Opening the Curtain

Stephen Adly Guirgis play "Between Riverside and Crazy" is one of those scripts that plays very differently outside of New York.

Happy New Year! LA theater is all about women in the new year.  There are one woman shows, re-imagining women from history.  Here’s a quick list of the shows I’m looking forward to this spring. Let’s start with a hit one-woman show … that now stars another woman.

Okay, Best of LA Theatre 2019 part two. Last week, I shared plays that tackled race head on. This week, one last favorite production that made an audience confront how race haunts our national drama from an unlikely source: The Getty Villa.

It’s time for the best of theatre of 2019. Like last year, the best theatre in Los Angeles - the theater that spoke with the clearest voice this year - was political.  But where last year the politics had to do broadly with who was leading who. This year, the politics were mostly about race and gender.  

Matthew Bourne’s “Swan Lake” is the production that 24 years ago catapulted Mr. Bourne’s work into the international spotlight. Famously, he reimagines Tchaikovsky’s ballet about women trapped as swans by an evil sorcerer's spell -- into the tragic and heroic story of a closeted prince discovering a secret world of male love.

A couple of years ago "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" was a big play. By big I mean it got a Broadway production, it won Tony awards, it went on a national tour - you know, big play. But here's the thing, it's not really a big play in a broadway sense.  It's a really beautiful small play that found it's big-ness. At it's core it's a wonderful ensemble play where a small group of actors not only play a bunch of roles - they make a whole world. This is the magic of the production at the Greenway Court a 99-seat theatre.  They rediscover the heart of the play in an intimate setting.

Remember being a teenager? If you are now or ever were a teenager, you've probably had to navigate some tricky social waters. Who's cool? Who's a poser? Who are your people? Those are some of the questions at the heart of Circle X's production of "punkplay" ... but in a very particular time period.

I’m guessing the last thing you need is another “to do” on your holiday list…but I want you to add one more. You need to go see “Jitney” at the Mark Taper Forum.

There’s a problem with school Thanksgiving plays. But not in the particular high school drama classroom you can see onstage at the Geffen. Logan, the drama teacher, is finally getting to make her Thanksgiving school play and it’s going to right those wrongs.

The setup at the center of Mike Birbiglia's one-man show "The New One" is not particularly new. In fact, it's familiar trope: the reluctant dad.