Just to put it out there before going any further, the Echo Theater Company’s production of Sarah DeLappe’s play, The Wolves, is a terrific, thrilling, moving, exciting, amazing theatrical work, directed by Alana Dietze, and performed by nine young women at the top of their game. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Wolves is the intimate … Continue reading “The Wolves” at The Echo Theater Company
The world premiere of Stephanie Alison Walker’s new play, Friends With Guns, now in production at The Road Theatre Company, could not be timelier. With the horror of the latest mass murder in New Zealand reverberating around the globe, the issues on the subject of gun laws, gun ownership, and gun proliferation are once more … Continue reading “Friends With Guns” at The Road Theatre Company
Fifty years ago, in the fraught 1960s, which was, for some of us, the best and the worst of times, when our political heroes were gunned down, when, thanks to the “pill,” love was free and easy, when the “Doors of Perception” were blasted open by psychedelia in the form of pot, LSD, and psilocybin, … Continue reading “1=0” at Theatre of NOTE
Nicky Silver’s 2014 play, Too Much Sun, is not a predictable, linear progression of action with characters moving from point A to point B and so on, but is rather like a Jackson Pollack painting, an emotional splatter that has more structure than might be readily perceived. Start with the prologue, a brilliant hook that … Continue reading “Too Much Sun” at Odyssey Theatre
Conundrum. Quandary. No exit. The Gordian knot that no sharp Alexandrian sword will serve to solve. This is the situation in which the characters in Jonathan Caren’s new play, Canyon, find themselves in the world premiere production served up by the partnership of IAMA Theatre Company and Latino Theatre Company. The opening scenes reveal Jake … Continue reading “Canyon” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center
If one counts movies, then I have seen dozens of “jukebox musicals.” Sometimes I head for the theatre thinking, “Ahhh…oh boy…yet another jukebox musical.” But when the performers come on and show their stuff, then they can turn some pretty sappy songs from the 1950s and ‘60s into pure gold. And that is just what … Continue reading “Life Could Be a Dream” at International City Theatre
The Fountain Theatre’s production of Idris Goodwin’s award-winning play, Hype Man, is a fast-paced, hyper-energetic, seriocomic wonder that is more serio than comic. It brings the hip-hop scene to vivid life for audiences who may not have experienced it in close, intimate contact. Virtually everybody who watches television has seen rap performances at one time … Continue reading “Hype Man” at The Fountain Theatre
