Posts Tagged ‘Los Angeles Theater Review’

AKUMA-SHIN

Terrific 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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THE MADRES

Playwright Stephanie Alison Walker pays tribute to the women who would not be silenced when their sons and daughters started disappearing by the thousands during the “dirty war” waged by the Argentine military dictatorship on its own citizens beginning in the mid-1970s in The Madres, another powerhouse Skylight Theatre World Premiere.
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A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS

Actors Co-op brings 16th-century English history to vibrant life with their 21st-century revival of the 1962 Best Play Tony winner A Man For All Seasons, Robert Bolt’s thought-provoking if overlong look at Sir Thomas More, torn between moral conscience and political expediency during Henry VIII’s reign as King.
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LAUGHTER ON THE 23RD FLOOR

Neil Simon takes us back to 1953 when Sid Caesar’s Your Show Of Shows ruled the airwaves in Laughter On The 23rd Floor, his 1993 Broadway valentine to TV’s early years now getting a sensationally directed and performed Toluca Lake revival at The Garry Marshall Theatre.
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CABARET

USC’s Musical Theatre Repertory once again rivals the finest intimate professional theater in town with its all-around smashing student-performed, student-directed, student-designed revival of the 1966 Kander and Ebb classic Cabaret.
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HENRY V

Those who insist on three-plus hours of Shakespeare may well get their knickers in a twist over the sixty-some minutes chopped from Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott’s excitement-packed Henry V now on show at Pasadena’s A Noise Within. Not this reviewer, who welcomes not just its refreshingly brief two-hours-and-change running time but its multitude of action movie-ready thrills.
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LITTLE WOMEN, THE MUSICAL

Santa Monica’s venerable Morgan-Wixson Theatre once again blurs the lines between community and professional theater with the best performed of the more than half-dozen big-and-small-stage Little Women, The Musicals I’ve seen.
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AN UNDIVIDED HEART

Pedophile Catholic priests and toxic waste-dumping chemical plants form the backdrop of Yusuf Toropov’s An Undivided Heart, a Circle X. Theatre Co./Echo Theater Company World Premiere that despite occasional tonal inconsistency and lack of clarity proves a powerful indictment of church-and-corporation-sanctioned abuse.
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