LOS ANGELES THEATER REVIEWS

In Rachel Bonds' beautifully-acted and cleverly written new play CURVE OF DEPARTURE---now finishing up its too-brief World Premiere run at Orange County's South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa through October 15---characters are confronted with unexpected events that forces them to make such choices f...

Horror houses are not my thing. Knott's Scary Farm, Reign of Terror, Universal's Halloween Horror Nights...you can keep them. But tell me a good ghost story and I'm in. Put me in the middle of an immersive theatrical ghost story as artistically beautiful and complex as it is otherworldly and I'm in ...

On Oct 14, 2017, Los Angeles Opera presented Giuseppe Verdi's third opera, NABUCCO in a new and extremely well detailed production by Thaddeus Strassberger....

If you like your entertainment sprinkled with a generous dose of politics, The Actors' Gang's world premiere of Jack Pinter's CAPTAIN GREEDY'S CARNIVAL will definitely be right up your alley. Set in the 1930s, during the heyday of traveling carnival sideshows, Pinter uses the carney swindling Captai...

In its admirable Orange County premiere production directed by Marya Mazor, Chance Theater presents an intimately-staged version of Nina Raine's thoughtful, award-winning 2010 play TRIBES, now playing through October 22, 2017. This comedic drama which centers around a young deaf man caught between h...

Playwright Julia Lederer's WITH LOVE AND A MAJOR ORGAN focuses on the novel conceit of utilizing the actual organ of the heart in all references to the heart as love - actually breaking your heart, physically stealing your heart, a weak heart as the product of two broken-hearted parents, a heart mad...

On October 7, 2017, Los Angeles Opera presented Georges Bizet's THE PEARL FISHERS starring sweet-voiced Mexican star tenor Javier Camarena as Nadir. Steel-voiced Mexican baritone Alfredo Daza, was Zurga, his rival for the hand of Leila, a beautiful priestess who had taken a vow of chastity....

As its first offering of its 2017/2018 season, LA Ballet is treating audiences to a mixed bill Director's Choice program entitled PUSHING DANCE BOUNDARIES, a compilation of four modern dance suites with contemporary choreography. There's no elaborate costumes or sets; just brilliantly talented danc...

The Groundlings never cease to rock your funny bones. Their current laugh-packed Friday & Saturday night show GROUNDLINGS OF THE CORN keeps the hilarity charging right at you. Groundlings' ever stalwart director Deanna Oliver's takes tight, confident directorial reins over her comically gifted ensem...

Thousands of souls have their final resting place in Altadena's Mountain View Mausoleum and Cemetery but, once a year in the fall, the living invade the domain of the dead. That's when Unbound Productions' WICKED LIT takes over the grounds and creates a site-specific theatrical experience based on c...

OUR TOWN is Wilder's most well-known work, a classic of the American theatre that presents the cyclical nature of life in three acts and a town called Grover's Corners, where birth, death, love, and marriage, are shown in their most mundane glory. The brilliant simplicity of the work cannot be overs...

The highly original coming of age story PLEASE EXCUSE MY DEAR AUNT SALLY from emerging playwright Kevin Armento features an unconventional narrator: the cell phone belonging to a 15-year-old Red McCray, a troubled teen enduring the break-up of his parents and moving to a new town. Audience members ...

Promoted as a precursor to Edward Albee's WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, comparisons to Albee's masterpiece does August Strindberg's THE DANCE OF DEATH, here adapted by Conor McPherson, a disservice. Having seen Dame Diana Rigg and David Suchet battle it out as Martha and George in 1996 at the Alm...

Raised in an upstate New York blue-collar family, Fred Herko showed much promise as a concert pianist, going on to attend Julliard. But at age 20 after seeing a performance of Giselle, he announced his intention to give up the piano and become a ballet dancer. The resulting severe beating by his fa...

VINO VERITAS by David MacGregor debuted in Michigan in 2008 and won the state's Purple Rose for Best New Play. The current Theatre 40 production is being presented as the second show of its 2017-2018 season, arriving as a perfect comedy for the Halloween season. Taking its title from a Latin proverb...

In 1970, Maria Callas posed for Blackglama's iconic What Becomes a Legend Most ad campaign. The famous black and white Richard Avedon photographs shot against a simple gray background captured the glamour and allure of black mink featuring some of the most iconic faces in the world. It was indeed ...

The temptation to take a film classic and turn it into a Broadway musical is a road fraught with peril. How do you take something perfect and make it better? This was the question posed in 1972 when producer David Merrick decided to musicalize the uproarious 1959 farce Some Like It Hot. The result w...

In a new, incredibly enjoyable regional revival of the Tony Award-winning AIN'T MISBEHAVIN' - THE FATS WALLER MUSICAL SHOW, La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts is presenting one of the most rousing, rip-roaring iterations of this musical treat, under the informed direction of one of the show's...

Much props must be given to Camille Spirlin for her unflinching, unapologetic portrayal of the unsympathetic, totally evil main character of Kali, of which RUNAWAY HOME revolves around. Runaway teenager Kali has no hesitation in blackmailing a Latino storekeeper, scaring an elderly neighbor with the...

The Old Globe has opened a window and let in a beautiful breath of fresh air in its latest world premiere musical, BENNY AND JOON, by bookwriter Kirsten Guenther, composer Nolan Gasser, and lyricist Mindi Dickstein. Based on the 1993 MGM film starring Johnny Depp, Mary Stuart Masterson and Aidan Qui...

The west coast premiere of THE VIEW UPSTAIRS bursts with a high-energied hodge-podge of some great vocals, charming performances and wonderfully executed choreography. Playwright Max Vernon, through the eyes of a present-day electronically dependent fashion designer, retells the stories of victims...

Though the Tony Award-winning musical adaptation of writer/director John Carney's well-liked indie film ONCE is a musical that this reviewer has liked quite a bit from past productions, it took seeing South Coast Repertory's brand new regional production---now on stage in Costa Mesa through Septembe...

Master satirist Paul Rudnick blends a deep humanity with a honed sense of hilarity in this powerful and funny play about family and fame, the personal and the political, and the drive to stand up and speak out. But it is also one that promotes a very progressive political stance on human rights, es...

As you age, every wrinkle and liver spot on your face tells a story, and there are some stories you would rather just forget....

THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE is a hip musical comedy which follows six young people in the throes of puberty, who are overseen by grown-ups who barely managed to escape childhood themselves, as they learn that winning isn't everything and that losing doesn't necessarily make you a lose...