CAFÉ SOCIETY

Zaniness reigns supreme in Peter Lefcourt’s screwball Café Society, now getting a terrifically performed, imaginatively directed, cleverly designed World Premiere at West L.A.’s Odyssey Theatre, the ever so “Westside” laughfest marred only by a jarring 11th-hour tonal shift that bears rethinking.
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IN THE HEIGHTS

Candlelight Pavilion tops everything it’s done over the past year—and that includes Evita, The Producers, Spamalot, and last month’s Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat—with a sensational mid-summer staging of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’s In The Heights.
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LUKA’S ROOM

Leave it to Rob Mersola, the playwright who gave audiences Backseats & Bathroom Stalls and Dirty Filthy Love Story, to subvert the teenage coming-of-age tale in the most outrageously unexpected of ways in Luka’s Room, the latest Rogue Machine World Premiere and sure to be one of this summer’s most buzzed-about productions.
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UP HERE

RECOMMENDED

The voices inside a neurotic computer whiz’s head take on decidedly human form in the latest from the La Jolla Playhouse, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez’s tuneful if overly ambitious musical romcom Up Here, a show that earns high points for the Oscar-winning couple’s score (and the talents who bring its World Premiere to life in La Jolla) but could prove too Out There for future mainstream success.
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THE GREAT DIVIDE

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Elephant Theatre goes out with a fizzle instead of a bang with the World Premiere of Lyle Kessler’s family dysfunction-fest The Great Divide, a play so credibility-defying that not even the best efforts of director David Fofi and an excellent cast can save it—and its audience—from the dull-drums.
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ADAM & EVE and STEVE: A Musical

What if, before Eve was plucked from Adam’s rib, the Devil himself had stepped in to provide The World’s First Man with his very own Same-Sex Partner?

It’s from this titillating concept that Chandler Warren and Wayne Moore have confectioned ADAM & EVE and STEVE: A Musical (aka Adam and Eve and Steve – The Musical), a fresh new musical comedy so absolutely fabulous I can’t wait to see it again.
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STANLEY ANN: THE UNLIKELY STORY OF BARACK OBAMA’S MOTHER

Ann Noble makes an indelible impression as the woman who gave birth to our country’s president in the World Premiere production of Mike Kindle’s one-woman bioplay Stanley Ann: The Unlikely Story Of Barack Obama’s Mother.
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THE TROUBLE WE COME FROM

News of his girlfriend’s pregnancy sends a 30something writer on a 24-hour journey of self-discovery in Scott Caan’s World Premiere comedy The Trouble We Come From, the actor-writer’s smart, funny companion piece to his previous Falcon Theatre hit No Way Around But Through.
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