FOR THE LOVE OF (OR, THE ROLLER DERBY PLAY)
Monday, March 11th, 2019With director Rhonda Kohl choreographing like you’ve never seen a play choreographed before, it’s perhaps no wonder CTG picked Theatre Of NOTE’s For The Love Of (Or, The Roller Derby Play) to open year’s Block Party at the Kirk Douglas despite its overly familiar coming-of-age love story and a two-and-a-half-hour running time that could stand some significant snips.
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HIR
Thursday, February 21st, 2019
There are dysfunctional family comedies … and then there’s Taylor Mac’s Hir, a dysfunctional family comedy that takes the genre to such extremes that not everyone will make it past intermission. I, on the other hand, relished every twisted second of this Odyssey Theatre Ensemble Los Angeles Premiere.
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LIGHTS OUT: NAT “KING” COLE
Saturday, February 16th, 2019
The impending live broadcast of the 42nd and final episode of network TV’s first black-hosted variety show becomes an existential nightmare for its celebrated star in Colman Domingo and Patricia McGregor’s Lights Out: Nat “King” Cole, a Geffen Playhouse West Coast premiere not without its problems but one well worth catching, and not just for the drama-song-and-dance showcase it provides its triple-threat star Dulé Hill.
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WITNESS UGANDA
Thursday, February 14th, 2019
A gay black NYU student heads off to Africa to help build a school only to come back transformed for life in Witness Uganda, Matt Gould and Griffin Matthews’ off-Broadway “Documentary Musical” thrillingly performed and excitingly restaged for L.A. audiences at Beverly Hills’ Wallis Annenberg Center For The Performing Arts.
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IT IS DONE
Friday, February 1st, 2019
Sparks fly in the most horrifyingly unexpected of ways in a seedy bar ninety miles from nowhere in Alex Goldberg’s edge-of-your-seat chiller It Is Done, the risk-taking latest from Beverly Hills’ venerable Theatre 40.
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PARADISE
Monday, January 28th, 2019
A Columbia University professor reduced to teaching science in an overcrowded, underfunded Bronx high school and a Muslim-American student with dreams far loftier than her Yemeni immigrant family are likely ever to allow. From these two disparate, desperate souls, Laura Maria Censabella has written Paradise, as intelligent, thought-provoking, compelling, heartbreaking, and satisfying a two-hander as I’ve seen in a good long while.
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LOVE ACTUALLY LIVE
Thursday, December 13th, 2018
Forget about streaming it on Netflix for the umpteen December or pulling out your much viewed DVD for another annual look-see. Instead, run, don’t walk to Beverly Hills for The Wallis & For The Record’s Love Actually Live.
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BUS STOP
Friday, December 7th, 2018
No one wrote about 1950s middle-America more accurately, astringently, and affectionately than “Playwright of the Midwest” William Inge, proof positive of which can now be seen in Theatre 40’s absolutely terrific revival of Inge’s 1955 gem. (read more)
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