Andrew Child

I chatted with writer Isaac Gómez about the world premiere of their new play Radical or, are you gonna miss me? at IAMA Theatre Company. The play, which tells the story of two sisters struggling to navigate a relationship despite major political differences, was inspired in part by a shocking discovery Gómez recently had in their own life.

Rachel Chavkin’s staging is resourceful and inventive, packing major punches within Rachel Hauck’s deceptively-simple design. David Neumann’s choreography shines in moments of storytelling, defining locales and making electric the mundane act of sitting in a stool, but flounders during more formal dance breaks.

Director Marissa Chibás encountered Jose Rivera’s Cloud Tectonics when it “first came into the world” 28 years ago, but feels the story about an apocalyptic storm is startlingly prescient for contemporary LA audiences. “The play is about mystery and magic,” she surmises, “how we miss the little moments in life that are actually the big moments.”

The new seat cushions aren’t the only thing regulars of the Getty Villa’s annual theatre production are buzzing about this season (even though they are surprisingly comfortable and make the amphitheater a worthy place to sit for a few hours).

In the ways Angels in America embodies and reflects the zeitgeist of the AIDS epidemic, Our Dear Dead Drug Lord presents a story of four young women with a penchant for summoning spirits that somehow perfectly encapsulates the larger experiences of living in a terror-obsessed, post-9/11 world muddied by senseless shootings.

It is hard to exactly box the show into a genre. The seeds of this show were planted, she recalls, partially in response to an earlier performance about “fallacious senses of intimacy with an audience” in which she and her collaborator “vomited confessions” at an audience in front of paintings.

Bob Baker Marionette Theater couldn’t pick a more accurate title for their current offering than Hooray LA. The show is a celebration of LA’s culture, history, people, landmarks, and traditions that— without shying away from the dark stuff— manages to delight Angelenos across a spectrum of generations.

Although a reflection and a response to his own relationship with the theatre, Bernardo Cubría hopes his newest play, Crabs in a Bucket will reflect “larger themes than what it means to be a theatre person” and laughingly wishes that even people he hasn’t personally invited will come to see its premiere at The Echo Theater Company.

I was appalled to see a fantasy of homeless people and hourly workers city-wide joining together to seek revenge against the rich framed as an inevitable horror. When the throngs of impoverished storm the building toward the end of Act 1, it was uncomfortable to see the ticket holders around me squirm in fear.

The performance itself was a straightforward, text-driven version of Macbeth. Director Ellen Geer has not ignored a word of Shakespeare’s text and has crafted a production which seems obsessed with clarity, but doesn’t present any theatricality or inventiveness beyond relaying the narrative.

Though Michael Michetti’s staging has some extraneous elements, Adrián González and Ed F. Martin shine through in fully-developed performances. They carry dense dialogue through nuances of tension, desire, and discomfort in a journey that belies the tight space of the cell in which the entire discourse takes place.

After the excitement of the participatory pre-show, we are sat down in a hodgepodge of rickety, old chairs and spoon-fed a mediocre staging of The Tempest. The whole evening takes on a feeling that Beil warns against in her program note; the immersive elements become a gimmick, a brief reward for taking our medicine.

Zoe Sarnak’s score rocks. It sounds at times like Blondie or the B-52s (I like the B-52s so that comparison is not a dig here), but is so intrinsically connected to the emotional arch of the story being told that it soars like a musical theatre score should.

Deser responded to the text using all of the tools at her disposal. The show, in her opinion, calls for lyrical moments of choreography, instances of grittiness that evoke the works of Edward Albee or John Cassavetes, and the overall flexing of “intellectual muscles” to engage with the mysteries and metaphors laid out in the text.

The music takes as a jumping off point the personalities and varied interests of each of the sisters, and we hear trite lyrics explain to us Jo’s love of writing and Amy’s love of painting, but somewhere amidst cutesy rhymes about daisies, butterflies, and taking flight, we lose the distinct dignity of each of these characters.

Every time I enter Skylight Theatre, I am completely blown away by the radical transformations designers are able to handle in the space. Stephen Gifford has crafted worlds which elevate the text of the play, the performances of the two actors, and the perception of the evening as a whole.

Director Alina Phelan is a master of visual comedy and everything you see has a punchline if you are willing to look for it. Vangsness’ impersonation is a biting satire that far supersedes anything Lorne Michaels’ could get away with putting on TV.

When the show opened on Broadway in 1991, it made history as the first major musical with an almost exclusively-female creative team. In the current production presented by Center Theatre Group,  whether caused by the lack of women on the creative team or not, the show is certainly missing a lot of its heart and is in need of a lot of polishing.

Though familiar in LA’s theatre scene as a champion of inventive, intimate theatre (he currently serves as co-artistic director for Rogue Machine Theatre and credits work like his production of Shakespeare’s Henry V staged in a 34 seat theatre with putting him on the map), Cienfuegos says he feels honored to tackle Much Ado as part of ANW’s season.

“There’s a bit of the feeling of that famous kiss in Times Square at the beginning of the play—- a feeling of infinite possibility at the end of the war, which is a version of America we all know. Many people don’t realize how harshly the pendulum swung back after that.”