hugo's 1831 doorstop novel about a church bell ringer with severe chiropractic difficulties, continues with a musical adaptation t…
At the center of Diana Son's drama "Stop Kiss" is a brutal attack on two women locked in an embrace. The scene is reported rather than graphically dramatized, but the violence clarifies so m…
"Once upon a time," the open sesame of childhood fantasy, worked its magic on adults Sunday at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, where an "Into the Woods" reunion was held with the show's …
Elaine Stritch didn't originate the role of Claire, the alcoholic loose cannon of Edward Albee's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1966 drama "A Delicate Balance." But she did put her corrosively funny…
"King Lear" is regarded as Shakespeare's pinnacle achievement in tragedy, a masterpiece of vast scope and overwhelming intensity. How big is it? A.C. Bradley, the great Shakespearean scholar…
Suicidal depression is easy to overact. The temptation for an actor is to make clarifying gestures when the character's impulse isn't to explain but to withdraw.
"Zealot," Theresa Rebeck's new play at South Coast Repertory, is ostensibly set in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, at the start of the Hajj, the annual holy pilgrimage that able adult Muslims are requi…
In an age of vacuous celebrity, in which body parts can go viral and a good plastic surgeon can get you a bigger pay day than talent, it is heartening to report that Broadway's leading men s…
"Pippin," the Tony-winning revival that transformed Roger O. Hirson and Stephen Schwartz's musical into a circus theatrical, has pitched its tent at the Hollywood Pantages, and it has been q…
"No one has the opportunity of tormenting one another as thoroughly as a man and woman who love one another (= hate one another)," Swedish playwright August Strindberg observed with his usua…
Depending on your taste for kink, "Venus in Fur," David Ives' twisty tale about a casting session between a smug playwright and an earthy actress trying out for the role of a well-born 19th …
In late summer rumors began circulating of a potential coup within Los Angeles' thronging and boisterous smaller theater scene.
The old conundrums about happiness " who's entitled and whether it can be lastingly achieved " are at the heart of Jessica Goldberg's "Better," which is having its world premiere courtesy of…
If the spirit of the theater could be incarnated, it would have looked and sounded very much like Marian Seldes, the Tony Award-winning actress who died Monday after an extended illness. She…
'Bright Star,' the quaint new musical by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell at the Old Globe in San Diego, has a luscious bluegrass score. Too bad the book is such a floridly melodramatic throwb…
A transformation happens to the students of Charles R. Drew Prep School for Boys whenever they open their mouths to sing. As soon as these feisty adolescents give themselves over to the Negr…
Comedy isn't the genre that springs to mind when one thinks of school shootings. But that is the unusual " and not insensitive route " Victor Kaufold, a fledgling 19-year-old playwright, too…
Jordan Harrison explores the fraught subject of memory from a variety of fascinating angles in 'Marjorie Prime' at the Mark Taper Forum. Ultimately, it's more intriguing than dramatically sa…
The one thing you can count on with Gob Squad, the always-surprising European performance collective now at REDCAT, is that the audience won't be excluded from the multimedia act.
One day a comprehensive literary biography of Tennessee Williams will be written that won't resemble a psychiatric case study. Until then let's savor John Lahr's "Tennessee Williams: Mad Pil…
Don't look now, but a positive trend seems to be developing: A bumper crop of talented American playwrights more interested in artistic expression than commercial validation is being recogni…
The fall season always brings the hope that something new will astonish us. I'm betting that a few old works might fit the bill.
Extravaganza isn't the word that first springs to mind when thinking of Shakespeare, but in the newfangled version of "The Tempest" at South Coast Repertory the goal is clearly to dazzle.
Tarell Alvin McCraney, one of the brightest American playwrights to come along in some time, showed up for our interview at the Geffen Playhouse with the buttoned-up demeanor of someone abou…