The big/little world of the Garage Theatre’s ‘Babylon Heights’

PHOTO by JAMI JOHNSON
Thanks to its cult following, any work incorporating The Wizard of Oz is bound to have an audience, even if the rationale is mere curiosity or nostalgia. Authors of any such work can’t help but know this, and so the danger is that they [...]

More hillbilly Lawrence Welk than ‘Walk the Line,’ La Mirada’s Johnny Cash dazzles nonetheless

Dyed-in-the-wool Johnny Cash fanatics usually don’t like anyone singing Cash but Cash—and those obsessive hipsters would certainly never buy tickets to a showcase of his music unless other woolly hipsters were singing it. But if you’re a moderate Cash admirer, who occasionally [...]

Enter the absurd world of Alive Theatre

PHOTO by JONATHAN LEWIS
The Alive Theatre gang are totally those kids you knew in high school who were constantly being laughed at, not with. You remember: the dorky drama nerds who thought it would be a plumb fantastic idea to bust out a little commedia dell’arte during the lunch [...]

Tom Jacobson’s ‘Bunbury’ tries rewriting the classics
Playwright Tom Jacobson’s Bunbury, on now at Long Beach Playhouse’s Studio Theatre, is a tantalizing “What if . . . ?”—asking a question that it wisely never quite answers.
This being a play, it takes a while before we finally hear it, from the title character (an admirably overwrought Stephen [...]

‘Women of Troy’ is a painful lesson on casualties of war

PHOTO by KEITH IAN POLAKOFF
Women of Troy opens on a meeting between gods, Poseidon (Juan Carlos Parada) and Athena (Ivana Karapandzic) considering a just-wrapped 10-year war (victorious Greeks on one side, Trojans on the other) and, here comes the sort of interesting twist for Team [...]

Don’t rock the boat, baby

I was prepared for “modern rock songs.” I was ready for “dance with urban elegance.” I was even up for “relevant sketch comedy.” And when the bright and shiny kids, all dolled up in their Liza lashes and Joel Grey bowties, opened the cruise-boat cabaret show with a perky, multipart harmony [...]

(Because the lady gets the chair!)
Machinal is the story of a murderess.
It is not a sexy, song-and-dance-filled story of a murderess. Renee Zellweger will not appear to surprise us with good acting and a terrific little cha cha cha. (Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Roxie Hart!) Nor is our murderess a vamp, a la Hedda Gabler, [...]