First look photos! Hilarious, profound and all-around irresistible, William Shakespeare’s quintessential rom-com, Much Ado About Nothing, gets the A Noise Within treatment as part of its “Daring to Love” season.
Quite possibly, a perfect production. Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage’s Tony Award-nominated CLYDE’S at the Mark Taper Forum is heartfelt, funny, and seriously delicious.
It doesn’t help that director Matthew Dunster plays much of Danny Robins’ script for laughs when it could have been amping up some suspense. It would have been more cohesive and had a bigger impact if it hadn’t played as a comedy for most of its 2-hour run time, though it wouldn’t have been enough to make the story land.
What did our critic think of ON BECKETT at A.C.T. Geary Theatre? On Beckett is an obvious labor of love, combining the phenomenal clown skills of the great Bill Irwin with his affection for the works of Samuel Beckett. Great comics often make great dramatic actors (e.g., Gleason, Lewis, Williams) and Irwin can, in a split second and with the aid of some clown props, morph into Beckett's complex, Irish voiced characters. The result is a stunning one-man show that delights and challenges.
What did our critic think of ON BECKETT at A.C.T.? Master clown Bill Irwin is the perfect guide through the world of Samuel Beckett in this beguiling and exceedingly entertaining show that excavates the humor in the great master's work while still honoring its underlying existential angst.
Bridging the 1985 original with the contemporary leaves one with a sense of disconnection
Koons' moody production at the Fleishman is trying to tap into a noirish whodunnit vibe in which the story’s professed detective is the one person in the building (or in this case, the amphitheatre) who doesn’t realize that he is himself is also the murderer.
The revival of Pearl Cleage’s rich and beautiful work “Blues for an Alabama Sky” opens Wednesday, April 13, 2022, at 8 p.m. at Center Theatre Group / Mark Taper Forum and continues through May 8.
Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill is a play with music written by Lanie Robertson and this production is directed by Wren T. Brown. The musical premiered in 1986 in Atlanta, Georgia and its story recounts some events of Billie Holiday’s life leading up to this performance at Emerson’s four months shy of her death in 1959. Emerson’s is a small bar in South Philadelphia and the time is a midnight performance by Lady Day. Set to the backdrop of a piano center stage and a few cocktail tables around the space, we relive some events of Ms. Holiday’s life as told through stories found deep in her memory but living on the surface as if they just happened yesterday.
National LatinX Playwriting Award winner Benjamin Benne’s stunning nee play, ALMA, launches the new theater season at the Kirk Doulas Theater and it is triumphantly resonant.
Three men stand on a stage for over three hours, trekking through 150 years of history in The Lehman Trilogy and it's the most invigorating evening imaginable. Directed by Sam Mendes and written by Stefano Massini—and adapted by National Theatre dramaturg Ben Power -- the play is a remarkable journey of three immigrant brothers from Bavaria, who travel to America to start a small business that evolves into the money-making machine known as Lehman Bros.
The world premiere of “Alma” opens Sunday, March 13, 2022, at 6:30 p.m. at Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre and continues through April 3, 2022. Written by up-and-coming playwright Benjamin Benne and directed by Juliette Carrillo, this new work will reopen the Douglas after more than two years. Produced in cooperation with American Blues Theater, the cast of “Alma” features Sabrina Fest as daughter Angel and Cheryl Umaña as mother Alma.
ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL undeniably has at its center, a butterfly-in-waiting and a marvelous performer waiting to take her on. From leading lady Erika Soto to company stalwart Deborah Strang, Nike Doukas’s solidly entertaining production of ALL’S WELL boasts a particularly strong core of women who anchor this effort with great skill.
Unquestionably, we all should listen...and talk...and occasionally laugh, and sometimes we should even be screaming until our lungs are on the brink of explosion. And we can be doing some of this to a Rihanna soundtrack.
Music and musicality run through the works of August Wilson like a sweet and impenetrable blues lick. There figures to be notes aplenty in any opus titled SEVEN GUITARS, the fifth play of Wilson’s cycle which is enjoying a muscular revival directed by Gregg T. Daniel at Pasadena’s A Noise Within.
During the opening number, the Troubadour Theatre Company, affectionately known to all as the Troubies, comment how thrilled the troupe, and the audience by extension, is to have returned to live theatre. The audience responded with glorious applause, and both the occasion and the Troubies deserve that adulation. The Troubies, who have rocked Los Angeles for the last 25 years, are one of the most creative teams in the city. Their imagination and gumption has entertained with parodies of classical works infused with a musical motif such as Alice In One-Hit Wonderland, Much ADoobie Brothers About Nothing, and A Charlie James Brown Christmas. Their latest, Lizastrata, based on both the Greek Aristophanes comedy Lysistrata and the songs made popular by Liza Minnelli, could have been a dazzler, but with a gossamer plot, too many recycled jokes, and a venue ill-equipped to allow the cast to sing with heft, the latest production is uninspired.
With the current theatre world on hiatus, I have created a Spotlight Series on Broadway World which features interviews with some of the many talented artists who make our Los Angeles theatre community so exciting and vibrant thanks to their ongoing contribution to keeping the Arts alive in the City of the Angels. And just like all of us, I wondered how they are dealing with the abrupt end of productions in which they were involved. This Spotlight focuses on Robert Yacko, one of the busiest triple-threat performers in Los Angeles!
Five and a half years ago, the town of Ferguson, Missouri, became the focus of national attention following shooting of teenager Michael Brown on August 9, 2014. The unarmed, black 18-year-old was shot dead by Darren Wilson, a 28-year-old white police officer, for allegedly robbing a convenience store on Canfield Drive, the same street on which Brown lived. Protests and media attention focused on the town for a year, while the community of Ferguson was left in turmoil.
The reviews are in for Ethan Coen's A Play Is a Poem, currently playing the Mark Taper Forum. Read what the critics had to say!
Lucas Hnath's DANA H., now in its world premiere at the Goodman Theatre, recounts a harrowing trauma experienced by the playwright's mother, Dana Higginbotham. In 1997, she was working as a hospice chaplain in Florida when a former patient, a mentally ill ex-convict, kidnapped her for five months. Hnath tells this deeply personal story through a riveting device: actress Deirdre O'Connell lip-syncs to recordings of interviews with the real Dana, conducted by Steve Cosson nearly two decades after the recalled events. Under the direction of Les Waters, this uniquely intimate encounter between audience and narrator offers a terrifying glimpse into the mental and emotional realities of being a survivor of abuse.
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