SUMMER AND SMOKE

Hollywood’s increasingly risk-taking Christian-based Actors Co-op takes a walk on the wild(er) side with its terrifically acted revival of Tennessee Williams’ Summer And Smoke, one that provides a surprising number of laughs along the way to the dramatic second act you might expect from the man who heated things up with A Streetcar Named Desire and Suddenly Last Summer.
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POCATELLO

Small lives matter in Pocatello, just as they do in all of Samuel D. Hunter’s “Idaho plays,” the latest of which now gets an impressive West Coast Premiere by the theater company that gave L.A. audiences Hunter’s equally memorable A Bright New Boise and A Permanent Image.
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PAST TIME

Stepping inside someone else’s skin may be just what Grandpa James and Grandson Chris need to make their respective romantic lives click in Padraic Duffy’s deliciously quirky, often side-splittingly funny, ultimately heartwarming (albeit somewhat over-padded) World Premiere comedy Past Time, now playing at Sacred Fools’ excitingly refurbished digs on Hollywood’s Theatre Row.
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THE DODGERS

What if all it took to determine whether you lived or died was your date of birth? This was the worst nightmare come true of over 850,000 18-26-year-old American males back on December 1, 1969, when the United States government held its first “Draft Lottery,” the losers of which were virtually assured a one-way ticket to Vietnam.

Playwright Diana Amsterdam takes us back to this not-so-long-ago reality in her gripping new play The Dodgers, now getting an exciting World Premiere at the Hudson Mainstage with as star-studded a 20something cast as you’re likely to see all year in a 99-seat production.
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DREAM BOY

Nine years after a pair of gay teen boys fell unforgettably into first love in Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing, Celebration Theatre and director Michael Matthews reunite for the similarly themed (albeit considerably darker) Dream Boy, Eric Rosen’s meticulously faithful adaptation of Jim Grimsley’s haunting Southern Gothic novel, an imaginatively directed, superbly performed, gorgeously designed Los Angeles Premiere marred only by poor sightlines that will often have you craning to see the action.
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DEN OF THIEVES

Organized crime meets a quartet of disorganized would-be criminals to wild and wacky effect in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Den Of Thieves, now getting a hilarious 20th-anniversary revival by 2Cents Theatre Group.
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THE KILL-OR-DIES

Ovation Award-winning playwright Meghan Brown is back with the intriguingly titled The Kill-Or-Dies, a darkly comedic edge-of-your-seat thriller that will keep you guessing from its first surprise twist all the way up to its gratifyingly unpredictable finish.
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RIO HONDO

Earlier this year in their brilliantly spoofy Entropy, playwright Bill Robens and Theatre Of NOTE managed somehow to stage a gazillion-dollar Hollywood space-travel epic inside a 40something-seat theater. Robens and NOTE now work the same magic on that most American of movie genres—the Western—in their World Premiere comedy Rio Hondo, to my knowledge the very first L.A. theater production presented “in CinemaStage” and one that no horse opera lover will want to miss.
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