Garage’s annual holiday melodrama touches children inappropriately

Though nothing can touch what remains the undisputed, dizzying height of the Long Beach stage—Safe House’s 1998 kabuki Harold & Maude—the ultradoityourselfiness of the Garage Theatre’s fifth annual holiday melodrama (for kids!) Long Beach Is Sinking did touch me (inappropriately). With the fabulous villain, Amy Louise Sebelius, sneering in [...]

Long Beach Shakespeare Company deftly de-immortalizes a classic
There are several things disconcerting about the Long Beach Shakespeare Company’s adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon–that Sam Spade smokes Djarum cigarettes; that he wears cuffless pants; that he’s a blond. But none are so difficult to reconcile as the distance between the seminal 1941 film version [...]

Shipwrecked works because its actors do
South Coast Repertory’s production of Shipwrecked: An Entertainment, The Amazing Adventures of Louis De Rougemont (As Told By Himself) claims to be an examination of the nature of truth. Eh, not so much.Yes, Shipwrecked: An Entertainment, The Amazing Adventures of Louis De Rougemont (As Told By Himself) is about a [...]

International City Theatre delivers a modernized goddess

For a play that begins with a flitting dream-sequence dance between a lovesick Japanese schoolgirl in traditional kimono and a droning Greek love goddess in flowing robes, Calling Aphrodite is surprisingly down-to-earth, particularly after the atom bomb explodes.
Velina Hasu Houston’s new drama is inspired by the cruel irony of [...]

All photos by Daniel deBoom