LOS ANGELES THEATER REVIEWS

Transgender actress/singer Alexandra Billings has done quite remarkable work on LA stages over the last decade, as well as being one of the stars of the current amazon TV hit Transparent. She holds nothing back; her acting style is brutally honest. Now through next Sunday only October 11, you can...

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a young, upcoming playwright whose Neighbors back in 2010 was an alluring eye-opener about racism and the human condition. It declared that race is just an illusion, so the outrageous display of some black characters wearing black face and other blacks sublimating their h...

So does FIRST DATE---the relatively new musical comedy now playing its Southern California regional premiere at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts through October 11---merit an outing? Sure! If you're looking for a cute, charming little musical that's giddy and entertaining and features a...

The West Coast premiere of playwright Martin Zimmerman's involving SEVEN SPOTS ON THE SUN receives a splendid, mesmerizing mounting with all the artistic elements artfully converging into one of the best and riveting theatrical experience I've seen in the Los Angeles theatre scene this year....

birthday. He is dying of cancer but is told that he is suffering from a spastic colon. Mendacity. Margaret (Madeline Fair) denies gossip that she and husband Brick (Daniel Kaemon) are sleeping apart. The denial is a lie. Gooper (Todd Andrew Ball) and wife Mae (Kyra Schwartz) swear to have Big Daddy'...

The 20th anniversary revival of the Odyssey production of Clifford Odets' classic AWAKE AND SING! receives a raw and reverential mounting. As directed by Elina de Santos, most characters in this two-hour-and-fifteen-minute three-act portray their roles in bold black-and-whites with little shades of ...

The Pasadena Pops held their final event of the summer at the Los Angeles Country Arboretum and Bontanic Garden on September 12, 2015. Michael Feinstein, performer and principal Pops Conductor led the full orchestra and featured soloists Shelea Frazier and Broadway's Jeremy Jordan....

Perhaps the best known musical of all time Rodgers' and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music has remained a family favorite since the 50s. Number one, the score is to die for; secondly, the book is dramatically fulfilling with a real life family being torn asunder by the ravages of fascism. Touches o...

To put it succinctly, be ready to laugh your ass off. A brilliant, witty melange of slapstick, sight gags, silly absurdity, hyperbolic acting, and even bits of good ol' reliable audience participation, ONE MAN, TWO GUVNORS, Richard Bean's exceedingly hilarious comedy of errors, misdirections, and mi...

You can tell when a theatre company cares about its audience, especially when that audience is largely made up of young people. It doesn't talk down to them and it doesn't assume they will only understand the obvious. Instead, its directors take the time to seek out work that is worthy of engagement...

Sami Staitman is pretty much your typical 15-year-old teenaged girl. On Sunday afternoon, we journeyed into the Valley to see the Ventura County resident play the part of Molly, pretty much your typical 14-year-old teenaged girl, in a one-girl musical called Welcome to My World, which played at the ...

On Sunday September 27 at Sterling's Upstairs at the Federal, dancer Mark C. Reis debuted his brand new cabaret show I'd Enjoy Being a Girl...on Broadway. Reis had tremendous success in 2012 with his first show at Sterling's called Diapers, Dishes and Dreams...Stories of a Dancer about his gay m...

LOOT, a 1965 satirical farce -- a bizarre, dark parody of an English drawing room comedy -- by British enfant terrible Joe Orton, is a difficult production. Desert Rose Playhouse, in Rancho Mirage, California, pulls it off. Excellent acting and directing result in a great deal of hilarity....

MENOPAUSE THE MUSICAL-THE SURVIVOR TOUR is a great deal of fun. Each bouncy number has plenty of clever lyrics and deliberately silly choreography to keep the audience laughing. It is almost impossible not to clap and dance along with the performers as they perform such antics as playing instruments...

What a witty script! What a fine cast! What an incredible first act! The world premiere of playwright Fielding Edlow's ICU immediately grabs your attention the moment you enter and take a seat in the waiting room of an unnamed New York hospital. With precision machine-gun delivery of Edlow's brutall...

It's a little uncanny how easily Shakespeare's tragedy lends itself to reinvention by a troupe of clowns and still communicates the full measure of the poet's intent, yet that is exactly what happens in FOUR CLOWNS PRESENTS HAMLET, a guest production at The Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles. To dire...

Palm Desert's Desert Theatreworks has mounted a must-see production of Sarah Ruhl's edgy, comedic, metaphysical play, DEAD MAN'S CELL PHONE.The director has created such a visual and musical feast that it doesn't matter if anyone understands the story, any more than it does with a ballet....

One of Stephen Schwartz's failures The Baker's Wife, which toured extensively across the US in 1976 but never made it to Broadway, had a cast recording with Patti LuPone, Paul Sorvino and Teri Ralston and has had a few revivals including the UK. Why did it bomb? It's a simple, sweet show with a lov...

The West Coast premiere of Ike Holter's HIT THE WALL vividly illustrates what might have happened that fateful night in 1969  when Stonewall became the flashpoint for what many consider the start of the gay liberation movement. With director Ken Sawyer's inventive staging, the audience becomes almo...

Jean Paul Sartre's 1944 NO EXIT receives a sturdy mounting by the InterAct Theatre Company. Kent Minault directs his gifted cast spouting out Sartre's lines ever so trippingly and sensibly on their respective tongues. Any faster readings would have been unintelligible. Bravo to the cast for their co...

Commissioned by the Yale Repertory Theatre and premiering there in 2014, These Paper Bullets by Rolin Jones received 4 Connecticut Critics Awards and has been a highly anticipated arrival this fall at the Geffen Playhouse. Now onstage at the Gil Cates Theater through October 18, the show is a huge...

For theatre aficionados of a razor-sharp, witty script performed by a spot-on bi-lingual-ish cast; run over to East West Players for their stunning production of David Henry Hwang's CHINGLISH. Jeff Liu directs his talented ensemble at a fast, but smooth and steady pace wringing all the possible lau...

Actress/singer/director Judy Norton began her cabaret act at Sterling's Upstairs at Vitello's in January of 2010 and in my review, I called it 'a stellar show with a true night club star. Norton, best known for her 9 years as daughter Mary Ellen and sister of John Boy on TV's The Waltons, is a versa...

The film of Josefina Lopez's Real Women Have Curves in 2002 was a big hit in art houses and won several Sundance prizes including an audience award for Best Actresses Lupe Ontiveros and America Ferrera, long before her Ugly Betty fame. Lopez's semi-autobiographical play from the 90s about the garmen...

This one act play with music was the surprise of my weekend. Not because of what I already knew about it, of course, based on press materials and previous word of mouth from friends who saw it at the Hollywood Fringe Festival, but because of something no one had thought to mention. That for all its ...