LA LA LAND STARTS WITH OOH-LA-LA BUT LANDS HARD In some ways, La La Land promises to be a moving, old-fashioned romantic musical that plays around with old techniques and presents t…
LIKING THIS LIKENESS Writer/producer/director Daniel Rover Singer's A Perfect Likeness imagines a meeting between Charles Dickens and Charles Dodgson–better known by the alias, Lewis C…
SIRRAH, NO Cyrano de Bergerac is the story of a fearless, witty, charismatic romantic whose grotesque nose prevents him from pursuing Roxanne, the woman he loves. Roxanne is smitten by Chris…
POSITIVELY PEERLESS PERICLES There's a certain respect lost among most national leaders today, especially here in America, due to the excessive regard for individuals graduated from northeas…
AH, GOOD THEATER! Ah, Wilderness! is Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning O'Neill's only comedy, and he describes it as, "a wistful recollection…the kind of childhood I wished I had growing up…
TOO MUCH OF TOO LITTLE FOR TOO LONG An aged widow and an even more aged married man have a shared, passionate history with each other that ended after during World War II. Now, nearly sevent…
AND NOW FOR A BRIEF INTERLUDE What's hip these days? It's the old tradition of taking idiosyncratic history or historical figures and putting the stories and details to music. Sufjan Stevens…
BRAIN FRIED Retaining a cephalopod's far-ranging spinelessness and wide-ranging tentacles, Alicia Adams and Justin Zsebe's vanity work, A Fried Octopus, makes a squishy thud at The Bootleg. …
ALL THE WRONG MOVES The musical Chess highlights the tongue-twisting, swift, and pithy lyrics by Tim Rice and the soaring, dazzling music by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA fame. …
THE PETITE POLITIQUE Few playwrights have it as good as Beau Willimon at the moment; he's a critical and commercial success on all three major platforms"stage, screen, and stream. His play F…
PASSION OVER PERFECTION wild Up is an electric ensemble of twenty-two twenty-somethings who vigorously perform a maelstrom of eclectic musical works ranging from J.S. Bach to They Might Be G…
NO SLIPS HERE After previous productions in Chicago and New York, Daniel Talbott's first play Slipping touches down in Los Angeles and serves as both the inaugural production of Rattlestick …
THE GEFFEN PRODUCTION OF AMERICAN BUFFALO PREFERS TO GRAZE RATHER THAN STAMPEDE The script of David Mamet's assaulting and brutal American Buffalo still packs bite after thirty-eight years. …
RESTORED RESTORATION Northern Irish playwright George Farqhuar died at the tender age of 30, in 1707. However, he finished writing one last play before his passing, The Beaux' Stratagem, a r…
A BUTTERFLY THAT’S STILL IN THE COCOON Katherine Noon's latest ensemble workshop-developed hydra creation, The Bargain and the Butterfly, takes its inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne…
MYTH UNDERSTOOD Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice is classical in its mythological origins but forges a modern path with a point of view modification and feministic flair. The original Greek myth of …
ONE NIGHT WITH PEARL Break out the Southern Comfort and feathered boa, One Night with Janis Joplin is a helluva concert experience presented at the Pasadena Playhouse. Writer-director-creato…
HOW TO SUCCEED CHAUVINISTIC INHUMANITY WITHOUT REALLY TRYING We live in a nation where people celebrate socialite Kim Kardashian, who bore a child with a man who's not her husband. Sexual in…
WHAT DO YOU DO WITH A BAD MOM? Chalk Repertory Theatre continues presenting non-traditional, site-specific theatre with the world premiere of Dorothy Fortenberry's newest work, Mommune. "Mom…
THE PLAY ABOUT A TRIAL ULTIMATELY BECOMES A TRIAL TO WATCH Stephen Adley Guirgis' The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is a courtroom drama set in Purgatory where the guilty or not guilty verdict…
RIPPED TO RAGS IN A BEAUTIFUL WAY John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize and National Book award-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath operates as both a harrowing portrait of the American struggle for…
GALATEA COMES TO LIFE Transformation. Evolution. Metamorphosis. These words are often confined to biological definition, abused in a critic's articulation, and criminally under-applied by ar…
CROSS OVER FROM ROUTINE AND VIVE LE VIE Napoleon's vision to make the world his grand empire of France was stifled by his winter campaign in Russia and his defeat at Waterloo. However, what …
TALK ABOUT A LONG AND WINDING ROAD So, this cool cat painter, a blonde Frau, and several Liverpool lads named John, Paul, George, and Pete walk into a bar in Hamburg… While this sounds lik…
RUSHIN' RUSSIAN Track 3 at the Bootleg Theater is a peculiar sort. Richard Alger's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's classic Three Sisters is better described as a transmogrification of the text…