I REMEMBER THE AMUSEMENT PARK BUT FORGOT WHAT THE RIDE WAS ABOUT The more I think about the Hypocrites' latest theater spectacle, Ivywild, the more entranced I feel about the imaginative pro…
CORNOGRAPHY It's been 70 years since Rodgers and Hammerstein ushered in the "golden era" of Broadway musicals with Oklahoma! and some dust has settled on the green corn of the 40s. Well, an …
DYING TO DIRECT It turns out that a career as a top literary agent at William Morris and CAA served as a solid stepping-stone for Michael Peretzian's dream job: directing in theater. As an a…
PERFECTED STORIES Ever since Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories premiered at South Coast Rep in 1996, and especially after it hit the Broadway boards starring Linda Lavin in 2010, the…
LEAVE IT TO CHILDREN’S THEATER TO MAKE THE BIGGEST STATEMENT OF ALL The biggest opening in Chicago last week was the behemoth pre-Broadway spectacle Big Fish, but right across to…
BLIZZARD TALE In meteorology, the phenomena known as Lake Effect occurs when a cold system glides over the warmer water of a large lake and dumps huge amounts of precipitation, usually snow,…
PLOUGHED UNDER BY GOOD INTENTIONS AND BAD SONGWRITING What a great idea: Create modern folk songs to represent Americans whose voices have been given short shrift (or ploughed under) b…
FAUST IN SPACE Just because I recommend Trap Door's latest production doesn't mean that I understand it. Core of the PUDEL (pronounced "poodle") is an Avant Garde/Experimental/Movement Theat…
ALMOST A FULL MOON The theater has been sorely affected by electronic communication. Since the advent of the internet, at least, the cumbersome amount of news bits and twittering has infecte…
OH BROTHERS! Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: Talk about a musical with a strange history! It begins with the Ancient Roman legend "The Rape of the Sabine Women" " attributed to Plutarch " f…
THE MUSICAL WITH LEGS Musical Theatre West's (MTW) exuberant production of A Chorus Line proves that the musical is as fresh as the day it appeared almost forty years ago, when the standard …
SO MANY ATROCITIES IN ONE EVENING When stories appear which elucidate the carnage during WWII, many look to heaven and ask, "Why?" But the script and execution of Our Class, about a true-lif…
NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED Henrik Ibsen stated that he had no conscious thought of making propaganda with A Doll's House (1879). Yet many productions have a feminist bent: Nora is the misu…
BETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE A soldier named Mario returns from Iraq just in time for the 2005 New Year's celebration with his East Los Angeles family, friends and novia " but he also retur…
MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL Although he wrote at least 15 complete operas, Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968) is not a familiar name, even to many in the opera world. The first-generation modernist…
FOOD FIGHT Using Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children (1939) as a template, writer Peter Howard has created a wartime tale about the need to survive in challenging times. But the war isn…
EVERYBODY HAS A BALL AT THIS CINDERELLA Gioachino Rossini's Cinderella (La Cenerentola) was written in 1817 during the bel canto era when operas were written to showcase beautiful singing, b…
NETHER NOR Reality is the state of things as they actually exist, right? Not anymore. It's fascinating that the World English Dictionary defines reality as "the state of things as they are o…
HAVING ISSUES WITH ISSUES Ken LaZebnik's On the Spectrum, which opened last week at the Fountain Theatre, belongs to a genre known as Theatre of Identity, aka Social Issues Theatre; the idea…
NOT WORTH THE WEIGHT The title of Samuel D. Hunter's The Whale refers to three things. The first is Charlie, a homebound, 600-pound tutor who instructs online classes in expository writing. …
L. A. THEATER RISES FROM THE DEAD With an assemblage of the bravest actors in Los Angeles, Zombie Joe returns with an all-new Urban Death, the naturalistic horror show in the style of Le ThÃ…
THE TROUBLE WITH THE TROUBLE WITH WORDS In 2011, I stumbled upon a refreshing new composer at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. The extraordinarily encouraging work in Gregory Nabours' song cyc…
GAY ABSTRACTION For years, Ken Roht has proved himself to be one of the most inventive theater practitioners in Los Angeles. His avant garde works include the renown 99 Cent Only shows, whic…
WHAT WERE JEW THINKING? Baby boomers should recall the time when a great comedy album could be played with regularity. Some of my favorites were Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow…Right…
THE CORN IS HIGH INDEED Messrs. Rodgers and Hammerstein reinvented American Musical Theater for the ages when they created Oklahoma! in 1943, incorporating song and dance to tell their story…