SOFT POWER
Friday, May 18th, 2018
A New York cast and production team bring Los Angeles audiences the World Premiere latest from Tony-winning playwright David Henry Hwang and Tony-winning composer-lyricist Jeanine Tesori, the crowd-pleasing East-meets-West “play with a musical” Soft Power, as audacious in concept as it is for the most part effective in execution.
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DIE, MOMMIE, DIE!
Sunday, May 13th, 2018
Over-the-top doesn’t begin to describe the performances–or the fun of seeing so much scenery chewed by so sensational a cast–in Center Theatre Group’s Block Party reprise of Celebration Theatre’s 2017 comedy smash Die, Mommie, Die!
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KNIFE TO THE HEART
Tuesday, May 8th, 2018
To cut or not to cut. That is the question facing Marshall and his shiksa spouse when pregnant-with-twins Julie Ann learns that the postpartum shindig her Jewish mother-in-law’s got planned will involve not just cocktails but a bit of infant cock-snipping. No wonder Stan Zimmerman and Christian McLaughlin have titled their entertaining, unexpectedly touching 80-minute stage sitcom Knife To The Heart.
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LITTLE BLACK SHADOWS
Tuesday, April 17th, 2018Kemp Powers’ Little Black Shadows takes an intriguing concept (the lives of teenage house slaves serving white teen masters in early-1850s Georgia), then veers off track into family dysfunction, folktales, magical realism, and a couple of weird plot twists that left me scratching my head despite the best efforts of a Grade-A cast headed by the simply sensational Giovanni Adams and Chauntae Pink.
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PIGS AND CHICKENS
Saturday, April 7th, 2018The 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.
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SHREW!
Wednesday, April 4th, 2018Amy Freed returns to South Coast Repertory with another hit-or-miss (but mostly miss) World Premiere comedy, this time a purportedly feminist take on William Shakespeare’s The Taming Of The Shrew retitled simply Shrew!
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THROUGH THE EYE OF A NEEDLE
Monday, April 2nd, 2018
A dysfunctional family in mourning makes for unexpected holiday hilarity and heart in Jami Brandli’s Through The Eye Of A Needle, a humdinger of a Road Theatre Company World Premiere.
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AKUMA-SHIN
Sunday, April 1st, 2018Terrific performances and an ingenious production design cannot salvage the perplexing jumble that is Kenley Smith’s big-ideas sci-fi-parody-fantasy-thriller black comedy Akuma-Shin, a Sacred Fools Theater Company World Premiere, any more than its cast of characters—Dr. Joyce Brothers, William F. Buckley, Jr., Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer among them—are able to save Tokyo from Godzilla.
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