Bill Raden

Liesel Hanson

For the Love of Brings the Raucous World of Roller Derby to the Stage

Bill Raden
Gina Femia’s all-women twist on the venerable locker-room drama doesn’t exactly reinvent the sports narrative but it does persuasively demonstrate how invigorating it can be to simply reorient hoary sports tropes with a new gender perspective. That fresh spin, plus sizzling choreography by director Rhonda Kohl and uniformly fine-grained performances, are enough to make Femia’s story feel arena-scaled even on Theatre of NOTE’s uncommonly intimate stage....
Josefina López

As Boyle Heights' Casa 0101 Fights for Its Life, Funding to Improve Diversity in the Arts Dwindles

Bill Raden
For a city that is more than 48 percent Latino, the loss of Casa 0101, one of only three all-Latino stages that produce regular seasons of plays in Los Angeles, might be incalculable to its audience, but it would be a Richter-scaled catastrophe to L.A.'s Latinx theater artists. Casa represents a disproportionate amount of the stage roles available to Latina/o actors — lead roles that are essential to every actor for developing the craft that is a prerequisite to better-paying film and TV work....
Eddie Goines

A New Stage Homage to Godzilla Packs Plenty of Fireworks but Comes Up Flat

Bill Raden
Why the Americanization of Ishiro Honda’s 1954 kaiju classic, Gojira, should be held up as a primary palimpsest for the rampaging horrors of post-industrial capitalism is just one of the mysteries driving a play that ricochets between parodic mockumentary, whimsical alternative history, allusive movie-geek trivia game and moody metaphysical thriller....
George Takei

Newly Relevant Musical Allegiance Depicts an American Wartime Crime Against Its Citizens

Bill Raden
With the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the administration's divisive mainstreaming of alt-right white supremacist hate groups, Allegiance’s sprawling and sometimes unwieldy tale of how the United States summarily stripped 120,000 Japanese-Americans — including 37,000 Angelenos — of their civil rights and incarcerated them in 10 prison camps for the duration of the war today seems harrowingly near....