Bill Raden

It was supposed to be a grand, visually stylized, outdoor stage spectacle befitting the urgency and epic scale of the human suffering it means to theatricalize — the perilous mass exodus of U.S.-bound child refugees fleeing the savage gang and drug cartel violence that has given Central America the dubious......

This year’s call for an Oscars boycott over the Academy Awards’ spurning of actors of color comes as the latest reminder that, to paraphrase von Clausewitz, art is the continuation of politics with other means. Nowhere is that dictum clearer than in Othello. And in few other cities does the......

It’s not easy to characterize And the Drum, the weird and whimsical but profoundly captivating site-specific stage hybrid from Capital W, the experimental theater collective comprised of director-writer Lauren Ludwig and producer Monica Miklas. On its website, the show is badly described as “immersive dance theater fused with a dinner......

It’s hard to imagine a world in which the feral and defiantly profane heroine of Bed, Echo Theater Company’s provocative new relationship melodrama, might be happily domesticated by a husband, hearth and home. Star Kate Morgan Chadwick makes a mesmerizing entrance as Holly, half crawling, half dragging herself like a rabid......

Perhaps the most emblematic of the ironies in 1984, the scintillating adaptation of George Orwell’s totalitarian surveillance satire currently playing at the Broad Stage, comes early. That’s when a member of a book club discussing the novel’s influence asks, “How can you say the book changed the world when nothing......

There is a palpable sense multiple journeys at play in Louis & Keely ‘Live’ at the Sahara, the Geffen Playhouse’s latest incarnation of the rousing and powerfully poignant jukebox biography of 1950s husband-and-wife crooners, the hyperkinetic bandleader Louis Prima (Anthony Crivello) and jazz stylist Keely Smith (Vanessa Claire Stewart). One......

End-of-the-year theater roundups are not exactly computer science. Rather they are extremely subjective tricks of the memory filtered by the taste, temperament and aesthetic sensibility peculiar to the rememberer. And while 2015 offered its share of scintillating Los Angeles stage riches, to this temperamental observer it proved all too typical......

For 20 years, the Troubadour Theater Company has reigned as L.A.’s undisputed masters of musical-mashup satire. Their comedy is rooted in the puerile pun and the incongruities implicit in grafting an inappropriate score of lyrically tweaked top-40 hits to either a Shakespearean classic (Fleetwood Macbeth) or, around this time of......

There’s been a lot of holiday parody under the bridge since the birth of American improvisational satire 57 or so Christmases ago in places like Chicago (the Compass Players, the Second City) and Minneapolis (Brave New Workshop). And by now, one might expect a show with a name like A......