Spoiler alert: In Itamar Moses’ brilliant intellectual farce, “Bach at Leipzig,” Bach does not appear. But his music does! Set in 1722, Moses’ witty comedy is based on an actual event: the gathering of eight of the major organists of the time in a competition to succeed the recently deceased organ m
All the ugly racist clichés about African-Americans that used to be tossed around with impunity during World War II are present in Paul Leaf’s new play “Mutiny at Port Chicago,” now having its world premiere at Santa Monica’s Ruskin Theatre.
My maternal grandmother, when she was just 12 years old, was placed in a hay wagon among a group of strangers and was sent from her small village of Mikhaelevka, in the Ukraine, across northern Europe to Hamburg, where she boarded a boat for America.
Can you imagine a more delightful way to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon than in the lush wooded tranquility of the Theatricum Botanicum watching several dozen gifted players gambol over the hillside declaiming the words of Shakespeare? This secluded outdoor theater in Topanga Canyon has begun its 20
Listen, wouldn’t you think that a musical that could produce lyrics that rhyme “prodigious, religious, prestigious and litigious” would be a show you’d like to see? Well, yes and no.
You might think that a 77-year-old playwright who has written a highly-acclaimed, prize-winning play nearly every year for 53 years might be running out of steam by now.
Surely a child abandoned in the forest and raised by wolves would not grow up to be as wild and uncontrollable as the young Helen Keller. Trapped inside a body that could neither see nor hear the world around her, and over-indulged by her helpless and bewildered parents, Helen vented her anger and f
Lydia R. Diamond’s new play, “Stick Fly” is “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” turned inside out. You all remember the 1967 movie in which the beautiful young white woman brings her brilliant black fiancé home to meet her liberal upper-class parents? Well, in “Stick Fly” the parents are upper class, in
Sometimes a corny, old-fashioned, totally out-of-date musical can charm you right out of your boots and remind you, once again, why the theater — for you at least — has always been such a magical place.
No matter how endearing you might find Frank South to be, spending two hours with him is a real ordeal. He paces, he twitches, he rages, he apologizes, he laments, he speaks in non-sequiturs, and he fights with his personal demons.
Sometimes siblings communicate with each other in a secret, private language that is unintelligible to the rest of the world. In Conor McPherson’s play, “The Seafarer,” the language is Irish.
As Queen Victoria used to say, “We are not amused.” Heaven knows, we wanted to be, but there is something just a little off-putting about the musical “No Way to Treat a Lady,” currently having its Los Angeles premiere at The Colony Theatre in Burbank.
