Top Los Angeles Theater Stories

With the arts always the first programs to be budget-cut in school curricula, and with the cries of woe on editorial pages that we're not... More >>

Jennifer Haley sets much of her new play, The Nether, in an elaborate virtual reality — think Second Life, where you wander about as your... More >>

At the age of 80, Donald Freed is one of the oldest living American playwrights. A consequence of his age and his prolific output, Freed now... More >>

Nina Raine's lovely play Tribes, now at the Mark Taper Forum, is likely to be done all over the place, having just the right blend of familiarity... More >>

At the opening of Mark Schwartz's Divorce Party: The Musical, a frumpy housefrau named Linda (Janna Cardia) sits amidst small rings of her own... More >>

The Englishman William-Henry Ireland lived from around 1775 — he appears to have lied about his birth year — to 1835. Were he able,... More >>

The debate in politics over pending "sequestration" goes back and forth like a ping pong ball — from the view that hatchetlike budget cuts... More >>

Two new musicals that opened across town from each other last weekend provide an answer — a rebuff, really — to the idea that stories... More >>

There are a number of reasons why it's hard to get all warm and fuzzy about porn as a poster child for the First Amendment. Maybe it has... More >>

Theater audiences, beware! Run for cover if you need to. Big ideas are crashing down like meteors, from UCLA to Pasadena. Australia's Back to... More >>

 sequence of events while seeing shows over the weekend brought on one of those moments where you look around and say, things are not as... More >>

A con-man/drifter walks into a small town, usually in the Midwest, and seduces a vulnerable local female. He not only seduces her, he awakens her... More >>

In small theaters, bold new artistic strokes don't necessarily lead to long-running productions — at least not in L.A. In fact, one can see... More >>

The question was put to the L.A. Weekly's stable of theater critics: What do you most dread and what do you most anticipate when being assigned... More >>

Looking across the border crossing of the holiday season, there's cause for curiosity and a feeling of being encouraged by the possibilities of... More >>

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How convenient it would be in describing the year's best stage events to roll in with an agenda: that local productions were better than imports;... More >>

Jon Robin Baitz can write a play with erudition and wisdom. He's been demonstrating that since 1987, when his remarkable The Film Society —... More >>

A telling admission in Derek DelGaudio and Helder Guimarães' magic show Nothing to Hide, at the Geffen Playhouse through Jan. 6, is that... More >>

'Tis is the season when many of our theaters go into a state of suspended animation for the express purpose of making it through the holidays.... More >>

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre arrived in Santa Monica from the United Kingdom last week, at the tail end of a U.S. tour. Its production of Hamlet,... More >>

In the program notes to the new musical Red Barn, which he co-authored with his wife, the show's director, Melissa Chalsma, actor-playwright... More >>

It's no secret: We, as a species, are more vicious than the most violent of dogs. What remains perplexing is that in the millennia since Homer,... More >>

Six smart, sassy playlets under the collective title Black Women: State of the Union — Taking Flight accomplish more or less what the front... More >>

The essay "A Bolt From the Blue," which opens neurologist Oliver Sacks' 2007 book Musicophilia, is the story of Tony Cicoria, an orthopedic... More >>

Let's not mince words, because Samuel Beckett doesn't. In the Irish dramatist's monodrama Krapp's Last Tape, at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, John... More >>

Izolda really loved her husband. No, I mean she really loved him. The way young Albert Narracott of Devon loved his equine in War Horse. She fell... More >>

David Mamet's Oval Office farce November centers on an imploding U.S. president, Charles Smith (Ed Begley Jr.), running for a second term, while... More >>

So what's the difference between a story and a lie? There are any number of possible answers to this conundrum — circling around issues of... More >>