ASHES TO ASHES

A 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.
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LEVI! A NEW MUSICAL

A 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.
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bled for the household truth

If 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.
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THE TRAGEDY

Whether you find The Tragedy, D.G. Watson’s twisty-turny tale of three young Hollywood talent managers in search of the stroke of genius that will save their floundering business a piece of theatrical brilliance or a hallucinogenic hot mess may depend on how many shrooms you’ve consumed before lights-up. In either case, this often outrageously funny Ammunition Theatre Company World Premiere is like nothing else now playing on L.A. theater stages.
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CHASING MEM’RIES: A DIFFERENT KIND OF MUSICAL

Tyne 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.
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LITTLE WOMEN [a multicultural transposition]

If 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.
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THIS LAND

At 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.
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SINNER’S LAUNDRY

No 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.
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