Evan Henerson - Page 5

To watch these singers perform these numbers is to dream about entire revivals of Sondheim shows built around some of these actors, maybe even productions that have their genesis at the Ahmanson.

With its gung-ho company of actors, clever construction, wicked cool set and general overall braininess, FAKE IT sails blithely along for 90 minutes, liberally trafficking in chuckles and cringes...FAKE IT’s physical and intellectual humor aren’t always completely in synch with each other, but the play is smart enough and directed with enough crispness to keep things entertaining.

For his production of THE SEAGULL at the Odyssey Theatre, Katzman deploys a mostly solid cast (two of whom are also producers), a talented technical team and a vision. The results are plenty engaging.

The production’s thrifty staging directed by Judith Hendra for Topanga Actors Company feels stagnant instead of urgent, indifferent where it could have been thought-provoking.

This deceptively dark world premiere, co-produced by People with Plays Productions and the Road Theatre Company at the Broadwater Studio Theatre, is not one for those looking to 2025 with visions of sunny skies ahead.

The mixture this time around is entertaining if not the company’s A-game. HOME ALONE-LY HEARTS CLUB, while providing plenty of laughs, feels thin…thin on merriment, thin on satirical edge and certainly thin on script.

As embodied by Rainn Wilson and Aasif Mandvi in the revival of GODOT at the Geffen Playhouse, Vladimir and Estragon are a formidable pair. Beckett’s play about the unknowable darkness of the human condition has - go figure! - long been catnip for comedians, and you get why Wilson and Mandvi would want a whack at them.

Is there some sort of formula for roping in both fans of a hit movie and stage hounds, to catch lightning in a new medium? Judging by what the musical's book writer Bob Gale, director John Rando and the musical team must have been thinking, the answer is you slavishly remake the movie on stage.

Barely six months since braving Wilson's KING HEDLEY II, the company and director Gregg T. Daniel are back an impactful - if leisurely – PIANO LESSON. Where HEDLEY was grim, this one is ghostly, rueful and full of music.

With a packed Taper house, a stage full of hot young singer/dancers performing, signing and middle fingering their hopes and disillusionments into an iconic rock score; yeah life doesn’t suck too much. Neither does this production, although ironically, here’s wishing that that the experience could have been even more roof-raising,

From the second we enter the Morgan-Wixon, ushered in by black cowl-clad members of the Cult of Bat Boy; from the moment we see that pointy-eared effigy strung up to the rafters, we’re primed for two plus hours of four alarm horror camp.

Read BroadwayWorld's review of A Good Guy at Rogue Machine at The Matrix Theatre. Learn more about the production!

Martin Crimp’s free adaptation – first staged in 2019 with James McAvoy in the title role -  is as urgent and beguiling as it is contemporary, a classic with a fiery heart and not an inch of dustiness or quaintness. In the revival directed by Mike Donahue at the Pasadena Playhouse, CYRANO bursts with energy and excitement.

In its L.A. premiere at the Geffen Playhouse directed by Andrew Russell, DRAGON LADY is every inch an homage to Maria Sr., who died in 2022, but also to resilience. Watching Porkalob crawl inside the skins these two little boys who are playing the part of super heroes ... is to take a wicked cool journey, the kind that only happens in live theater.

The work’s premiere at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum feels like a couple of different narratives – along with a screed or two – stuffed into a single evening. It’s an identity quest! It’s a perilous journey to motherhood! It’s a rumination/condemnation on what it means to be Latino! It’s a…circus?

THE BROTHERS SIZE, a heart-rending, music-suffused three-hander exploring the strength and limits of fraternal bonds, is being staged in the Geffen’s smaller Audrey Skirball Kenis Theatre, where it fits beautifully.

The world premiere of the LaBute-ian tango, IF I NEEDED SOMEONE, is being staged at Santa Monica’s City Garage where director Frédérique Michel and actors Devin Davis-Lorton and Adam Langsam serve it up with (sorry, Jules) considerable sweetness.

Director David Melville's Forest of Arden has plenty of space for the melancholy, the displaced and the lovelorn alike, even for a frisky French goatherd who warbles merrily as she bags goat poop. ISC free Shakespeare patrons only get one production this summer, but it’s a winner.

In Barry Edelstein, we’ve got an adaptor/director who is guiding these proceedings with a rock and roll brio...The production is big, brash, often overreaching, occasionally pandering and utterly arresting through its nearly six hours (over two evenings) of stage time.

Rob Morrow has found a dramatic vehicle that – more than 25 years after its premiere - is deepening and maturing as intriguingly as the actor himself. Baitz’s play is small with a loud heart. Director Mike Reilly, Morrow and co. do it up proud.