The mythic figure of Cesar Chavez literally looms over The Sweetheart Deal, playwright-director Diane Rodriguez’s inspirational account of the United Farm Workers during the union’s storied struggles of the early 1970s. Amid the headlines of Yee Eun Nam’s projections on the sweeping cyclorama that tops designer Efren Delgadillo’s towering set......
At first blush, using Barnsdall Art Park’s iconic Hollyhock House as the setting for director Kate Jopson's environmental staging of María Irene Fornés' wryly metaphysical, 1977 feminist drama Fefu and Her Friends might seem inspired. The Frank Lloyd Wright 1920s landmark, with its bas-relief masonry and magnificently detailed woodwork and furnishings, fits......
Experimental immersive theater tends to be charged with an element of underground insurgency. For this ultimate form of audience-interactive and site-specific storytelling, performances shrouded in the secrecy of unpublished addresses and furtive street rendezvous have become as integral to the form’s capacity for surprise as have the elaborate environments that......
Although the duel of honor has been virtually extinct in America since the Civil War, the rigid social code it adjudicated is immediately grasped by every schoolboy who defends his dignity in a playground fistfight. What may be less understood in today’s schoolyards is the extent to which our adult......
One doesn’t have to look very hard to encounter political gestures that offend. To many Angelenos of Mexican descent, for example, building a $21.6 billion “wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border is the political equivalent of being flipped the bird. Same goes for Muslim Americans and Trump's travel bans. But the......
“Adolescence is a war,” the mystery writer Harlan Coben once shrewdly said of that traumatic collision of self-esteem and self-awareness from which “no one gets out unscathed.” Though the textbooks insist it ends when one reaches “the age of majority,” the idea that a meaningful cessation of hostilities is inextricably......
The free spirit of animator Max Fleischer’s salacious, pre-Code animated flapper, Betty Boop, literally hovers over Jen Silverman’s wisecracking if somewhat undercooked 2016 gender comedy, which is making its West Coast debut at Pasadena’s Boston Court. Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Boops features Betty Boop’s iconic, black-and-white image shimmying......
To be a theater reviewer in Los Angeles is to some degree to work in the shadow of Gordon Davidson’s near-mythic 1978 production of Zoot Suit, the dazzling original musical written and directed by Luis Valdez, the equally legendary founder of the 1960s guerrilla theater troupe, Teatro Campesino. It's the......
Audiences for The Lion, balladeer Benjamin Scheuer’s solo autobiographical coming-of-age rumination about love and loss and regret and finding his voice as an artist, might be forgiven for momentarily thinking they’ve wandered into an acoustical set in the back room of McCabes Guitar Shop rather than an evening of musical......
