Posts Tagged ‘Los Angeles Theater Review’
THE TWO KIDS THAT BLOW SHIT UP
Sunday, August 28th, 2016
Playwright Carla Ching takes a tried-and-true formula (best friends who can’t quite get it into their noggins that they are Made For Each Other) and turns it on its head in her World Premiere dramedy The Two Kids Who Blow Shit Up, not only L.A. theater at its intimate best but a textbook example of how #diversity works.
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PARALLEL LIVES
Saturday, August 27th, 2016
A pair of busy TV actresses prove they can light up the Falcon Theatre stage as brightly as they shine on the small screen in Parallel Lives, the talented twosome bringing character after character after character to hilarious (and occasionally poignant) life while managing at the same time to comment on gender, age, sexuality, and the whole damn thing.
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DRAMA QUEENS FROM HELL
Sunday, August 21st, 2016NOT RECOMMENDED
Significant trimming and tweaking is needed to make Peter Lefcourt’s Hollywood-spoofing Drama Queens From Hell the comedy hit it aspires to be despite some occasional insider hilarity and several deliciously scene-stealing performances.
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NEXT TO NORMAL
Saturday, August 20th, 2016
The 99-seat Pico Playhouse proves a just-right setting for a compelling, powerfully-performed intimate staging of Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s Next To Normal, one of only nine musicals in Broadway history to have won the Pulitzer Prize.
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GO BACK TO WHERE YOU ARE
Thursday, August 18th, 2016
There’s a whole lot of fourth-wall-breaking going on in Go Back To Where You are, David Greenspan’s magical seventy-five minute bit of meta-theatrical romance and whimsy now getting an admittedly brain-challenging but absolutely captivating West Coast Premiere by the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble.
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THE IMAGINARY INVALID
Sunday, August 14th, 2016
Theatricum Botanicum legend Ellen Geer follows her 2014 Queen Lear with another gender-bending star turn, this time as Molière’s Malade Imaginaire, aka The Imaginary Invalid, Constance Congdon’s 21st-century adaptation turning a three-and-a-half-century-old farce into a playfully raunchy laughfest that would do Mel Brooks proud.
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BLUEPRINT FOR PARADISE
Saturday, August 13th, 2016
The weeks leading up to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor provide the historical backdrop for Blueprint For Paradise, Laurel M. Wetzork’s fascinating, fact-inspired look at the unlikely friendship between the heiress wife of an American Nazi sympathizer and the African-American architect hired to design a “refugee compound” on fifty-acres of the couple’s Pacific Palisades estate.
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D DEB DEBBIE DEBORAH
Friday, August 12th, 2016RECOMMENDED
Twilight Zone meets Theater Of The Absurd in D Deb Debbie Deborah, Jerry Lieblich’s trippy journey to a land where no one, not even the title character, is who they seem, and though it’s anyone’s guess what Lieblich is getting at throughout most of his play’s seventy-five minutes, confusion hardly matters till a sudden eleventh-hour try for profundity takes Quadruple D from entertaining to exasperating.
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