TREASURE ISLAND
Tuesday, August 18th, 2026
Dialog scenes get bogged down in nautical jargon, 18th-century slang, and outdated grammar, much of it unintelligible to 21st-century ears, but whenever action sequences take over, Theatricum Botanicum audiences are treated to the swashbucklingest adventure story ever to unfold under Topanga skies.
(read more)
AMERIKA OR, THE MAN WHO DISAPPEARED
Tuesday, March 31st, 2026
Writer-director Dietrich Smith takes a young German immigrant on the journey of a lifetime in his stage adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Amerika or, The Man Who Disappeared, the year’s most exhilarating theatrical adventure ride.
LIFE OF PI
Thursday, May 8th, 2025
Not since War Horse has there been a theatrical experience as spectacular as Life Of Pi, the Tony-winning Broadway smash now dazzling L.A. audiences with its life-sized animal puppets, it cinematic spectacle, and Taha Mandviwala’s star-making performance in the title role.
(read more)
HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD
Thursday, April 17th, 2025
I’m not what you’d call a fan of the fantasy genre (though I did try to make it through the first Lord Of The Rings movie and the first Harry Potter flick), but even a fantasy curmudgeon like me found myself thoroughly dazzled and ultimately quite moved by Harry Potter And The Cursed Son, now packing them in at the Pantages.
(read more)
WENDY’S PETER PAN
Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024
Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum treats audiences to their most kids-friendly show in memory with Wendy’s Peter Pan, Ellen Geer’s reimagining of the J.M. Barrie classic as told by a now grown-up Wendy Darling to her three precocious offspring.
(read more)
HAPPY FALL: A QUEER STUNT SPECTACULAR
Friday, August 30th, 2024The stunts, the puppetry, and the multimedia effects are indeed spectacular, but Lisa Sanaye Dring and Rogue Artists Ensemble’s Happy Fall: A Queer Stunt Spectacular ends up biting off more than it can chew in combining all of the above with the doomed love story of two gay stuntmen, one proudly out, one deeply closeted, in an industry where being heterosexual is a must.
(read more)
MIX-MIX: THE FILIPINO ADVENTURES OF A GERMAN JEWISH BOY
Saturday, May 25th, 2024
Prolific Filipino-American playwright Boni B. Alvarez takes audiences on the most thrilling and danger-packed of WWII escapes in Mix-Mix: The Filipino Adventures of a German Jewish Boy, a fact-based action-adventure epic as vividly cinematic as it is imaginatively theatrical.
(read more)
BATTLESONG OF BOUDICA
Tuesday, April 11th, 2023
Fans of those sword-and-sandal epics that made bodybuilders like Steve Reeves and Gordon Scott action-movie stars in the late-1950s and early-1960s won’t want to miss Christopher Williams Johnson’s Battlesong of Boudica, now thrilling audiences with Jen Albert’s almost nonstop fight choreography at Hollywood’s Hudson Backstage Theatre.
(read more)
Since 2007, Steven Stanley's StageSceneLA.com has spotlighted the best in Southern California theater via reviews, interviews, and its annual StageSceneLA Scenies.
COPYRIGHT 2026 STEVEN STANLEY :: DESIGN BY