LOS ANGELES THEATER REVIEWS

On the immediate surface, QUIXOTE NUEVO is a feast for the senses. On a deeper level, the play explores relevant issues, particularly those affecting the Latinx community. Sandwiched in between, however, is a distracting use of sophomoric humor that slightly threatens to counter all of the good mess...

Don't miss this delightful, gorgeously produced classic musical running through October 22nd...

By its very title, BISEXUAL SADNESS plays and feels like it should be the topic of a seminar or an article in a clinical journal, maybe even the theme of a discussion group. Which is, in a lot of ways, how India Kotis’s play comes across in its world premiere at the Road Theatre....

With a fresh lineup of new musical tunes and favorite classics, it’s pretty much the perfect Broadway concert show.  I’m still humming “Popular” from Wicked and “Razzle Dazzle” from Chicago nonstop, floating in a giddy haze of joy-soaked musical elation....

La Mirada Theatre’s new production of the Estefans’ aspirational life story reverberates with high-octane, vivacious Latin rhythms presented via enthusiastically-performed dance numbers and beautifully-sung songs—elevated by its terrific, talented ensemble. This engaging production (going on t...

A co-production with East West Players, Ulloa’s play makes the case for deeper investigation and against the kind of snap judgments that its hero, Chino, endures and fuels. Engagingly performed and containing plenty of cool visuals, Fidel Gomez’s production is a bit of a group hug. But it plays....

Dominique Morisseau’s BLOOD AT THE ROOT is a blistering look at race, prejudice, and the complexity of human relationships, and is provocative without being preachy....

Birds of North America Is a brilliantly well produced drama with a quiet, luminous, elegiac quality, at the Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles. With exquisite subtlety and sensitivity in the writing by award-winning playwright Anna Ouyang Moench, it chronicles the relationship of a father and daugh...

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 fo...

Tony Award-winning Broadway star Kelli O'Hara has established herself as true theater royalty, one of a handful of go-to leading ladies that have amassed a rabid, fanatic following that can elicit frequent deafening kudos from audiences and critics alike. She brings undeniable evidence of this in he...

Run, don’t walk, to the Laguna Playhouse’s production of the classic 1954 hit play The Rainmaker. I absolutely love this show. It's impossible to leave the theater after watching The Rainmaker without feeling lifted up by its transcendent joy and restorative optimism. ...

As the singing, dancing, attention-whoring engine of THE UNTITLED UNAUTHORIZED HUNTER S. THOMPSON MUSICAL, Gabriel Ebert gives Thompson the idol treatment. Featuring music and lyrics by BE MORE CHILL’s Joe Iconis and directed by Christopher Ashley, UUHTM blows the doors off the La Jolla Playhouse�...

Don't let the show's overall over-the-top theatrics dissuade you from experiencing this visually-stunning, showstopper-filled production which continues at Segerstrom Center through October 1. A boisterous, grandiose spectacle of overtly expressed emotions and overtly belted show tunes, LES MISÉRAB...

Two of Smith’s previous plays have been mounted at the Solana Beach company, and the company commissioned Smith to create a new work to kick off NCR’s 42nd season. That play, THE ANGEL NEXT DOOR, directed by Artistic Director David Ellenstein, is a kick and a hoot. Maybe that makes it a kick-oot...

when you’ve got a guy like Adam Rapp writing a cerebral two-handed dance between a Yale creative writing professor and her enigmatic new student, and you pepper it with scribes ranging from Dostoevsky to  Anne Tyler, and you give the whole shebang to the Pasadena Playhouse and cast Amy Brenneman ...

EVERY BRILLIANT THING is a deeply affecting meditation on grief and mental illness told with humor and a clear-eyed optimism that makes the message that much more powerful....

Despite stunning choreography, sets, and costumes, you might find yourself left wanting once the magic carpet has spirited our lovers away to that whole new world....

A mother-daughter tale that traffics in regrets, dreams deferred, selfishness and the value of all lives human and animal, KILL SHELTER barely elevates the contrivances of its plotting. A larger problem in this four-character world premiere is the casting, which – at least as regards the Blue Cast...

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)....

The L.A. premiere of Will Arbery’s HEROES OF THE FOURTH TURNING is an example of Southland live stage at its finest – an intelligent, slickly-cast think play, compellingly directed by Rogue Theatre Company Artistic Director Guillermo Cienfuegos for a company that rarely misfires....

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 muddie...

PETER PAN GOES WRONG is the most Fractured of Fairy Tales, a raucous sitcom on steroids that is uproariously funny as it barrels along at light speed...

While the new changes to this beloved musical are stunning, this iteration of LES MISÉRABLES fails to recognize human pathos....

Featuring distinctively intuitive direction from Matthew McCray, and an amazing, youthful ensemble cast that are consistently giving it their all, this latest OC iteration of Jonathan Larson's Tony-winning 1996 rock opera is much more impactful than even past stagings that have toured---and is one o...

STEW – a Pulitzer Prize finalist - is a lot more complicated than it presents. You might have questions about what has transpired. But a bit of ambiguity is a good thing especially when you have actors like Roslyn Ruff, Samantha Miller, Jasmine Ashanti and especially LisaGay Hamilton to muddy the ...