LOS ANGELES THEATER REVIEWS

After a two-year delay due to COVID, this long-awaited So. Cal. production of NEWSIES---currently on stage at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts through May 29, 2022---marks the much-anticipated live and in-person return of 3-D Theatricals. The wait, as the saying goes, was worth it....

The lady is four-alarm hot; the man, her plaything. The script is literate and cruelly funny, a simultaneous homage to its salacious source and to the craft and vagaries of live theater. Got your stole? Very good. So who out there is game for some kick-ass kink?...

There’s a lot going on, but the play itself lands its message within the first twenty minutes, and then bumbles through seventy more minutes of reiteration, repetition, and regurgitation....

Read our critic's review. HADESTOWN, the too-hot musical by Anais Mitchell directed by Rachel Chavkin, is a scorcher. Masterfully sung, elegantly staged and with a sensibility so romantic it could physically knock you over, the national tour of the 2019 Tony Award-winning musical parks at the Ahmans...

Edward Albee’s Tony Award–winning play about discontent and despair in 1960s academia is brought to blazing, blistering life by director Gordon Greenberg at the Geffen Playhouse, its themes and anxieties as relevant as ever on its 60th anniversary. Read our critic's review. ...

Read our critic's review. TOOTSIE is a contemporary take on an old trope: a man unconvincingly passes himself off as a woman, everyone in his world buys it, and hilarity tries to ensue. It's been done countless times, going back past Shakespeare to the ancient Greeks. That doesn't mean it always wor...

THE SOUND OF MUSIC's built-in charm and charisma is indeed very much present in McCoy Rigby Entertainment's latest stage iteration of this classic stage production, now playing at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts through May 15, 2022. Filled with visually-captivating production values, ...

Prestidigitation factors heavily into ESCAPE, but it’s by no means the performance’s only draw. Directed by Lee Costello from a script by Carter, the 90-minute three-hander showcases Judy Carter as a talented performer and a deeply conflicted person who has navigated some bumpy terrain in her l...

Now having its Orange County premiere performances at Chance Theater in Anaheim through May 1, 2022, CRY IT OUT is a poignant slice-of-life that takes an eavesdropper's look at the hopes, fears, and lessons that come with new motherhood in our current times, and just how different each new mother ch...

Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky at Center Theatre Group gets a few topical buzz words in there, but there is nothing fresh, urgent, or timely about the piece. Pitting a closed-minded character against a cohort of progressive friends, the play is deadly: as dull as its message is heavy-hand...

Pulitzer Prize nominee Tanya Barfield’s brilliant BRIGHT HALF LIFE is smartly and artfully realized by director Amy K. Harmon, adding up to another solid project from The Road Theatre, which consistently stages challenging and rewarding productions....

Ahmed Best's production expertly blends fantasy, pop cultural references and the keen observation of a sharp script. HOODED is an instruction manual for lovers of good drama.  ...

Lucas Hnath is an ambitious playwright. He turned his mother's harrowing recollections of being abducted in the '90s into a riveting, intimate one-woman tale, Dana H, where the actress lip-syncs to the recording that his mother had made. Despite such legends as Harold Prince, Betty Comden and Adolph...

Now on stage through April 10, 2022 at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Christine Quintana's searing, bilingual two-character play CLEAN / ESPEJOS is a riveting drama showcasing how two different women of different cultures cope with past trauma....

Even without dazzling special effects and spectacular theatrics, or histrionic high drama, THE BAND'S VISIT---the Tony Award-winning stage musical now on stage at Orange County's Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa through April 3---still provides a powerful show that is quietly poetic in i...

The satirical juices flow through Michael John Garces’ production of THE PLAY YOU WANT. Set in the present day, the play offers a bunch of well-known, real-life figures who are sent up and ultimately knocked down to make Cubria’s point....

The buzz on the internet about Sutton Foster playing Marian the Librarian in the latest Music Man revival was polarizing to say the least, but NO ONE can claim that Sutton Foster wasn't born to play Reno Sweeney in the classic Cole Porter musical farce, Anything Goes. Foster won a Tony playing the r...

Suppose you took a really good movie – or a crowd-pleaser - and you loaded it down with bad music. Or maybe not with atrocious music, but wrong-headed ditties. Or maybe you assigned the wrong composer for this particular cinematic genre....

National LatinX Playwriting Award winner Benjamin Benne’s stunning nee play, ALMA, launches the new theater season at the Kirk Doulas Theater and it is triumphantly resonant....

Lettie is a city girl and London is her home. But when the war comes to her doorstep, for her safety, Lettie is sent to the country with over 600,000 other children. But it's not as nice as she'd been promised. For the next year, Lettie spends her lonely, monotonous days on an isolated farm wishin...

Its warnings of the trappings of materialism and conformity are universal and timeless....

If every theatre review compared each show to the last presentation by the same company, we would be lost beyond the already limited capabilities of “thumbs up vs thumbs down” or “three and a half stars”....

The thing about Lindsay Joelle’s Trayf, now playing at the Geffen Playhouse, is that it has really excellent dialogue. In every sense of the word. The opening patter between two Chassidic teenage boys fizzes like a sketch comedy routine and the rhythm carries like a current through a lot of sillin...

Three men stand on a stage for over three hours, trekking through 150 years of history in The Lehman Trilogy and it's the most invigorating evening imaginable. Directed by Sam Mendes and written by Stefano Massini—and adapted by National Theatre dramaturg Ben Power -- the play is a remarkable jour...

The script is amusing, moving with sparkling briskness. The characters are defined and distinct, and the performers bring them to life in energetic and well-modulated ways. And while the meaning of life isn’t necessarily unveiled, it is sought and the intertwining relationships do find both unique...