BILLY BOY OH BOY Meet Billy, an ex-con sharpshooter who is living his American Dream in 1979. This optimistic showman, romantic, and visionary has encouraged a fraternity of castaways " a Na…
SHE'S BA-A-A-CK AND SHE'S FA-A-A-ABULOUS Charles Busch's play Die, Mommie, Die! is equal parts Greek comic-tragedy and Hollywood kitsch " a melodramatic campy cult classic in the vein of 196…
BEST WHEN IT'S GRIM GRIMM Born in Austin and now living in New York City, artist Natalie Frank created 75 works based on the stories of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Using gouache and chalk paste…
NOT ONE FALSE NOTE The musical masterpiece Falsettos follows Marvin, an appealing, brainy, anxious, obsessive, wealthy Jewish gay man who struggles to create a tight-knit family out of hi…
SOME, NOT ALL, IS ILLUMINATED Sadly, not everything is illuminated in British playwright Simon Block's fascinating but problematic adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's best-selling novel abo…
CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE THEATER Well, there certainly is nothing wrong with good advice. And there's plenty of that in the structurally unconventional Tiny Beautiful Things, Nia Vardalos's stag…
GRACE NOTES Now on the Kleberg Stage in Austin, TX, Anna Deavere Smith's powerful, engrossing and resonant solo play " Notes from the Field " has been updated for four actors by ZACH's Produ…
A VAULTING MATILDA Imagine Annie with psychokinetic powers, Nancy Drew as a mind-reader, or Cinderella acting as her own fairy godmother. Self-empowerment fuels this upbeat, knock-down, pell…
photos by Little Fang Up Here La Jolla Playhouse 2910 La Jolla Village Dr in La Jolla ends on September 6, 2015 for tickets, call (858) 550-1010 or visit La Jolla Playhouse
BRAIN CRAMPS One of the brainiest plays since, well, British playwright Nick Payne's other brainy play, Constellations, Incognito (2014) contains Payne's usual assortment of short scenes and…
TEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA I'm not really sure if director Alana Dietze could have done anything more with The Wolves, a dramatically inert slice-of-life one act that follows an al…
ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF A PLAY Anarchy is not chaos. The former means "without law" and the latter means "without form." This is an important distinction to consider in a play that intends to ma…
TOO BAD THEY DIDN'T RAISE THE RENT Rent has a romantic history: Jonathan Larson, its author and composer, died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm on Jan. 25, 1996, 10 days before his 36th birthd…
KITTY LITTER If I had my way, the slogan for Cats would be changed from "Now and Forever" to "Not Now, Not Ever." Even when I saw the show back in the early 80s and again in the early 90s, I…
HARRY POTTER AND THE RECYCLED RECORDING ENGINEER Jack Thorne's immensely popular two-part play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, has taken up residence in London, New York, and Melbourne, …
A YES AND NO NANETTE When the 1925 musical No, No, Nanette was revised and remounted in 1971, it was predicted to be a flop by folks in the Biz, but it was the buzz of the season with nostal…
WE'RE STILL WAITING You're watching a play but you have no idea what's happening. There is no plot, the dialogue is gobbledygook, and characters are filled with despair, yet you are told tha…
LOVE CONQUERS COMMON SENSE My takeaway about Oscar Wilde in David Hare's intellectually stimulating but overly static play of ideas, The Judas Kiss, now at Boston Court, is this: The literar…
CRIPPLE THE FUN Funny and heartbreaking, Martin McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan is nothing less than a slalom run of emotional ups and downs and plot twists and turns. Antaeus Theatre's …
WITNESSING UGANDA IS AMAZING, EVEN THOUGH THE SHOW NEEDS WORK Griffin is a young black New York actor in search of more than a career. When he is kicked out of his church choir because he's …
UNFORGETTABLE AND FORGETTABLE AT THE SAME TIME Well, here's a show that, while it doesn't defy description, is nonetheless perplexing. As with Matthew Borne's Cinderella, now playing across …
BOY OH BOYS With a fun and intermittently funny score by Hal Hackady (lyrics) and Larry Grossman (music), perky, adorable, enterprising direction by J. Scott Lapp, and some shining performan…
RUNNING ON FULL After producer Sophina Brown's celebrated production last year of King Headly II — one of ten dramas of the late August Wilson's 2oth-century chronicle The Pittsburgh C…
A MORE INTIMATE TITANIC MADE EPIC It’s telling that the 1997 musical Titanic won Tony Awards for each nomination — Best Musical, Peter Stone’s book, Maury Yeston’s sc…
BUCKLEY BUCKLES A BIT, BUT DOLLY DEFINITELY DELIVERS To start with, let's agree to never say "Goodbye, Dolly." Thornton Wilder's genius for the common touch isn't just a golden legacy in …