Thursday, April 17, 2014
Thanksgiving dinner can often be a recipe for disaster, but it proves especially problematic for the workaholic chef who finds her familiar familial dysfunction laced with far grimmer ingred…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:32PMThursday, March 27, 2014
It’s not every play that spawns a pop culture trope on the order of “Six Degrees of Separation.” Yet there’s far more to John Guare’s 1990 drama than platitudes…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:15PMThursday, March 6, 2014
“Every great artist has freed himself from something — his family, his nation, his race,” warns the worldly mentor to an aspiring painter in Chaim Potok’s semi-autobi…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:00PMThursday, January 23, 2014
Though Thomas Jefferson wasn’t the Founding Father renowned for chopping cherry trees, he cherry-picked Scripture with aplomb in producing his famous Jefferson Bible.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:30PMTuesday, November 26, 2013
Steeped in star-crossed tragedy, mordant humor and paranormal activity — in other words, an Irish play to its core — Marina Carr’s contemporary take on the story of Medea, …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 01:49PMWednesday, November 20, 2013
A convenience store cashier endures a stream of oddball customers, arguments about 1970s movies, even a drop-in by an ex-girlfriend now engaged to be married to someone else — the syno…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:30PMTuesday, November 5, 2013
Very little about Shakespeare’s blood-soaked earliest tragedy lends itself to reimagining the play as an old-time variety show, and lacking the ingenuity to make the concept work Stell…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:34PMThursday, October 31, 2013
As if transforming philosophical debate into a high-stakes drama wasn't enough theatrical alchemy, Cormac McCarthy’s riveting two-hander, “The Sunset Limited,” at Ventura&r…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 03:08PMTuesday, September 17, 2013
“How will I ever have a career if I don’t sound like everyone else?” doubts young tenor Roland Hayes at a supremely ironic point in “Breath and Imagination,” Da…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 03:42PMMonday, September 2, 2013
As a snapshot of Harlem in 1943, John Henry Redwood’s “The Old Settler” evokes some historical artifacts that have faded into obscurity — party line telephones, the S…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:22PMFriday, August 30, 2013
“A Short Stay at Carranor” feels like anything but.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 02:23PMMonday, August 19, 2013
As a spate of spontaneous serial psychosis grips Victorian-era London, a theatrical classic lit mash-up pits the deductive reasoning of the world’s most famous fictional detective agai…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:10PMTuesday, July 30, 2013
Judas Iscariot: Worst friend ever or fall guy in a greater plan for the salvation of mankind? Stephen Adly Guirgis’ “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” explores differing per…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 02:05PMTuesday, June 25, 2013
Anyone familiar with Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum -- the scenic Topanga Canyon outdoor theater operated by the late actor’s family -- will immediately appreciate the slyly ap…
SOURCE: ngux.latimes.com at 03:41PMWednesday, June 12, 2013
Though Shakespeare’s Bottom claimed his dream was “past the wit of man” to describe, it’s well within the wit of the Troubadour Theater Company to revive in spectacul…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 02:28PMWednesday, May 8, 2013
Depending on your point of view, the enduring topicality of Frank McGuinness’ 1992 Middle East hostage drama, “Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me,” can be seen as a testame…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:00PMWednesday, January 30, 2013
The ready-made edginess of hit men, hookers and gangsters is a foundation that a story can either build on or coast on. Writer-director Brian Peterson’s "The Misadventures of Rick the …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 03:16PMThursday, December 6, 2012
The disarmingly cross-eyed puppets of “Avenue Q” may have taken up a more modest residence than in touring productions past, but they’re still thoroughly engaging in DOMA…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 01:38PMWednesday, November 28, 2012
“Some problem with the nuclear thing again …” Such is the breezy way locals in a remote New Mexico community shrug off a declared state of emergency following a nearby ura…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:33PMTuesday, November 20, 2012
Taking its name from the tail number of a crashed airplane, “One November Yankee” at the NoHo Arts Center is about a disaster rather than being a disaster, which is always the be…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 03:09PMTuesday, November 13, 2012
Skypilot Theatre Company’s “Kong: A Goddamn Thirty-Foot Gorilla” sets its satirical aircraft targeting system on a rather sizable object. Managing it on a small stage with …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:56PMTuesday, November 6, 2012
What are you most afraid of? Posing that question directly to the audience at the outset of his “Smoke and Mirrors” theatrical magic show at the Promenade Playhouse in Santa Moni…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 03:40PMThursday, September 20, 2012
Tolerance is an ideal easily invoked in the abstract, but it seems to be losing ground when it comes to follow-through. In a particularly timely revival, “Cherry Docs,” David Gow…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:15PMTuesday, September 11, 2012
Dazzling repartee between the pair of divorced sophisticates at the center of “Private Lives” is one reason Noël Coward’s 1930 comedy of bad manners never goes out of styl…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:42PMThursday, August 2, 2012
Thirty years before a certain caped crusader commenced his crime-fighting career, a cloaked criminal commandeered a comparable chiropteran cognomen for his crooked capers. We refer of course…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:45PMThursday, July 19, 2012
One sure way to stage “As You Like It” to make way sure you like it is to send in the clowns — an approach director Kenn Sabberton takes rather seriously in the Shakespeare…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 03:09PMTuesday, July 10, 2012
As the title suggests, Alan Aymie’s “A Child Left Behind” at the Beverly Hills Playhouse takes critical aim at the ways under-resourced educational institutions fail those …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:42PMWednesday, June 27, 2012
At what point does creative freedom collide with moral accountability? Sheila Callaghan’s bleakly sardonic “Roadkill Confidential” at Son of Semele Theater poses the questi…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:00PMTuesday, June 5, 2012
That perennial harbinger of summer — Shakespeare in the great outdoors — is once again upon us, as one of the Southland’s spectacularly scenic venues, the Will Geer Theatri…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:35PMSunday, May 27, 2012
“What good is freedom if you can’t do nothing with it?” demands the superb Anthony J. Haney as former Underground Railroad conductor Solly Two Kings in an early defining mo…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:34PMThursday, May 24, 2012
A weeklong road trip through the Santa Ynez Valley wine country drives two middle-aged buddies to unexpected tests of both their varietal and moral palates in “Sideways: The Play.&rdqu…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:29PM 
