LOS ANGELES THEATER REVIEWS

I must admit that the entire production is so dynamically attention-grabbing that I failed to take many notes, as I did not want to miss a moment watching the incredibly athletic performers who often seemed to not have a bone in their bodies as they cavorted on high-flying trapezes and uneven parall...

Colorado born, independent artist Android Jones has become worldwide famous due to his impressive art installations at the Burning Man festival, the Grateful Dead Fare Thee Well Tour, as well as his interactive projections on the Sydney Opera House and Empire State Building in New York City. Best de...

On Sunday, April 28, the 2019 Los Angeles Dance Festival wrapped up a month of hosting over 50 dance companies, a dance photography exhibit, and several master classes. Over 100 years ago, modern dance was created by the 'LA Ladies' the Festival Producer, Deborah Brokus reminded the audience, adding...

On Friday, April 26 the Diavolo Space became the final home to the 2019 LA Dance Festival. A relaxed setting, with limited seating, and no AC, 'LA Dance is hot, it's cookin,' joked the Festival Producer, Deborah Brokus. Brokus introduced the Fringe portion of the evening and referred to Southern Cal...

At Broadway and 52nd Street in New York City, the nightclub Birdland was the legendary center of the jazz world, where the glitterati of Broadway, Hollywood and the sports world regularly filled its 500 seats. In August 1959, the biggest star in jazz was Miles Davis, who earlier that year recorded K...

OLD JEWS TELLING JOKES has garnered rave reviews across the country, and I can certainly understand why it's kosher for a Jew to be a ham after watching these five talented and energetic actor/comedians take over the stage. Sets of jokes are broken into categories, with the titles displayed on a la...

Deborah Brockus of The Brockus Project, producer of the 7th Annual Los Angeles Dance Festival has assembled an amazing array of dance performances, featuring a wide variety (50, total) of dance companies and groups that are based in Los Angeles over the span of the month of April at different venues...

CLYBOURNE PARK is a savagely funny, ferociously smart, and brilliantly written play by Bruce Norris which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2012 Tony Award for Best Play. Perhaps best known as a companion piece to Lorraine Hansberry's classic play A RAISIN IN THE RUN, an audience favorit...

With flashes of ROCKY HORROR and RENT, Michael Shaw Fisher's DR. NYMPHO VS. THE SEX ZOMBIES gives the audience more than an eyeful of enthusiastic and energetic nubile women and men in a fast-paced burlesque romp, inventively choreographed to every inch of the Lex's tiny stage....

There is nothing negative I could possibly say about the performance I witnessed on April 4, 2019 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.  Such artistry is almost hard to describe.  This company has an amazing history and is superb in both their interpretation and their amazing technique. Their 60-yea...

To celebrate the longstanding relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States, BritWeek launched its annual event in the Bram Goldsmith Theater at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills on Wed, 4-24-19 with the World Premiere of the new 60th anniversary do...

NATIVE SON, a novel written in 1940 by Richard Wright, tells the story of 20-year of Bigger Thomas, an African American youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in 1939. While not apologizing for Bigger's crimes, Wright portrays a systemic inevitability behind them, makin...

The much-anticipated touring Broadway production has finally landed at the Ahmanson! 'It is a great thrill to be bringing (our production) to theatre audiences across America and to be doing so with this exceptional cast of Broadway actors,” said James Lapine, director of the artistically beautifu...

Even before it opened this month, La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts and McCoy Rigby Entertainment knew they had a hit production on their hands with SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, based on the greatest movie musical of all time with screenplay by Betty Comden & Adolph Green and songs by Nacio Herb Bro...

If you are wondering whether it's necessary for you to have seen Qui Nguyen's critically-acclaimed 2015 play VIETGONE in order to enjoy its superior new sequel POOR YELLA REDNECKS, then don't worry too much about it. This incredibly funny, incredibly innovative, and incredibly well-acted follow-up i...

Playwright Cicely Hamilton's first productions of her DIANA OF DOBSON'S in 1908 must have been quite controversial with a, then unheard of, strong, outspoken woman Diana Massingberd as the lead character. Abigail Marks more than fills the shoes of Diana with her relentless command of the stage. Dire...

Women of a certain age. That used to be a death knell for excellent artistic opportunities for great actors in not only film but on stage as well. But thanks to playwright Cricket Daniel and compassionate director Kristin Towers-Rowles, that myth may as well fly out the window of a red convertible...

Directed with finesse by Kimberly Senior, THE NICETIES features Lisa Banes as the liberal, white professor Janine, and Jordan Boatman as the ambitious young black student Zoe, who become involved in a polite clash of perspectives that quickly explodes into an urgent and dangerous debate threatening ...

The best way to characterize Mary Zimmerman's adaptation of the mythical tale of Jason and the Argonauts is as a playground for adults in which theatre artists use every storytelling trick in the book to bring gods, monsters, mortals, and kings to life. Puppets, masks, stilts and aerial silks trade ...

On Sunday April 14 Pacific Opera Project (POP) presented Giacomo Puccini's 1904 opera, Madama Butterfly, in Japanese and English in Los Angeles's Little Tokyo. The company also live-streamed it online. Did anyone ever think an American Navy officer would speak to a young Japanese lady in Italian? l'...

Taking its cue from Orson Welles' 1937 Mercury Theatre production of JULIUS CAESAR, Independent Shakespeare Co. exercises its exceptional ability to adapt one of Shakespeare's massive works for an intimate indoor setting without giving up any of the play's scope or impact. ...

The time is 1947. The place, England. Politics abound with the murder of an heir to a foreign throne, hunting a jewel thief. At the Chimneys Estate we find in residence Lord Caterham (Lloyd Pedersen), friend Lottie Lomax (Michelle Schultz), and visitor Virginia Revel (Stasha Surdyke), highly suspect...

If you were fortunate enough to be one of the many who caught the touring production of the Tony Award-winning musical DEAR EVAN HANSEN during its Southern California stops at L.A.'s Ahmanson Theatre or, more recently, at O.C.'s Segerstrom Center of the Arts this past January, then you, no doubt, wo...

Maria Callas was a unique opera singer with an instantly recognizable voice. As a result, today's opera fans still have a desire to hear her recordings and to try to know what her performances were like. On April 13, 2019, Los Angeles Opera, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and BASE HOLOGRAM ...

In this world premiere of THE THINGS WE DO, playwright Grant Woods has created an interesting take on an affair of the loins, acted out by a most committed cast. The two adulterers, wanting to continue their illicit trysts, plot to introduce their respective spouses to each other with the purpose of...