Saturday, December 12, 2015
It happens so often in Iowa that the housewives have come to expect it: Moments after their husbands and children head off to the state fair, hunky photographers arrive, asking directions to…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 12:35PMSunday, December 6, 2015
The stripper whose wildest dream is of marriage. The high-stakes gambler who falls for a missionary. Both live on the sweet, homely Broadway of Damon Runyon, whose short stories about Depr…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:42PMThursday, October 22, 2015
As a child, I couldn’t understand why anybody would attend a production of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”; surely not even the most pretentious adult would choose to watch gloomy Russians w…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:42PMThursday, October 15, 2015
You could counterfeit money, risking jail time, or you could cast the stars of one of the most profitable romances in movie history and hit the road with a perennially popular stage show. Th…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:50PMSome of us try to jury-rig meaningful lives using the disheartening fragments at our disposal; others dream of wiping the slate clean and starting anew. Both approaches prove painfully unsat…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:52AMThursday, August 27, 2015
One unintended consequence of the communications age is the increased difficulty of putting together a believable plot.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:16PMThursday, August 20, 2015
The ensconced veteran reluctant to give up the spotlight. The impatient successor nipping at his heels. This scenario has launched plots from "Paradise Lost" to "The Late Shift."
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:41PMFriday, July 24, 2015
The first collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, "Oklahoma!," which debuted in 1943, is often credited with reinventing musical theater - although "Showboat," from 1…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:13AMFriday, June 26, 2015
Struggles over inheritance are always painful -- unless, of course, they take place in a French farce, in which case they are endlessly prankish and ribald.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 02:47AMFriday, June 5, 2015
“When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh,” the late Nora Ephron once wrote, neatly summing up the powe…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:38PMFriday, May 29, 2015
Aeschylus introduced the second actor to Greek plays, adding dialogue, conflict, action — in other words, drama — to what had been a primarily lyrical art form. It seems like a no-braine…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:50AMThursday, May 21, 2015
When women have babies, expectations are born at the same time -- dream children, made up of assumptions and hopes, that grow up alongside the real ones.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00PMThursday, May 7, 2015
The characters in Ron Klier’s new play “Gus’s Fashions
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:00PMTuesday, April 21, 2015
The importance of Martha Graham in modern dance can't be overstated: Like Picasso and Stravinsky, she is credited with bringing a classical art form forcibly into the 20th century through ra…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 02:00PMTuesday, April 7, 2015
South Coast Repertory’s generosity to new playwrights has a fairy godmother-like charm. The company commissioned a play from the relatively unknown writer Melissa Ross and has lavished a v…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:00PMWednesday, March 25, 2015
I thought I was over "Cinderella." I assumed the whole world was over "Cinderella" right along with me.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:00PMSaturday, March 21, 2015
"I'm actually wondering if I need to put a giant sign in the lobby of the Pasadena Playhouse that says, 'This is not like "My Fair Lady," ' " says Jessica Kubzansky, who is directing a reviv…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 02:00PMThursday, March 19, 2015
Theatre West has revived Jim Beaver’s play “Verdigris,” a hit for the company 30 years ago, about a young man’s absorption into an offbeat Oklahoma family in the summer of 1972.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:30PMTuesday, March 17, 2015
There are plenty of fish in the sea, we console ourselves when loved ones escape our nets. But in Kimber Lee’s new play, “tokyo fish story,” having its world premiere at South Coast Re…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:00PMWednesday, February 25, 2015
David Mamet’s “American Buffalo,” which premiered in Chicago in 1975, startled and delighted the theater world with its dialogue: broken, overlapping sentence fragments, studded with e…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:00AMSunday, February 15, 2015
“Enter Laughing,” Carl Reiner’s semi-autobiographical 1958 novel, has had nearly as varied a career as its author. Playwright Joseph Stein (“Fiddler on the Roof”) turned it into a …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:03PMFriday, January 30, 2015
The versatile impressionist Darrell Hammond, 59, holds the record as the longest-running cast member on "Saturday Night Live" (1995-2009) and recently succeeded the late Don Pardo as the pro…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 02:00PMFriday, January 23, 2015
“Serrano the Musical,” in its world premiere at the Matrix Theatre, relocates “Cyrano de Bergerac,” originally set in 1640 France, to New York’s Little Italy, around now.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 01:00PMThursday, December 11, 2014
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas -- an unusually frosty, Northeastern Christmas for these climes -- at the Hudson Mainstage, where a twinkly new production of John Cariani's "Almo…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00PMFriday, November 28, 2014
"It's currently 12 degrees in Chicago," says Robert Falls, the artistic director of Chicago's Goodman Theatre. He's in L.A. to oversee the Tuesday opening at the Kirk Douglas Theatre of Rebe…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:00PMThursday, November 13, 2014
Would you believe that in the Broadway juggernaut "Kinky Boots," which has just arrived at the Pantages Theatre, nobody even wears boots?
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:39PMFriday, October 17, 2014
In his new play, “Nice Things,” premiering at Rogue Machine Theatre, Vince Melocchi returns to the middle-American, blue-collar, recession-devastated milieu of his two previous plays, �…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:30PMThursday, October 9, 2014
Underpinning much of Mel Brooks's comedy is the assumption that people constantly yearn to break into tightly choreographed, vaudeville-style song-and-dance routines.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:30PMSunday, September 28, 2014
Michael Wilson’s revival of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful,” which has just opened at the Ahmanson Theatre, premiered on Broadway in 2013 to a bounty of praise and nominations…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00PMTuesday, September 23, 2014
“Let's Make a Deal's" Wayne Brady as the lead in a revival of "Kiss Me, Kate": It almost sounds like an especially wacky draft in some fantasy stunt-casting league for theater directors.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00PMTuesday, September 16, 2014
“We’re just going around in circles,” a character accurately observes in British playwright Mike Bartlett’s “Cockfight Play,” having its L.A. premiere at Rogue Machine Theatre. (…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00PM 
