LOS ANGELES THEATER REVIEWS

The show is a blistering expose of a political campaign and the tenuous loyalty, fierce ambition and blinding hubris that takes place every day in every office across the country....

The West Coast premiere of DRIVER'S SEAT at NoHo’s Theatre 68 Arts Complex gives us an actor/playwright very much on top of her game....

The ’80s are remembered as the most fun decade in recent memory but they were rife with strife and upheaval that affected everyone, even if they were living in a Broadway bubble, and this show looks back with clear-eyed, unsentimental affection....

The performance at hand has its moments, and they are all while Patrick Warburton is on stage. He is a funny actor performing funny roles in funny scripts. I wish this group had just performed the texts as written. There are sound cues, animations, deadly pauses, and unexplainable impersonations whi...

THE INHERITANCE is designed to make an audience feel quite a few different kinds of emotions: sadness certainly over lives lost and squandered; seething bitterness over a country adrift; humor over the many creative ways in which smart people cope and endure; and perhaps even a strong inclination to...

A truly fun-filled, ecstatically-performed iteration of this classic musical, MTW's Broadway-caliber production (now on stage at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center through October 30) is a definite must-see. The production's trio of terrific leads---Lesli Margherita, Jeff Skowron, and James Olivas...

Beautifully acted (and sung) by an exquisite ensemble of gifted actors, South Coast Repertory's production of NINA SIMONE: FOUR WOMEN is a thoughtful, gut-wrenching play---punctuated with spectacular musical performances---that dives deep into the soul-baring creative process of an artist hoping to ...

With TV star Teri Hatcher ('Desperate Housewives,' 'Lois & Clark') leading the way, 5-Star Theatricals' production of 'The Addams Family' is a gag-filled laughfest, with great tunes, a cemetery full of puns, and even a wardrobe malfunction. It's real, and it's spectacular!...

Rogue Machine Theatre has produced several of the Samuel D. Hunter's works and in A GREAT WILDERNESS, director Elina de Santos, knows exactly which gears to pull....

Especially thanks to Spencer Liff’s inventive staging and punchy choreography, the show is either a riotous musical bursting out of the seams of the intimate Bourbon Room or a drag revue elevated with a solid narrative, pristinely-timed punchlines, and innovative novelty routines. ...

I was not going to pass up an opportunity to see Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap in October—- a time when we’d all like to be a little frightened by our entertainment—- and seeing it on the seventieth anniversary of its London premiere was a delightful bonus....

In this full-circle journey, for the women of DESERT STORIES FOR LOST GIRLS, for us the viewers, and for their future generations, there is the sense that healing is what life for all Native American women absolutely needs to be about....

EVERYBODY, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ contemporary riff on a 15th-century morality play, is a creative and chaotic allegory about Christian salvation which is, in the end, an uneven production for the usually consistent Antaeus Theatre Company. ...

This is a sensitively crafted and introspective drama is. It isn’t easy to watch, but it can be cathartic....

Now that the initial FOMO-induced, must-see hype of its early years has quieted down, is revisiting HAMILTON again in the room where it happens still live up to the hype in 2022? The answer, at least for myself, while witnessing the recent Opening Night performance in Costa Mesa is a very resounding...

Bridging the 1985 original with the contemporary leaves one with a sense of disconnection...

As directed by Zi Alikhan with a pitch-perfect technical team and acted to the nines by Ana Nicolle Chavez, Miles Fowler and Kanoa Goo, SANCTUARY CITY is the kind of intelligent evening that may get you talking before the final blackout....

Overall--especially in this tighter, revised version lifted from London’s West End production that’s much zippier than the original--there is no denying that YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN is a witty, super funny, and genuinely enjoyable musical comedy that earns plenty of laughs and smiles along the way....

It seems everybody is having one of two reactions to Director Daniel Fish’s revival of OKLAHOMA! currently playing at the Ahmanson Theatre. But love it or hate it, so much of this update of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s acclaimed 1943 musical in which a farm girl is courted by two rival suitors, works...

As these projects go, the Alanis Morissette-scored JAGGED LITTLE PILL may not have entirely broken the mold of jukebox musicals, but it has sure put a dagger-sized gash in it and made it bleed....

Koons' moody production at the Fleishman is trying to tap into a noirish whodunnit vibe in which the story’s professed detective is the one person in the building (or in this case, the amphitheatre) who doesn’t realize that he is himself is also the murderer....

In the staging of 13 at the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center, the kids are more-than-allright; occasionally a little rough around the edges, but so is this musical. Frequent Panic helmer Barry Pearl, music director Lloyd Cooper and a rocking company of 19 give this heartfelt ode to self-discovery bo...

The best way to describe my experience at A Noise Within’s production of Peter Hall, Adrian Mitchell, and Richard Peaslee’s 1984 musical version of Animal Farm is that when the ensemble came out to bow and I only counted 11 actors, my jaw dropped....

Taffeta’s dialog is often an attack on the audience rather than a composition about Lincoln.  A passive character study with a blow-horn built in so that you don’t doze off into your own fantasy about who she is and what SHE represents....

An enchanting, deeply resonant, and wholly entertaining reimagining of a classic Greek myth, HADESTOWN---now on stage at Orange County's Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, CA through August 21, 2022---is a beautifully layered piece of imaginative theater that stirs as it entertains and is...