LOS ANGELES THEATER REVIEWS

Rubicon Theatre Company lands a winner with its latest musical comedy RETURN TO THE FORBIDDEN PLANET by Bob Carlton. The silly sci-fi confection is two hours of deliciously kitschy fun accompanied by a rock and roll score that blasts out more than twenty hits from the '50s and '60s and a dynamite c...

As a life-long fan of Edgar Allan Poe and site-specific theater, I jumped at the chance to attend NEVERMORE, a one-of-a-kind guided tour experience by Metro bus through the San Fernando Valley. Billed as a unique Halloween experience taking place only on Saturday, October 29 celebrating Edgar Allan...

24th Street Theatre takes on the Brothers Grimm in its latest world premiere Hansel & Gretel Bluegrass by Bryan Davidson, but forget the fairy tale you think you know. This is no sanitized version of the story. The original, written in 1812, was a cautionary tale, bleak in its portrayal of a time wh...

In the American Coast Theatre Company's West Coast premiere of LIFE WITHOUT PAROLE, playwright Warren John Doody has brilliantly adapted Dr. Elizabeth Dermody Leonard's verbatim transcripts of interviewed, incarcerated women into a brutal, unrelenting look at our current justice system. Susan K. B...

During the West Coast premiere of UNDERNEATH by Olivier Award winner Pat Kinevane, be prepared to be called upon and repeatedly referred to during the show if you challenge the audience's attention by unwrapping candy during his performance, drop something on the floor, or just happen to be seated i...

Los Angeles Ballet's eleventh season celebrates the masters and introduces LA to a new choreographer that is changing the dance landscape. The season opened with Modernists/Ballet Visionaries which features works of three icons of their time: August Bournonville, 1805-79, creator of the Danish Bour...

The Actors' Gang's Cynthia Ettinger ever so smoothly directs her very exceptional cast as they infuse life to six real-life, wrongly convicted death row survivors and the peripheral people besides them. Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's script of THE EXONERATED vividly illustrates how these six people...

Groundlings' latest laugh-packed Friday & Saturday night show GROUNDINGS HOOK-UP APP  had their packed house in the palms of their hands laughing hard and reacting loudly to every possible twist, turn and diss. Jordan Black deftly directed his very talented cast of eight comedians extraordinaire at...

Executive Producer Kate Pazakis has done it again with her latest UMPO production THE UNAUTHORIZED MUSICAL PARODY OF HOCUS POCUS. Director Tye Blue effectively corrals his vocally gifted cast in gloriously performing re-purposed pop tunes in between delivering Pazakis and John Flynn's cleverly writt...

To kick-off its 9th season, DEZART PERFORMS will present Casa Valentina, a thoroughly entertaining Tony Award-nominated "dramedy" written by Harvey Fierstein, the multiple Tony Award-winning actor/playwright and American Theatre Hall of Famer. Fierstein's raucous dramedy, CASA VALENTINA, is a hugely...

Coming off the heels of another politically-charged play ALL THE WAY that they presented last month, Orange County's Tony Award-winning regional theater South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa is following up that searing drama with a staging of a brand new production of playwright Aaron Posner's DISTRI...

Each October for the past several years, I have thoroughly enjoyed welcoming the Halloween Season by attending WICKED LIT, produced by Unbound Productions at the spooky Mountain View Mausoleum & Cemetery in Altadena. This year audiences are being treated to three World Premiere short plays staged a...

I love a good prequel, especially when a contemporary playwright decides to take on the back story of a hallowed play by the likes of William Shakespeare. I mean, come on. Daring to tread on that playing field takes some guts because you know before you begin that audiences are going to have high ex...

The prolific eight-time Academy Award-winning composer---perhaps best known for his decades of unforgettable work in several landmark Disney animated musicals---was on hand to unveil a world premiere concert entitled 'A WHOLE NEW WORLD WITH ALAN MENKEN' on September 30, 2016 at Orange County's Seger...

British playwright Shelagh Delaney was a precocious young woman with a keen eye for detail and a gift for naturalistic dialogue. She reached the height of her literary fame at 19 with the premiere of her play A TASTE OF HONEY which she wrote in just two weeks. Much to her dismay, Delaney was often...

DELUSION is the premiere first-person horror experience where audiences are an essential part of the storyline. In order for the Sullivan children to make good on their quest, they must interact with their environment by unearthing clues, engaging with the strange and surreal characters of the villa...

The Blank Theatre opens its 26th season with a new work written and directed by founding artistic director Daniel Henning that explores one of the most controversial events in U.S. history - the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. THE TRAGEDY OF JFK (as told by Wm. Shakespeare) is the result...

Even without eye-popping special effects, a gimmicky storyline, or those oft-used literary or cinematic source materials, some stage musicals just manage to entertain by sheer likability alone. A big warm hug of a show that's brimming with lots of surprisingly snappy wit and, arguably, some of the p...

For the Record is first and foremost an absolutely awesome show visually... and emotionally. The creative team of For the Record, namely Anderson Davis, Shane Scheel and music supervisor Jesse Vargas, began these amazing shows back in 2010 at Show at Barre on Vermont which turned into Rockwell Table...

Before Peter had the last name Pan, he was a browbeaten 13-year old orphan shipped off with his two mates from Victorian England to a distant island ruled by the evil King Zarboff. The boys know nothing of the mysterious trunk in the captain's cabin, containing a precious, otherworldly cargo, given ...

This world premiere of playwright Ken Levine's GOING... GOING... GONE! has the benefit of a strong quartet of actors and sure-handed direction at a swift pace. Witty quips and snappy one-liners populate the rapid repartee of the baseball reporters in a sky-high reporters' box. If the purpose to dup...

The great genius of contemporary musical theater, creator of Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods and Company, Stephen Sondheim leads audiences on a tuneful revue of presidential assassins and would-be killers from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley. The performance is guided by the Proprietor (brilliantly ...

Frances Seymour Fonda, actor Henry Fonda's second wife, was only 32 years old when the theater she commissioned architect Arthur W. Hawes to build opened in December of 1940. Originally known as the Westwood Theater, it was designed to be a performance space for live productions and for a short time...

In today's world, many are passed over for promotion, often causing jealousy and bitter reactions to the person who does advance over you. But just how far would you go to get that job you want and feel best qualified for, at least in your own mind? And what if you feel that person in the position...

When October hits and Halloween horror movies begin to flood late night TV, you can always count on at least one station somewhere airing Mel Brooks' 1974 classic comedy YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. But this year, the situation is a little different. With the recent passing of Gene Wilder, who stars in the t...