THE BAPTIST WITCHES OF SHELBYVILLE
Saturday, April 4th, 2026A trio of Tennessee sisters in their early 40s reunite for an entertaining albeit largely uneventful 4th Of July weekend back home in Julie Shavers’ World Premiere Southern Gothic comedy The Baptist Witches of Shelbyville, now playing once a weekend at the Whitefire Theatre.
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AMERIKA OR, THE MAN WHO DISAPPEARED
Tuesday, March 31st, 2026
Writer-director Dietrich Smith takes a young German immigrant on the journey of a lifetime in his stage adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Amerika or, The Man Who Disappeared, the year’s most exhilarating theatrical adventure ride.
THE BEST BOARDING HOUSE IN DELAWARE
Friday, March 13th, 2026
Playwright Marja-Lewis Ryan is back, and reunited with her One In The Chamber star Heidi Sulzman in The Best Boarding House In Delaware, not only the year’s most deliciously dark comedy but one that marks the return to the stage of the exquisite Leigh Taylor-Young.
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RED HARLEM
Tuesday, February 24th, 2026An intriguing truth-is-stranger-than-fiction premise (Stalin-era Soviets’ recruitment of African-American performers for a movie expose on racism in the U.S. to be shot in the USSR) and some inventively stylized staging by director Bernadette Speakes are two major pluses in Kimba Henderson’s Red Harlem. What it needs to achieve full impact is a trim.
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INCITATION TO THE DANCE
Monday, February 16th, 2026An intriguing premise—sultry queer Millennial insinuates himself into the lives of a couple of gay married Boomers—falls flat in Theatre West’s overlong, overwrought, credibility-defying World Premiere melodrama Incitation to the Dance.
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SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA
Saturday, February 14th, 2026Haunted house stories can be both thrilling and entertaining. There is, unfortunately, little fun to be had inside the Beacon Hill apartment occupied by blocked, depressed writer Sally in the present day and in the 1950s by her more celebrated (albeit equally depressed) 20th-century counterpart in Sylvia Sylvia Sylvia, Beth Hyland’s downer of a World Premiere at Westwood’s Geffen Playhouse.
RIGHTEOUS AMONG US
Tuesday, February 10th, 2026Sometimes it pays to stick around for Act Two, which is why I urge you to resist the temptation to exit Little Fish Theatre after Righteous Among Us’s talky, overpadded first act because if you do, you’ll be richly rewarded when Amy Tofte’s tale of Holocaust heroism both real and invented takes dramatic, compelling flight.
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THE TYPIST
Wednesday, February 4th, 2026
A jaded novelist and the cockeyed optimist he hires to type his latest opus try hard not to fall hard for each other in 1961 Greenwich Village in Shem Bitterman’s edgy and entertaining World Premiere two-hander The Typist, now playing at the Hudson Guild Theatre.
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Since 2007, Steven Stanley's StageSceneLA.com has spotlighted the best in Southern California theater via reviews, interviews, and its annual StageSceneLA Scenies.
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