AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

It’s hard to imagine a more gorgeous setting for Tracy Letts’ sprawling August: Osage County than under the Topanga stars at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum, just one reason why the Oklahoma family saga’s return to L.A. (for the first time since A:OC’s Broadway National Tour played the Ahmanson back in 2009) makes for news worth shouting to the heavens and beyond.
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OFF THE KING’S ROAD

NOT RECOMMENDED

Several bright supporting performances and a topnotch production design are not enough to rescue Off The King’s Road from its lackluster script, languorous pacing, and a numbingly dull lead performance, though truth be told it would take an actor with the charisma and star power of the late James Garner to stir up any interest in playwright Neil Koenigsberg’s sad sack protagonist.
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PICNIC

A hot-and-sexy college football star turned ne’er-do-well drifter arrives in a sleepy Midwest town circa 1952 and the lives of one family and their friends will never be the same again in William Inge’s American classic Picnic, now being given a pitch-perfect partner-cast revival by The Antaeus Company.
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HOLLYWOOD FRINGE FESTIVAL 2015 REVIEWS & STAGESCENELA’S HOLLYWOOD FRINGE 2015 TOP 10

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ALL SHOOK UP

All Shook Up, aka “The Elvis Musical,” has come to San Diego-adjacent Vista as Moonlight Stage Productions offers SoCal audiences a terrific outdoor revival of one of the most thoroughly entertaining Broadway shows of the past dozen years.
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ASTRO BOY AND THE GOD OF COMICS

The words “You’ve never seen anything like this before” may sound cliché, but trust me, you have never seen anything like Sacred Fools’ West Coast Premiere of Natsu Onoda Power’s Astro Boy And The God Of Comics, a mind-boggling blend of fact and fantasy that weaves together human performers and live action with still-&-animated video projections, puppets, and most exciting of all, live cartooning by some skilled actors/pen-&-ink artists—all of which adds up to what is certain to be one of the summer’s most gigantic hits.
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THE HEIR APPARENT

As he did with Corneille’s The Liar a few years back, playwright David Ives once again works his theatrical magique on a centuries-old comédie française in The Heir Apparent, Ives’ 2014 off-Broadway adaptation of Jean-François Regnard’s 1706 farcical French bonbon Le Légataire Universelle, now delighting audiences in its Los Angeles Premiere at Long Beach’s International City Theatre.
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BAD JEWS

To the list of female comedy leads that any actress would kill to play (and win awards for), a list that includes Born Yesterday’s Billie Dawn, Twentieth Century’s Lily Garland, and Lost In Yonkers’ Bella Kurnitz, you can now add the name Daphna Feygenbaum, a role that Molly Ephraim knocks out of the ball park—and then some—in the Geffen Playhouse’s West Coast Premiere of Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews, a play as hilarious as it is brilliant, and one you’ll be talking about for quite some time to come.
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