Steven Leigh Morris

Photo by Craig Schwartz Were James Joyce’s The Dead — now at the Ahmanson with most of the original cast (albeit somewhat rearranged) of its Tony-nominated Broadway run — a mere reduction of its source material, it would merit a stock review recommending it to people who don’t give two......

City Garage is situated in an alley adjoining Santa Monica‘s Third Street Promenade -- that mecca of consumerism around which the other legit stages in the immediate area devote themselves to sketch comedy and other comparatively feel-good entertainments. But where such troupes as Second City, at the Mayfair Theater, swiftly......

A memorial service for actor James O’Rear will be held on Saturday, July 1, at 1 p.m. at Theater West, where he was a longtime member. O’Rear was 86 and an active member in the theater’s Musical Comedy Workshop up to the week before he died, on June 14. In......

It just don‘t move me the way that it should. --from Randy Newman’s song “Maybe I‘m Doing It Wrong” Randy Newman is America’s one-man Bertolt Brecht--Kurt Weill show. Among recording artists, he‘s our wryest social commentator of the past 30 years, and a consummate musician as well. Despite his feel-good......

Photo by Ed KreigerPerfectly respectable productions of Anton Chekhov’s plays performed locally over the past several seasons have been awash in dour poignancies, somber ironies and a generalized ennui, all flowing from an icy pool of philosophizing aristocrats. Though there’s been some evidence of the Russian master’s subterranean humor, it’s......

Photograph by Joel West In 1959, atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair sued the Baltimore school district in which her son William was enrolled, charging that officially sanctioned morning prayers in his classroom imposed religion upon the boy in a constitutionally protected secular zone. Her complaint is more or less re-enacted in......

Photo by Tanesa Whiting In one scene, the narrator (Julian Bleach) of Shockheaded Peter — the much-heralded, ghoulish cabaret/puppet show from England — holds a large magnifying glass in front of his face in order to distort and distend his nostrils and eye sockets. Like the rest of the show,......

Photo by Joan Marcus The first of many questions provoked by the Center Theater Group’s lavishly decorated, beautifully performed and ultimately ridiculous production of The Scarlet Pimpernel (based on Baroness Orczy’s novel) is how many more musicals about French history they think we can stomach. With Les Misèrables, Martin Guerre......

It‘s hard to argue with a theater perforM-ance as visually ravishing as adapter Mary Zimmerman’s staging of tales by the Roman poet Ovid, now at the Mark Taper Forum. But I‘d like to try. Ovid was a storyteller, and so is Zimmerman, a recent MacArthur ”genius“ award recipient. Her approach......

Photo by Ted Soqui Ties galore punctuated a festive 21st annual L.A. Weekly Theater Awards (honoring stages of 99 seats or less, for productions that opened in 1999), held Monday night at the ever-gracious LATC, co-hosted by the ever-iridescent Charlotte Rae and Chris Wells. In 26 competitive categories, six resulted......