SINGING AGAINST HATE If it takes a village, the Black Ensemble Theater creates one nightly. Actually, it's a "healing circle" that's literally at center stage and figuratively at the heart o…
OUR INKBLOT INTERPRETATIONS: SPLAT, SPLAT, SPLAT, SPLAT, SPLENDID Theater isn't just what it brings to us, it's also what we bring to it. At least, that's the general idea behind Open Fist T…
GLORY GLORY GLORIA I don't know if Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has ever worked in a Manhattan publishing house but he sure knows his way about the workplace. In Gloria, he paints an extraordinary…
SHE LOVES ME…AND WITH GOOD REASON! Ah, love. As hard to find as ever, but so satisfying when it is. But what did the ancients (20th-century people) do to find love before Tinder, eHarmony,…
PUPS 'N' STUFF MAKES A DOGGONE DRAMA "Love me, love my dog. [Then I'll love you…}" That's the operating assumption between Dex & Abby, a cross-species comedy/love play. At 130 minutes …
HERE'S SOMETHING THAT WILL INTEREST YOU This is the second show this year in L.A. to take head-on the insanity of modern journalism (the insanity being that while newspapers deliver so-calle…
LOST … AND FOUND Found: A New Musical is determined to find its way. After a run off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theatre Company in 2014, this reworked West Coast premiere "Â now playing a…
MONSTER MASH In an effort to strip away the centuries, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has gone under the knife. Revitalizing the 200-year-old classic is the Beverly Hills-based performing arts …
IT'S THE HIGH SCHOOL SHOW THAT I WISH I WROTE IN HIGH SCHOOL The thing that looks like a high school vanity project at the Geffen Playhouse is actually a world premiere with a lot of bucks b…
I CAN ALWAYS USE MORE MEN Well, here's a national tour that isn't resting on its laurels. Somewhat tighter with impeccably glorious performances, a golden angel high above at the center of a…
CARYL ME HOME When the author is famed English playwright Caryl Churchill, theater about death and life's surmounting surrealism isn't depressing at all; it's exhilarating. The author of Clo…
POSTHUMOUS EMANCIPATION The painful premise behind Kill Move Paradise is that there's no justice on this side of the grave. So author James Ijames goes to the other side. He creates a kind o…
REBIRTH Which walls are worse? Those that keep people out or those that keep people in? Playwright Rogelio Martinez seemed to have this question in mind when he wrote Born in East Berlin, wh…
YOU SHOULDA BEEN THERE Happy ever after is the stuff of fairy tales " yet, happy ever after is how we in the audience left the Alex Theatre on Sunday night. The show was It Shoulda Been You …
APPROXIMATING AN ATROCITY It's an evil not to be exorcised. As the excellent HBO documentary My Name Is Sandra Bland showed, a tragedy resonates " Bland was found hanged in a prison cell in …
LIFE IMITATETH ART In Christopher Guest's brilliant 1996 mockumentary Waiting For Guffman, the smalltown residents of Blaine, MO, come together to put on a show. But what if instead the resi…
PAPA, CAN YOU HEAR ME? Every once in awhile a play comes along that reminds what " and how exciting " theater can be. In The Father (Le Père), French playwright Florian Zeller doesn't just …
GREAT F. SCOTT! If you love literature, have fond memories of being read to or of reading to others, and feel, as so many do, that F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is in the Pantheon o…
DISCO'S ONCE AND FUTURE DIVA As the song says, "Dim All The Lights" " or set them to scorching splendor. Anyway, the giant mirror ball is back, scintillating and scattering flecks of light t…
TAKE A CHANCE WITH FUN When a newly "out" lesbian learns her closeted father has taken his life mere months after revealing to him her sexuality, she has a lot to process. Being an artist, s…
PASS THIS ROACH After a convoluted build-up, there's a late scene in I Decided I'm Fine: A Roach Play that actually works. In it, Ellen (Veronica Tjioie), a trauma-stricken hoarder, exposes …
AT DAY'S END Thanks to Lanie Robertson's bedrock-basic script, Wren T. Brown's dedicated staging, Karole Foreman's extraordinarily vulnerable performance, and Stephan Terry's elegant piano p…
EMMA PLOTS, THIS TIME IN SONG Nobody knew better than Jane Austen how love could get lost in the social maze of Regency England, where social distinctions quickly become psychological barrie…
STILL STEPPING This Irish extravaganza is celebrating its 25th anniversary, a quarter century of Celtic thunder as thousands of feet have pounded countless floorboards. What Stomp offe…
WHERE WILL THIS RED BIKE TAKE YOU? Red Bike immediately presents a huge challenge to a director. Caridad Svich's script contains no stage directions (and little punctuation, even) and reads …