ASHES TO ASHES
Monday, December 11th, 2017A divorced couple must spend 16 days, 21 hours, and 32 minutes in each other’s company or forfeit the $955,000,000 they’ve been bequeathed in Ashes To Ashes, Debby Bolsky’s entertaining, mostly successful screwball romcom, a World Premiere guest production at the Odyssey.
(read more)
LEVI! A NEW MUSICAL
Thursday, November 30th, 2017A stellar Marc Ginsburg and more than a dozen unsung Sherman Brothers songs are the best reasons to catch the World Premiere of the old-and-new Levi! A New Musical, the latest from the students of LACC’s Theatre Academy.
(read more)
bled for the household truth
Tuesday, November 28th, 2017If a tightly-wound New York male and a free-spirited Manchester female sharing NYC digs sounds like the latest take on Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, think again. Ruth Fowler’s bled for the household truth may have an uncomfortable laugh every now and then, but what the Welsh playwright has up her twisted sleeve in this Rogue Machine World Premiere proves the darkest, most disturbing, and quite possibly the most compelling play in town.
(read more)
CHASING MEM’RIES: A DIFFERENT KIND OF MUSICAL
Friday, November 17th, 2017Tyne Daly rises above the material she’s been given in Chasing Mem’ries: A Different Kind Musical, though if by “different,” book writer Josh Ravetch means clichéd, maudlin, sitcommy, and song-deficient, then this Geffen Playhouse World Premiere “musical” is indeed quite different from the rest.
(read more)
LITTLE WOMEN [a multicultural transposition]
Tuesday, November 7th, 2017If Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March had come of age in post-WWII L.A. as the Mayeda sisters, offspring of a Japanese-American father and a Chinese-American mother, Louisa Mae Alcott’s classic novel might look and sound just like Little Women [a multicultural transposition], Velina Hasu Houston’s unabashedly G-rated World Premiere rewrite that had me in its spell from ebullient start to heartwarming finish.
(read more)
THIS LAND
Tuesday, October 31st, 2017At once epic and intimate, Evangeline Ordaz’s This Land weaves two centuries of Watts history—from the Mexican ranchers who seized Tongva Indian land in the 1880s, to the white homeowners who took flight in the 1950s when blacks moved in, to the Latinos who became the majority four decades later, to today’s white gentrifiers—into two absorbing, illuminating hours of Los Angeles theater at its best.
(read more)
SINNER’S LAUNDRY
Monday, October 30th, 2017No playwright could ask for a better cast or finer production design than IAMA Theatre Company has given John Lavelle’s Sinner’s Laundry. Audiences, on the other hand, may find themselves leaving the Lounge Theatre clueless to the message, meaning, or simple raison d’être of Lavelle’s World Premiere absurdist existentialist comedy. I certainly did.
(read more)