LOS ANGELES THEATER REVIEWS

JERSEY BOYS opened at the August Wilson Theatre on Broadway to critical acclaim on November 6, 2005, running 11 record-breaking years and becoming the 12th longest running show in Broadway history. The Tony, Grammy and Olivier Award-winning hit musical telling the story of Frankie Valli and The Fou...

This piece works much better as something you would see drunk in a bar in the 90s...

In their current production of  NEXT TO NORMAL, the East West Players present a first-rate, extremely well-executed musical look at mental illness. Nancy Keystone smoothly directs this two-hour-plus performance at a steady, non-stop, heart-wrenching pace with barely enough time for the audience to ...

Before Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty teamed up for iconic works like Ragtime, Once on this Island, and their current Broadway hit Anastasia,they wrote a crazy little musical called LUCKY STIFF. It was their first collaboration and, though it never made it to Broadway, it won the pair a Richard Ro...

Everyone has dreams they wish to have fulfilled during their lifetime. And as it turns out, the energy we put into fueling our passion to achieve them can take us in directions we could never have anticipated, yet become so necessary in obtaining whatever goal we have set for ourselves or influencin...

Golden West College brings to life a vibrant production of Hairspray for their Spring 2017 Musical....

The corn was high as an elephant's eye at the Alex Theatre in Glendale last Sunday as Musical Theater Guild presented a staged reading of Rodgers and Hammerstein's bucolic musical State Fair, the only musical R&H wrote specifically for the screen. State Fair wasn't adapted for the stage until 1996, ...

The romantic dramedy HAROLD AND MAUDE incorporates elements of dark humor, centering around the exploits of a young man named Harold who is intrigued with his own death, often staging his own suicide to avoid dealing with his overbearing mother who wants nothing more than for Harold to find the 'rig...

California State University, Fullerton closes off their Spring 2017 Season with a dark yet thrilling production of Andrew Lippa's WILD PARTY....

I entered the comforting lobby of the Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks, received my press kit and took a seat near the window. The house opened in about 20 minutes, so I struck up a conversation with the man sitting a couple chairs away. He asked me where I was from. "South Florida," I told him. He...

Grammy® Award-nominated and multi-platinum R&B/pop recording artist and film/TV actress Deborah Cox is starring as Rachel Marron in the first U.S. National tour of the hit musical THE BODYGUARD during its Los Angeles premiere at Hollywood Pantages Theatre through May 21, 2017. Ms. Cox is not only ...

After working in the Warner Brothers Manhattan office mailroom, Playwright Neil Simon got his first big break as a staff writer on Sid Caesar's celebrated television series 'Your Show of Shows,' a live 90-minute variety show starring comedy legends Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca that ran from 1950 to 1...

Strikingly refined yet pleasingly grounded and altogether delightful, the gorgeous 2015 Broadway musical stage adaptation of AN AMERICAN IN PARIS---inspired by the Academy Award-winning 1951 movie musical of the same name---is a sweepingly lush, dance-centric production that combines the high-brow s...

King of the Road: The Roger Miller Story features brilliant performance by Jesse Johnson as the late country music star...

With House of Cards and Ides of March (based on this play) on playwright Beau Willimon's resume, you might come to see his FARRAGUT NORTH with rather high expectations. Jack Tynan's confession and termination scenes (with Geoffrey Lower as Paul, Stephen's boss) really pop and sizzle, with their tens...

Pasadena City College brought Lin-Manuel Miranda's IN THE HEIGHTS to Southern California in an exciting, vibrant, and mesmerizing production....

During the 2015 Hollywood Fringe Festival, I discovered the all-female theatre troupe Broads' Word Ensemble when my love of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shew and being a fan of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy led me to the group's first production, Fifty Shades of Shrew. After being exquisitely ente...

Culver City residents Jeannine and Jack Stehlin are celebrating the 21st anniversary season of their New American Theatre production company by presenting MACBETH: REVISITED, directed by and starring Jack Stehlin in the title role with choreography and sound design by John Farmanesh-Bocca. Last yea...

If you find yourself in Downtown Long Beach, be sure to catch this unique show....

Not a single weak link in JTK Productions' powerful, pitch-perfect RABBIT HOLE, playwright David Lindsay-Abaire's 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama. The strong cast of five sleekly directed by Eric Hunicutt vividly illustrates Lindsay-Abaire's tale of a family coping with the accidental loss of thei...

SING HAPPY!, a delightful cabaret showcase of Ann LeSchander's vocal chops and comic talents backed by wonderful musicians who know when to take focus and when to lay back. Kudos to The Gardenia's sound system that allows each instrument to be heard so distinctly as individual instruments, then blen...

'Failure: A Love Story' chronicles the lives, loves and deaths of the three Fail sisters (June Carryl, Margaret Katch, and Nicole Shalhoub) and the one man with the double moniker Mortimer Mortimer (Kurt Quinn) who fell in love with each of them but not at the same time. Set against the backdrop of ...

LEAR'S SHADOW, a new play by Shakespeare Ensemble Theater Artistic Director, Brian Elerding, is a sensitive exploration of theatre's transformative ability to heal, even under the most devastating of circumstances. Using passages from King Lear as a tool within a contemporary storyline, it takes a t...

Since I left the theater last Sunday, I have been singing 'Camptown Races' (sometimes referred to as 'Camptown Ladies'), a comic song written by Stephen Foster, known as the father of American music who was considered the pre-eminent songwriter in the United States of the 19th century. Appropriatel...

BELLA GAIA - A Poetic Vision of Earth From Space is a multi-dimensional musical and visual concert experience created by Kenji Williams that emotionally reconnects us - to each other and to our planet - by offering an extraordinary view of earth as one people, one world....