SECOND CHANCES NEED SECOND ACTS Sit " and calm " down and make yourself at show. A captivating work extolling rural redemption, The Spitfire Grill, a 2001 musical of the 1995 film, shows how…
IT USED TO BE A MISS; NOW, THE HEAT IS ON IN SAIGON Infinitely stronger than the original Broadway outing, this national tour of Miss Saigon overcomes a still strangely muddled plot, some aw…
DESPEREAUX TIMES CALL FOR DESPEREAUX MEASURES More precious than profound, this new family musical is pure children's theater with multilayered storytelling and plenty of songs that aid in e…
SIBLING WARFARE Can lightning strike again after 37 years? In 1982 Steppenwolf Theatre Company put itself on the map with a landmark staging of Sam Shepard's domestic disruption True West…
MORE LIFE FOR DEATH Rob Morrow's completely compelling interpretation of Willie Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman has made the show so popular that an extension has been announced…
THE PLAY ABOUT THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG GOES WRONG The title of this play is brutally honest " and you can't say you weren't warned. In the style of Monty Python and Michael Frayn's farce No…
A PASSIONATE PASSION Stephen Sondheim's Passion is less a work of art than it is an art piece and the Custom Made Theatre Co., in its lovely and elegant chamber version, treats it as such. I…
GO TELL MAMA: CABARET'S A HIT Cabaret was and remains one of the boldest and most innovative experiments in the history of musical theater, a ravishing work that has neither lost its power n…
EVEN WHEN HAIRSPRAY CAN'T HOLD UP… THE EXPERIENCE CAN There are some shows that are beyond criticism or, rather, shows that render criticism totally unnecessary, and the Bay Area Musicals …
MAN, OH MUSIC MAN If ever a show spelled out summer, it's Meredith Willson's 1957 masterpiece The Music Man. Throughout the rollicking story, the title character exudes sunny optimism,…
A GUY WITH ONE LEG WALKS INTO A THEATER… This show-in-residence at the Santa Monica Playhouse (it plays most Friday nights) is a funny, exhilarating dive into comedian, best-selling author…
TEMPEST BELONGS OUTDOORS The words can get windblown or contend with sirens and such. But, just as food tastes different (better?) when eaten outdoors, so does the Bard. Embracing all, Shake…
GO-GO SEE THIS SHOW-SHOW It's a marriage made in musical heaven: A ton of fun erupts from combining seemingly antithetical elements " a 16th-century fairy-tale/poem cycle by Sir Phillip Sidn…
NO SHIT, SHERLOCK As with Good Boys playing across town, Mysterious Circumstances doesn't quite give us an ending the material deserves, but hoo-boy what a ride this is. Directed by Matt Sha…
DEATH LIVES Arthur Miller makes Willie Loman, the tragic figure in his Death of a Salesman, 63 years old. So I was more than a little skeptical as to whether or not Rob Morrow (of Northern E…
THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A DAMES When Dames at Sea opened in 1966 at the Caffe Cino, a small coffee house and performance space in New York City's Greenwich Village that was at the heart of the…
I WANNA SEE THE PRODUCERS Let's get the bad news out of the way first. The Celebration production of The Producers is as far away from the Borscht Belt as a New York musical comedy " whose c…
A JEALOUS WIFE WITH BAD GUN CONTROL You can't keep a bad/mad woman down. Not to be confused with A Doll's House, where Henrik Ibsen offers an almost feminist defense of a vastly underesti…
AN APP-ETITE FOR AMOUR Sooner or later you knew an Internet application would get its own show, especially when it plays Dan Cupid, hooking up randy seekers of one-night stands or permanent …
KEEP IT GAY It's always springtime for Mel Brooks, who really does write musicals the way they used to. Even before Young Frankenstein, his 2001 triumph The Producers (based on the sidesp…
THE WINNER BY AN INCH It's a perverse Pride Month offering that cocks a snoot at authority and respectability: "I'm the new Berlin Wall " try to tear me down!" That defiant dare marks the fl…
A LITERAL STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Only 65 minutes long, British playwright Jez Butterworth's spell-casting The River manages, as few plays have, to simulate a dream on stage. Heraclitu…
THESE CASCADING CRISES ARE NOT SOON FORGOTTEN Sometimes, given the right writing, a seemingly small struggle can defy and define supposedly close kinfolk " and even stamp a society: The futu…
HOUSE IS IN ORDER, BUT IS THAT ENOUGH? There is so much that is right about Ike Holter's clever script of Put Your House in Order. Because of that, it is unfortunate that, in the end, it is …
GREEK TRAGEDY IN THE 'HOOD Having read Luis Alfaro's Oedipus El Rey, one can see that is a true original, that it possesses power, anger, frustration, political and social outrage, that Alfa…