LOS ANGELES THEATER REVIEWS

When traveling between floors on an elevator, how often do you look around and react to strangers, wondering who they are or what they do for a living? And if you guess, what percentage of the time will you be wrong? Such is the challenge presented by the hit 2010 Hollywood Fringe Festival play EL...

Utilizing a sort of amusing, somewhat wacky plot that somehow works in a sustainably fresh, surprisingly plausible, and audaciously charming way, the world premiere production of playwright Michael Mitnick's thoroughly engaging new play THE SIEGEL---continuing at SCR in Costa Mesa through April 23--...

We are still laughing, days after seeing the West Coast premiere of THE LEGEND OF GEORGIA McBRIDE at the Geffen Playhouse. The play with fantastic and ultra-flamboyant musical numbers will keep you laughing from beginning to end, centered on 'a wildly joyous story of empathy, of inclusivity, of comm...

The Elephant Theatre Company's LONE STAR provides an interesting character study populated with three intriguing characters, the most being the younger brother Ray as embodied by Christopher Parker....

Elysium Conservatory Theatre has thrown everything but the kitchen sink into its latest production of Shakespeare's ROMEO AND JULIET, the first in their brand new space in downtown San Pedro....

Santa Monica Playhouse presents the funny, touching, and just a little bit racy, world premiere comedy, Albert James Kallis's A DeLUSIONAL Affair which will make you question everything you ever thought you knew about love, marriage, fantasy and reality, leaving you with a new perspective on it all....

The first act of the Skylight Theatre Company's world premiere of LORD OF THE UNDERWORLD'S HOME FOR UNWED MOTHERS presents a riveting, fast-paced, well-acted tale of Dee, a teenage girl experiencing the joys of young love and the pains and consequences of unexpected pregnancy. Corryn Cummins totally...

The West Coast premiere of Complicite's THE ENCOUNTER amazes with its cutting-edge technology of 3-D audio. Co-creator/performer Simon McBurney commands the Wallis stage as he recalls National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre's 1969 photographic expedition into the depths of the Amazon rainfor...

Torn from today's headlines, what do you do when your enemy may be smarter than you? William Mastrosimone's gripping drama CAW'S-PAW is set in a warehouse near the U.S. capital where a terrorist who has wreaked madness and destruction on America is about to use a news reporter to exploit just one mo...

Perfection! A Noise Within produces a stunning, modernistic, most entertaining take on MAN OF LA MANCHA, the tale of Don Quixote and his man servant Sancho during the sixteenth century Spanish Inquisition. Co-Producing Artistic Director Julia Rodriguez-Elliott most skillfully directs her very talent...

Dogs and cats reign supreme  - and, in fact, are the catalyst for all of the action  - in Christian O'Reilly's warm and intelligent comedy CHAPATTI, the final production in Dezart Performs rather remarkable ninth season in Palm Springs. Dezart Performs, a long time 'best kept secret' in Coachella ...

A wave of new plays addressing social unrest are now hitting the stages of Los Angeles theaters. Last weekend I saw Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan's BUILDING THE WALL at Fountain Theatre, the first in a series of productions set to take place at theaters across th...

Rules of Seconds is easily the best new play that has premiered in Los Angeles this year....

No doubt those of us who survived protesting the Vietnam War in the mid-60s will remember CHEECH AND CHONG, the comedy duo featuring two very different L.A. street kids who bucked the rules and openly smoked and promoted the use of marijuana at a time when doing so guaranteed a stint in jail. As one...

ROAR, standing for "Rock On American Resurrection," roared to life Thursday at its opening night at the Crown City Theatre Company in North Hollywood. In contrast to the intimate, quaint setting of a lobby no larger than my living room and a house whose maximum capacity has to be close to 100, ROAR ...

Lili Marlene is the name of the famous German love song that was popular during World War II. The title of the play is in homage to the song, featuring one of the most famous versions sung in 1944 by Marlena Deitrich whose portrait hangs in the show's cabaret. We are told early in the musical that ...

Comprised of 10 short plays in 2 acts about the follies and foibles of love and lovers, LOVE ALLWAYS addresses the subjects of love and romance which have long provided great source material for comedy, created from the pens of two proven masters of American comedy. With busy careers in film, televi...

A charming though perplexing adaptation of the 2004 film, FINDING NEVERLAND jets into too many erratic directions at any given moment and doesn't gel completely as a whole. And for all its gorgeous, visual splendor, it is surprisingly lacking in honest-to-goodness stage magic. The touring version of...

This show is the very definition of a slow burning candle. More aptly put, a slow burning candle whose wick winds up being connected to a thousand pounds of dynamite that blows your face off without any warning....

Anyone who is a fan of creepy stuff will love this show....

It used to be true that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. But not anymore. For the next five weeks, LA audiences will get a taste of Sin City right here in our own backyard, thanks to Spiegelworld's in-your-face adult-only production, ABSINTHE LA....

This Ode to Hell's Kitchen is a hazy, heartwarming, homage to the playwright's memory of the neighborhood she grew up in and once loved....

A solid acting ensemble fires up the Ruskin Group Theatre's world premiere of playwright Justin Yoffe's THE GUN. Dave Florek sure-handedly directs his talented cast at a brisk pace in this 60-minute one-act brimming with suspenseful taunt and tensioned urgency....

If American Horror Story decided to do a season set in the time of ancient mythical English kings, you would get Julia Rodriguez-Elliott's King Lear. I highly recommend this eerie interpretation of one of Shakespeare's most produced works....

Balanchine choreographed 425 works over the course of 60-plus years, and his works are considered masterpieces and performed by ballet companies all over the world. So you can image how thrilled I was to find out Los Angeles Ballet was going to present BALANCHINE: MASTER OF THE DANCE as their final...