LOS ANGELES THEATER REVIEWS

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...

The beloved Mary Poppins character has been on a journey with children of all ages since 1934, first as a popular children's book series by P.L. Travers, then as the 1964 Academy Award-winning and most popular Disney film of all time (after Walt Disney managed to convince the author to allow him to ...

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...

Broadway and TV actress/singer Megan Hilty performed a splashy show at Valley Performing Arts Center at CSUN, Northridge on Thursday, September 24 at 8 pm to a packed audience of her fans. Hilty is best remembered for playing Glinda in Wicked for four and a half years - she replaced Kristin Chen...

DOUBLE DOOR debuted on Broadway in 1933, with a subsequent play by Elizabeth McFadden, debuting on Broadway in 1945. This later version is currently being presented at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills as the second production of their 2015-2016 season. And I advise you not to miss it as you will be kep...

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...

BROADWAY BOUND won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making part three the most serious of the Eugene trilogy plays in which we find Eugene and his older brother Stanley trying to break into the world of show business in 1949 as professional comedy writers while coping with their parents break-up a...

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 ...

What do you get when you combine two already proven, successful musicals- The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Hedwig and the Angry Inch? THE EXPERIMENT - A ROCKIN' FRANK + WIGHEAD INSANE CABARET, the current extremely entertaining mash-up from the brilliantly creative minds of Creating Arts Studios. C...

Based on Daniel Wallace's 1998 novel and Tim Burton's 2003 film of the same name, Big Fish, with a few minor changes in plot, becomes quite an imaginative musical...with Andrew Lippa, composer of some of the best songs written for a Broadway show in a long time. So, it is hard to imagine why its Br...

Some shows I can see again and again, especially those composed by the forever upbeat Jerry Herman. Hello Dolly bowed on Broadway when I was a teenager in the 60s and it had a long run with original star Carol Channing, followed by turns with Ethel Merman, Ginger Rogers, Pearl Bailey, Martha Raye...

EST/LA's world premiere of playwright Tom Lazarus' THE PRINCES OF KINGS ROAD succeeds as an involving, albeit slow moving, character study of three very interesting characters. John Nielsen easily evokes all of Schindler's various emotions and attributes, bottled up and rejuvenated. Ray Xifo deftly ...

On Sunday September 6 at Sterling's Upstairs at the Federal, Kritzerland Records celebrated its 61st show and 5 year anniversary. On hand were affable host Kritzerland producer Bruce Kimmel, musical director extraordinaire John Boswell at the piano and a bevy of super talented singers who includ...