Anna Jensen

What did our critic think of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST at PCPA: Marian Theater?

PCPA’s production of “Cabaret” delivers musical and dramatic thrills as two ill-fated couples try to dance around ascending brutality of the rising Nazi party in Berlin. 

The Play That Goes Wrong is a side-splittingly funny production not to be missed. The laughs begin as you enter the theater and last to the final bows. It’s a play that goes wrong by design, of course, and then goes more wrong in service of our amusement as the Cornley Drama Society puts on the murder mystery The Murder at Haversham Manor.

Little Shop of Horrors director/choreographer Keenan Hooks blends camp sensibilities with emotional honesty in his staging of this musical. The theatricality of the puppeteering in this send-up of B-horror flicks like “The Day of the Triffids” or “It Came from Outer Space” and 1960s pop tunes make it worth the price of admission.

A warm and tender tale of resilience and the power of imagination.

What did our critic think of THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT at Rubicon Theatre Company?

What did our critic think of THE THANKSGIVING PLAY at ETC?

'Nunsense,' now playing at SLO Rep, delivers an evening of heavenly harmonies and gentle comedy to tempt even novice theater-goers. 

What did our critic think of EMMA at Marian Theater? A confectionary morsel of Regency romance!

The chaperone has hit the bottle pretty hard and is 'napping.' The young lady she's meant to watch over has cold (or are they itchy?) feet about her impending nuptials. What could go wrong? Everything--in the most musical and zany way possible, of course. The screwball Broadway hit, The Drowsy Chaperone opens at the Marjorie Luke's stage this weekend.

In an unnamed mountain town, two neighboring couples share the last name, 'Jones.' As they become better acquainted with one another, they discover further commonalities, both comic and poignant.

What did our critic think of CINDERELLA at PCPA's Marian Theater?

Miss You Like Hell plays November 4-13, 2022 (Friday - Sunday) at Center Stage Theater in Santa Barbara, CA.

A fun, sweet, and multi-layered presentation of this favorite of Stephen Sondheim's musicals. PCPA ventured 'Into the Woods' on Saturday night to open its run of Stephen Sondheim's musical. There's fun to be found in following well-known fairy tale characters such as Little Red Riding Hood (Ekatrina Bouras), Rapunzel (Elizabeth Martinié), and Cinderella (Gracie Jurczy) lose themselves in the woods. Our familiarity with the stories allows Into the Woods to enlarge, send up, fracture, and interweave their storylines--all in the service of an engaging evening of musical theater.

NAACP, Garland and Ovation Award-winning actor Chris Butler plays 36 different roles in Rubicon Theatre Company’s production of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 by Anna Deavere Smith. The production begins previews on April 27 and opens on April 29, the 30th anniversary, to the day, of the announcement of the verdict in the Rodney King Trial and what was then called the L.A. Riots.

A 'joyful' celebration of Shakespearean theater and the Broadway musical!

The Secret Garden, PCPA's enchanting holiday musical, will delight the whole family with its hopeful, heartfelt story of love, loss, and regeneration.

San Luis Obispo Rep's craftily staged production of Deathtrap, a comedy thriller, delivers on the foreshadowing promise of its opening dialogue: 'One set, five characters. A juicy murder in Act One, unexpected developments in Act Two. Sound construction, good dialogue, laughs in the right places.' Deathtrap's stage action runs like an intricately laid out fox hunt where the audience as the pack of hounds follows continuously forking trails of red herrings. And it's delightful.

Just today, famed opera singer Plácido Domingo resigned from LA Opera amid accusations that he sexually harassed workers there. It seems as though such stories are far more common than they were a few years ago. In October 2017, journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the stories of women sexually assaulted and harassed by the movie producer, Harvey Weinstein. That story was followed by an explosion of women who shared their own experience of workplace harassment. So many women posted under the 'MeToo' hashtag, that the systemic infection of sexual harassment became harder to deny.