Theatre Articles

Based on the 1942 novella by Eudora Welty, which itself is a relatively cheery adaptation of a gruesome tale from the Brothers Grimm, The Robber Bridegroom took on life as a musical in the 1970s with producer Stuart Ostrow’s Musical Theatre Lab.

Don’t let the program fool you; the casting of two actors in the role of Richard III isn’t a sign that the Theatricum has developed an appetite for the avant-garde or the experimental.

In the parlance of World War II Harlem, an old settler is a woman long past what society considers the peak age for marriage; a spinster.

The toughest assignment in yesterday afternoon’s closing performance of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” went to six sassy girls — thank heaven, at 11, 12, 13 and 14 years old, they still are smart enough to allow themselves to be called girls instead of women, persecuted feminists, ladies, non-men, matrons or however many genders are running free now.

At the least, Southern Comforts stands out as a declaration that the capacity to love has no expiration date. But the play and its production at the International City Theatre in Long Beach rates as more than a sly, sideways manifesto in rebuttal to society’s ageism.

For an evening that tastes like a sumptuous dessert guaranteed to add half a foot to your waistline, sprint, don’t just amble on over to the creaky old Robert Frost Auditorium on the Culver City High School campus.
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After the evening’s performance at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Center, Shakti Dance Company founder and Bharata Natyam guru Viji Prakash took to the stage and articulated what I had been thinking all along. While the music and dance are richly rewarding for people well-versed in the compositional intricacies of classical Indian music and the kinetic language of Bharata Natyam, the novice aficionado can just as easily and fully be elevated, inspired and moved. The vernacular gives way to the universal, the senses become engaged in the music and costumes, and cultures comes together in a shared experience of beauty.

The Actor's Gang, one of L.A.’s most consistently magical troupes, can always be relied upon to deliver theatre that channels our era's nebulous zeitgeist.

A larger-than-life story like Alexandre Dumas’s classic adventure needs room for swords to clash, dastardly villains to plot and heroes to save the day. Movie adaptations of “The Three Musketeers” benefit from expansive locations and sets, along with the illusion provided by camera angles. Ellen Geer’s theatrical adaptation benefits from the outdoor amphitheatre space of the Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon.

“The play’s a game,” says playwright Sir Alan Ayckbourn, “which I hope an audience enjoys playing as much as the actors enjoy playing it.” Quite. It’s an entertaining bauble, chock full of colliding assumptions, misinterpretations, well-intentioned but misguided interventions, and all the usual trimmings of a farcical comedy of errors.