-
Musical theater
“Hamilton” was nobody’s idea of a box-office bonanza. When you consider the elevator pitch, it’s lucky to have been staged at all: Imagine a musical based on a wordy biography about one of America’s less well-known founding fathers, an immigrant whose career high was serving as Treasury secretary. The score will include a lot of rap music, and performers of color will play most of the major roles. We’ll cover many arcane historical...
-
Entertainment
When the audience enters Ruskin Group Theatre at Santa Monica Airport, onstage is an examining table bearing a Jack Russell terrier snuggled in a soft little towel. Oh, dear. Are we going to be laughing or crying? There’s cause for both throughout “The Rainbow Bridge” by Ron Nelson, who filled his play with funny lines — and there’s quite a bit of life’s truths in there. But the work needs a rethink. It can and should be...
-
Musical theater
Don’t let the habits fool you. These disco divas are ready to get down. The Torrance Theatre Company continues its season with the Tony-nominated musical “Sister Act,” which brings music, laughs and a lesson about different worlds coming together to the James Armstrong Theatre. “It’s not a serious piece, but there is a really nice message about finding out what’s important in...
-
Entertainment
No one is safe from this Broadway musical. It pokes fun at just about everything, especially other Broadway musicals. Monty Python’s “Spamalot” is cheeky, a bit disrespectful and maybe even rude, but it’s also a hilariously smart and surprisingly sophisticated show that became a Broadway sensation, earning 14 Tony Award nominations and winning three, including best new musical. So when 3-D Theatricals brings the musical comedy to
-
Entertainment
San Pedro’s Little Fish Theatre is celebrating a milestone as its signature production, “Pick of the Vine,” turns 15 this year. The season-opening series is a collection of fewer than a dozen short plays chosen from hundreds of entries every year. It launched with the opening of the 65-seat theater in 2002 and to date more than 140 original short plays have been produced as part of the series. And to...
-
Entertainment
In their West Coast premieres, two one-act radio plays by Anthony Minghella grace the smaller stage at Pacific Resident Theatre. Though the two are produced as radio plays, the actors speaking from music stands, Michael Peretzian directs with enough subtext and reactions to start the audience’s imagination moving and filling in any blanks. Minghella (writer-director of “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “The English Patient”) wrote “Hang Up” in...
-
Entertainment
Imagine writing a play in the hopes of creating as complex a double helix as a strand of DNA. That appears to be the intent of Arun Lakra, whose “Sequence” is at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills. Complex it is, at least in volume though not necessarily in nuance. Still, the play proves artfully directed enough that the script’s overt nature is, to some extent, overcome. Essentially, two strands of story take place on the same stage at the same time. In one, a man...
-
Entertainment
Driving home from a summer job making sandwiches, in a grisly road accident, a 17-year-old killed his 9-year-old sister. Fifteen years later, he talks about it — the collision, his family’s reactions, coping — in playwright Adam Rapp’s “Nocturne.” It’s in production by Triptych Theatre through Aug. 13 at the tiny Vs. Theatre in West Los Angeles, where we listen, breathlessly, to a 90-minute monologue that takes us down that road...
-
Musical theater
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was fierce. A singer and guitarist, Tharpe blended her gospel roots with jazz, blues and R&B, creating her own style, and is credited with helping create rock ’n’ roll. Her hits include “Down by the Riverside,” “This Train” and “Strange Things Happen Every Day,” and she influenced many musicians, including Elvis Presley,
-
Plays
There is a moment toward the end of a favorite documentary where people who grew up in the then-segregated African-American neighborhood around Central and Slauson in L.A. talked about the loss of that neighborhood with regret. Entrance into the mainstream was great, they say, but they lost those close-knit community ties. I could not help but think of this while watching Lauren Yee’s funny, insightful “King of the Yees” at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City.
