PIGS AND CHICKENS

The Office meets A.I. meets Orwell’s Big Brother in Marek Glinski’s entertaining if a tad over-complicated satirical absurdist black comedy Pigs And Chickens, the latest Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA World Premiere.
(read more)

THE MADRES

Playwright Stephanie Alison Walker pays tribute to the women who would not be silenced when their sons and daughters started disappearing by the thousands during the “dirty war” waged by the Argentine military dictatorship on its own citizens beginning in the mid-1970s in The Madres, another powerhouse Skylight Theatre World Premiere.
(read more)

CABARET

USC’s Musical Theatre Repertory once again rivals the finest intimate professional theater in town with its all-around smashing student-performed, student-directed, student-designed revival of the 1966 Kander and Ebb classic Cabaret.
(read more)

AN UNDIVIDED HEART

Pedophile Catholic priests and toxic waste-dumping chemical plants form the backdrop of Yusuf Toropov’s An Undivided Heart, a Circle X. Theatre Co./Echo Theater Company World Premiere that despite occasional tonal inconsistency and lack of clarity proves a powerful indictment of church-and-corporation-sanctioned abuse.
(read more)

BINGO HALL

A high school boy navigating unrequited feelings for a female best friend while making college plans either to stay close to home or to travel thousands of miles away is a tale, if not as old as time, at least as ancient as the John Hughes 1980s, but it feels fresh and new when the high schooler in question has only ever known life on a New Mexico Indian reservation in Dillon Chitto’s World Premiere comedy Bingo Hall.
(read more)

ALLEGIANCE

Allegiance has arrived at Little Tokyo’s Aritani Theatre, and if the feel-good Broadway musical about the forced internment of 70,000 American citizens and another 40,000 longtime U.S. residents tries too hard to be a crowd-pleaser in ways that the similarly fact-based Parade and The Scottsboro Boys did not, its East West Players debut is if nothing else a splendidly performed (and refreshingly homegrown) Los Angeles Premiere that scores bonus points for the light it sheds on a dark stain in American history.
(read more)

THE HAPPIEST SONG PLAYS LAST

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes concludes her deservedly acclaimed “Elliot Trilogy” with The Happiest Song Plays Last, its powerful Latino Theater Company California Premiere made momentous by the fact that Parts 1 at 2 are both currently playing in L.A.*
(read more)

THE CHOSEN

Friendship has rarely felt so good or hurt so bad, nor have father-son relationships caused more joy or pain than they do in Chaim Potok’s exquisite coming-of-age novel The Chosen, adapted for the stage by Aaron Posner and Potok and now making an absolutely superb Fountain Theatre debut.
(read more)

« Older Entries Newer Entries » « Older Entries Newer Entries »