KING JAMES
Thursday, June 9th, 2022
Two young men forge a life-changing best-friendship thanks to their shared love of basketball (and more specifically of b-ball superstar LeBron James) in Rajiv Joseph’s heart-stopping brom-com King James, now bringing audiences to their feet at the Mark Taper Forum.
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COME FROM AWAY
Thursday, June 2nd, 2022
The 2017 Broadway Tony winner Come From Away has returned to the Ahmanson Theatre for a two-week run, once again proving that heroism, humanity, and heart can triumph over terror. Not only that, but this supremely feel-good musical remains one of the best directed and most powerfully performed National Tours I’ve seen in many a year.
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UNTITLED BABY PLAY
Friday, May 27th, 2022Performances are impeccable (and laughs are abundant, at least in Act One), but by the time Laila Ayad, Anna Rose Hopkins, Courtney Sauls, Sonal Shah, Jenny Soo, and Sarah Utterback finally take their bows (at close to 11:00 p.m. on Opening Night), a more suitable title for Nina Braddock’s Untitled Baby Play would be Interminable Baby Play.
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VENUS IN FUR
Saturday, May 14th, 2022
A sizzling Sam Bianchini ignites the Atwater Village Theatre stage opposite the dynamic Roland Ruiz in David Ives’ Venus In Fur, as provocative and daring as it is maddeningly cryptic.
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AFTERGLOW
Saturday, May 7th, 2022
Can an open marriage survive if one husband embarks on a sexual relationship with one of the couple’s occasional bed guests? This is the provocative question posed by playwright S. Asher Gelman in Afterglow, a surefire seat-filler thanks to its extended softcore sex scenes early on but a West Coast Premiere whose real dramatic fire begins once the clothes have come back on.
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MASAO AND THE BRONZE NIGHTINGALE
Monday, May 2nd, 2022Playwrights Dan Kwong and Ruben Funkahuatl Guevara have quite a tale to tell about post-WWII Little Tokyo and Boyle Heights in Masao And The Bronze Nightingale and an ethnically, culturally, linguistically diverse cast of characters to tell it with, but the World Premiere play-with-songs’ hefty three-hour running time begs the question, how much of a good thing is too much?
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HADESTOWN
Friday, April 29th, 2022
Like Rent, Spring Awakening, and Hamilton before it, Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown, the 2019 Tony winner for Best Musical, revitalizes the genre in the most electrifyingly original of ways.
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LEGALLY BLONDE
Monday, April 25th, 2022Ragged around the edges but blessed with some terrific lead performances, Cupcake Theatre’s intimate revival of Broadway’s Legally Blonde would have me singing its praises even louder had the show not started thirty minutes late to accommodate walk-ins.
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