CHARM
Saturday, September 10th, 2016
Edward J. Olmos’s Jaime Escalante did it in Stand And Deliver. Michelle Pfeiffer’s Louanne Johnson did it in Dangerous Minds. Sidney Poitier’s Mark Thackery did it in To Sir With Love. And now Lana Houston’s Mama Darleena Andrews does it in Charm, transforming the lives of a classroomful of rebellious teens, only this time round the teacher in question is a transgender sexagenerian and her students an unruly bunch of homeless LGBT teens. Talk about a setup for an edgy, funny, and (you guessed it) heartstrings-tugging crowd-pleaser, the latest all-around winner from Celebration Theatre.
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LIKE BLOOD FROM A CHEAP CIGAR
Wednesday, September 7th, 2016An effective use of reverse chronology and a luminous Genevieve Joy are the two best reasons to catch Like Blood From A Cheap Cigar, Joy’s short, bittersweet look at love gone bad, now concluding a limited run at Hollywood’s Hudson Guild Theatre following its Hollywood Fringe Festival debut this past June.
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DUTCH MASTERS
Tuesday, September 6th, 2016
A classic setup—Hitchcock called it Strangers On A Train—is given an excitingly edgy contemporary spin in Greg Keller’s edge-of-your-seat two-hander Dutch Masters, a Rogue Machine Theatre West Coast Premiere that will keep you guessing throughout its riveting seventy-five minutes, then have you talking about what you’ve seen long after its powerful final fadeout.
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THE TWO KIDS THAT BLOW SHIT UP
Sunday, August 28th, 2016
Playwright Carla Ching takes a tried-and-true formula (best friends who can’t quite get it into their noggins that they are Made For Each Other) and turns it on its head in her World Premiere dramedy The Two Kids Who Blow Shit Up, not only L.A. theater at its intimate best but a textbook example of how #diversity works.
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BLUEPRINT FOR PARADISE
Saturday, August 13th, 2016
The weeks leading up to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor provide the historical backdrop for Blueprint For Paradise, Laurel M. Wetzork’s fascinating, fact-inspired look at the unlikely friendship between the heiress wife of an American Nazi sympathizer and the African-American architect hired to design a “refugee compound” on fifty-acres of the couple’s Pacific Palisades estate.
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D DEB DEBBIE DEBORAH
Friday, August 12th, 2016RECOMMENDED
Twilight Zone meets Theater Of The Absurd in D Deb Debbie Deborah, Jerry Lieblich’s trippy journey to a land where no one, not even the title character, is who they seem, and though it’s anyone’s guess what Lieblich is getting at throughout most of his play’s seventy-five minutes, confusion hardly matters till a sudden eleventh-hour try for profundity takes Quadruple D from entertaining to exasperating.
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SPACE
Saturday, July 30th, 2016
Disproving the oft-suggested notion that a playwright should never direct his own work, Stefan Marks not only scores a double bulls-eye at the Stella Adler; in never leaving the stage as Space’s riveting protagonist, the Ovation Award-winning director-writer-actor proves himself a bona fide triple-threat in this brain-teasing dazzler of a play.
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I LOVE YOU BECAUSE
Saturday, July 23rd, 2016
A sparkling book, a dozen or so delightfully quirky characters, and above all one of the catchiest (and often most gorgeous) scores in recent years add up to Joshua Salzman and Ryan Cunningham’s unabashedly romantic I Love You Because, at long last getting the Los Angeles staging I’ve been wishing and hoping for since first falling in love with the musical’s original cast recording nearly ten years ago—and what a terrific production ILYB has been given at Hollywood’s Hudson Theatre.
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