Andrew Child - Page 3

It is difficult to imagine a better team than conductor Gustavo Dudamel and director Peter Sellars to allow Wagner’s score to freely and mystically float through the Walt Disney Concert Hall uninhibited by stage mechanics and repurpose every inch of the space to paint reverberating aural images.

BBMT is currently delivering a treat for all ages with their spunky rendition of Tchaikovsky’s popular Christmas ballet, complete with a team of evil mice, gracefully dancing sugarplum fairies, a growing Christmas tree, and all manner of delightful surprises.

Vinny DePonto is an extraordinarily engaging performer who, in front of a simple white backdrop, captivates the crowd like a bonafide vaudevillian.

Rather than paint a mural of multicultural children holding hands around the globe or undertake some other trite pass at celebrating diversity with young people, Imagine Theatre's artistic director, Armina LaManna chooses to prioritize stories from the intricate 'cultural fabric of LA', working equitably with local artists to share the narratives through new adaptations fused with music, dance, and puppetry. In 2019, the group premiered a new production of The Tale of Turandot which celebrated LA's rich Chinese culture. Their upcoming Warrior Queen: Anahit the Brave honors the 'large Armenian diaspora in Southern California'. I chatted with LaManna about her fundamental beliefs about theatre and her desires to infuse Los Angeles' theatre scene with a deeper respect and appreciation for children's theatre.

The performance at hand has its moments, and they are all while Patrick Warburton is on stage. He is a funny actor performing funny roles in funny scripts. I wish this group had just performed the texts as written. There are sound cues, animations, deadly pauses, and unexplainable impersonations which weigh down the tempos of the plays.

Especially thanks to Spencer Liff’s inventive staging and punchy choreography, the show is either a riotous musical bursting out of the seams of the intimate Bourbon Room or a drag revue elevated with a solid narrative, pristinely-timed punchlines, and innovative novelty routines.

I was not going to pass up an opportunity to see Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap in October—- a time when we’d all like to be a little frightened by our entertainment—- and seeing it on the seventieth anniversary of its London premiere was a delightful bonus.

The best way to describe my experience at A Noise Within’s production of Peter Hall, Adrian Mitchell, and Richard Peaslee’s 1984 musical version of Animal Farm is that when the ensemble came out to bow and I only counted 11 actors, my jaw dropped.

Though fused with the pop sounds of the latest Broadway grab toward tween-friendly franchises, Matthew Sklar and Chad Beguelin’s score has a heart that leans more toward the unabashed sincerity of The Pajama Game or The Music Man than the more saccharine offerings from the current scene.

Mike Birbiglia is an undoubtedly remarkable storyteller. The way his latest solo show, The Old Man and the Pool, which is playing now at CTG’s Mark Taper Forum, is structured is clean, snappy, clear, and concise.

King Liz is the premise for a television show at best, and, despite the noble work of those who are trying to pass it off as a piece of live theatre, its plot points, the characters’ relationships, and the narrative are only strong enough to grab our interest through the next commercial break.

Writer and performer D’Lo exudes coolness in his purple print button down and Lakers cap, and from his first entrance, it is evident that we are present for a fully polished, fully fleshed-out tour de force evening of theatre.

What did our critic think? Joseph has woven an intricate veil of social commentary which haunts the two characters. King James might be a play about a Black man finding a way to advocate for himself, a white man figuring out how his access to wealth has affected him, or two friends navigating the terrors of adulthood. 

There’s a lot going on, but the play itself lands its message within the first twenty minutes, and then bumbles through seventy more minutes of reiteration, repetition, and regurgitation.

Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky at Center Theatre Group gets a few topical buzz words in there, but there is nothing fresh, urgent, or timely about the piece. Pitting a closed-minded character against a cohort of progressive friends, the play is deadly: as dull as its message is heavy-handed.

If every theatre review compared each show to the last presentation by the same company, we would be lost beyond the already limited capabilities of “thumbs up vs thumbs down” or “three and a half stars”.

The thing about Lindsay Joelle’s Trayf, now playing at the Geffen Playhouse, is that it has really excellent dialogue. In every sense of the word. The opening patter between two Chassidic teenage boys fizzes like a sketch comedy routine and the rhythm carries like a current through a lot of silliness and a lot of seriousness.

Rogue Machine Theatre’s latest offering, the American premiere of Welsh playwright Daf James’ On the Other Hand, We’re Happy opens in a cloud of cliches.

Teenage Dick, a current streaming option from Pasadena Playhouse, filmed as a coproduction with the Huntington Theatre of Boston and Woolly Mammoth Theatre of DC is perfectly translated from the stage to the computer screen.

The play explores the friendship between Gina, a self-proclaimed “wordsmith” whose liberal “activism” channels through her popular podcast and a pending book deal, and Dru, the young “Banksy of the Black Lives Matter movement”.