So here are two smart new plays in two intimate theaters across town from one another, both with lovingly conceived productions. Here we see it once again: L.A. as an incubator of the kinds of works that simply wouldn't be born in other cities where union actors aren't permitted to......
"After 30 years of volunteering, Equity members will have the opportunity to be paid," says Maria Somma, national director of communications for Actors Equity' Association. The union for actors and stage managers is campaigning to end L.A.'s 99-Seat Plan, which currently allows actors to volunteer at theaters of 99 seats......
In the immersive theater piece The Day Shall Declare It, three actors play out various scenarios that start to look like a story but ultimately aren't. That's no problem, however. The scenes walk the audience through at least five exotically decorated locales. Separated by partitions of stacked wooden boxes, there's......
Allen Barton’s absorbing new drama, Disconnection, spun from his experiences with Scientology, looks at the fallout from a regime change at a self-improvement church, when that church, under a new administration, devolves into an abusive cult. When amateur pianist Landon (Bo Foxworth) resumes his musical hobby with the help of......
Shakespeare’s adage from Hamlet, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions,” seems to course through Stephen Karam’s Pulitzer Prize finalist play, Sons of the Prophet. The sorrows arrive with such tenacity upon a Lebanese immigrant family that they become a source of humor. One character learned to......
Actors' Equity Association, the New York–based union representing stage actors and stage managers, never liked L.A.'s 99-Seat Theater Plan, which allows union actors here to work for a pittance in theaters of 99 seats or less. The actors ratified it in 1987, but it wasn't until a 1989 court settlement......
When Zayd Dohrn's Reborning at the Fountain Theatre gets something right, it gets it so right that you may be left in a state of disorientation. That something is the gulf of incomprehension between Daizy and Kelly (Ryan Doucette and Joanna Strapp), an entrepreneurial couple not long out of art......
You're one of six college friends in, say, New York or even Nepal, and you want to visit Hollywood for a weekend. You can book a hotel for $75 to $350 a night, or you can seek an apartment or room in somebody's home via Roomorama, VRBO or the granddaddy......
Funerals emerge as a metaphoric backdrop in the West Coast premiere of Mac Rogers' Viral, as well as in Billy Elliot — The Musical, the London and Broadway sensation now enjoying a regional-theater presentation at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts. The latter concerns a coal mining town in......
In one of many striking images in Brian Kite’s staging of Billy Elliot – The Musical, an army of northeast England miners, having had their strike busted by Maggie Thatcher, descend en masse into a pit, the lamps on their helmets blazing forward, as they sing the rousing “Once We......
