LOS ANGELES THEATER REVIEWS

Denied membership in the American Red Cross during WWII, 180 black women of the 32nd and 33rd WAAC companies were reluctantly accepted into the Army, assumed their duties at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and went on to contribute an important chapter to America's history....

'A lean an hungry look,' Julius Caesar’s oft-quoted descriptor for Cassius, is an apt metaphor for the season-opening production of JULIUS CAESAR at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, and not always in a good way. The leanness box is dutifully checked, but director Ellen Geer’s production could...

Good grief! You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown Is Live But Sadly Not Alive. A combination of miscasting, poor direction, and a play that runs out of steam, this early production in the reemergence of live theater is a disappointment....

Christina Aguilera slayed the packed 17,500-seat Hollywood Bowl audience with her amazing vocals and her emotion-filled songs for the first of her two nights performing with Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic Orchestra. At the top of her game, Christina looked great and sounded fantastic!...

“So many of our #dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.” 27-year-old author and Google project manager Brett N. Axler has a real way forward for theater geeks trying to make it in the real world....

Brian Bedford originally thought that playing Lady Bracknell in the 2011 Broadway presentation of THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST was a rotten idea. Luckily, for us, he changed his mind. Now streaming Live-in-HD until July 31st. ...

With the re-imagining of its outdoor terrace, the Wallis provides an exceptional example of how theater has successfully responded to the limits of Covid-19.  And they didn’t forget the fun!...

Pacific Symphony Orchestra’s semi-staged version of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata (The Lost One) was filmed at Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, CA. This opera’s title role requires a charismatic soprano and a consummate actress who can pull the audience into the opera’s stark drama. Cec...

Judith Moreland’s cunning production for the Fountain Theatre sneaks up behind you, gooses, tickles, sings, brays and pretty much does everything but give everyone in the audience a wedgie....

On June 22, I watched J’Nai Bridges’ online recital at Los Angeles Opera’s website. Bridges has been making highly acclaimed debuts at major opera houses. For her LA Opera recital, she chose major selections by Johannes Brahms and Charles Gounod as well as many lesser-known shorter pieces. She...

On June 18, 2021, I watched Los Angeles Opera’s film of Stravinsky’s 1927 opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex. Jean Cocteau, who wrote the libretto, based it on the ancient Greek tragedy Sophocles wrote ca. 429 BCE. Right now LAO is featuring it online for free....

There’s been a #local #opera #evolution @OvertoneIND #LosAngeles that is registering more than a blip on the theatrical EKG....

Euphemia and Andronico bicker over Andronico's choice of the miserly Don Procopio as a husband for Bettina. Ernesto, Bettina's brother, arrives home from long travels and hears that his sister is to be married to a man she does not love. Bettina loves Odoardo. Ernesto, Odoardo, and Bettina, knowing...

Just when it reaches the point where it’s almost unbearable, the show takes a hard turn, cutting to a frustrated office worker named Jeremiah, who is in a psychiatric session trying to process his rage at living in an America where Black lives do not matter to everyone and where being gay is consi...

The Geffen Playhouse has created a colorful, world premiere, CHOOSICAL MUSICAL adventure for ‘frustrated kids in quarantine’. It is off-the-charts fun!...

On Saturday, May 15, 2021, Los Angeles Opera and Opera San Jose presented a recital honoring Latina composers. It includes songs by Modesta Bor, María Luisa Escobar, Chabuca Granda, María Grever, Ernestina Lecuona , Ángela Peralta, Consuelo Velázquez, and contemporary writers, Gabriela Lena Fr...

SOMEONE ELSE’S HOUSE Is Like Paranormal Activity for the Stage...

Christine Goerke and Craig Terry's Recital can be seen on the Los Angeles Opera website as part of the five-part Signature Recital Series offered for $45 per household. Performances will be streamed until July 1, 2021. Goerke and Terry opened with a wildly dramatic  rendition of Handel’s fire an...

Anna LaMadrid’s one-person comedy The Oxy Complex explores humanity reaching its breaking point after 500 days with zero human touch....

'We hope you can help us understand what happened here so it never repeats itself and justice can be served.'...

Playwright Dan O'Brien made a splash in LA theatre back in 2017 when The House In Scarsdale: A Memoir For The Stage received multiple Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Nominations. Now, O'Brien has published four of the essays under the title, A Story That Happens, as a primer for burgeoning playwrig...

Los Angeles Opera’s digital short film, Death, is Nadia Hallgren’s nine-minute creative take on Paul Laurence Dunbar’s turn-of-the 20th century poem, entitled Death. Two crows in seemingly choreographed flight introduce scenes with myriad black birds circling the edge of a leafless forest....

On the evening of February 10, 2021, The Broad Stage presented Breathing Free, an auditory and visual online love letter to freedom produced by Heartbeat opera to tell the stories of those who who have experienced various versions of its absence. Through an inquisitive collaborative process with a d...

Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’ Lumee’s Dream, is the expansion of Lumee’s Act II short monologue sung while smoking outside a nightclub in p r i s m. She says she “hurls herself out the window” into the blue from which she eventually returns tired and wet. In the Dream, Lumee speaks of her ...

On January 28, 2021, Los Angeles Opera streamed a newly filmed version of Roxie Perkins and Ellen Reid’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera  p r i s m. An operatic tapestry, p r i s m tells of the psychological dreams, desires and struggles of Bibi, a sexual assault survivor....