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Tony Awards
Now that last year’s big winner “Hamilton” is out of contention this year, the race for Broadway’s best begins anew. So you don’t miss any of the excitement, tune in to CBS for the Tony Awards, which returns to Radio City Music Hall, live at 8 p.m. Sunday, June 11. The musical “Dear Evan Hansen” and the play “Oslo” are favored to win in their respective categories. But with veterans as well as brand-new hits on...
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Entertainment
If performing arts lovers share one thing in common, it’s the desire for more choices closer to home. Luckily, the Hollywood Fringe Festival has them covered this month. Beginning Thursday, audiences can catch 375 productions that range from comedy and ensemble theater to nontraditional immersive performances at more than 30 venues in a single square mile of Hollywood through June 25. That’s nearly 100 more shows...
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Entertainment
The Magrath sisters have relationship problems. One sister never had a man she loved, another just left the one she had and the third, well, she just shot one. And it’s those aching, dysfunctional hearts that really bring this family together in Beth Henley’s Pulitzer- and New York Drama Critics Circle Award-winning dramedy “Crimes of the Heart.” “It is a wild, wacky ride. Outrageous, eccentric and yet filled with great humor and lots...
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Entertainment
In 1970, when Americans had causes to fight for, we literally took a stand, physically joining forces, moving into action for what we believed in. We didn’t merely tweet. Even the popular music that year was the soundtrack for social activism, including the evocative rhythms and potent lyrics of “Ball of Confusion,” “Ohio” and “War.” Music of that era forms the soundtrack for the story of Mari and Will, the couple at the heart of...
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Plays
This year marks the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, when U.S. citizens were forced to abandon their homes and businesses and move into camps, such as the Santa Anita Assembly Center in Arcadia. Gordon Hirabayashi defied the order. The college student was imprisoned 90 days for curfew violation. Later he took a principled stand against racial discrimination and spent a year in prison for refusing induction into...
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Theater
Catherine the actor and Jamie the writer find a bit of success during their marriage and start to see the other as unavailable at best, heartless at worst. Or were they always a mismatch? And so goes “The Last Five Years,” in which they reveal this in a series of songs about their courtship, marriage and divorce. Jamie sings his version of their story in chronological order, starting with the type of woman he was looking for. Catherine sings her version of their story in...
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Theater
In 1988, the fledgling duo of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty produced their first musical: “Lucky Stiff.” The show is a silly send-up of the mystery/suspense genre, and based loosely on the 1983 book “The Man Who Broke Monte Carlo.” Now open in a new production at Actors Co-op in Hollywood, the show itself proves a bit creaky, though the pair would go on to write “Ragtime,” “Suessical the Musical” and “Once Upon This...
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Entertainment
The war is over. Thousands of dismembered corpses lie in stinking heaps picked over by vultures. Wailing women search for lost loved ones as the two surviving kings look on in dismay at the extent of the carnage. How has the state of the world come this horrific place, they ask? From that description, you might think this is a preview of the upcoming season of “Game of Thrones.” In fact it is a description of the opening scene of “Battlefield,” Peter...
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Entertainment
Rajiv Joseph’s world premiere play “Archduke,” as its title evidences, centers on the assassination that history tells us led to World War I. It also examines our innate need to live a meaningful life. Three Balkan boys in their late teens are adrift. It’s 1914, and not much is available to them, including longevity. More troublingly, each seems alone, uneducated, unloved. One of them, Gavrilo (Stephen Stocking), has at long last sought medical...
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Musical theater
In the final scene of the Broadway hit musical “Hamilton,” the cast takes center stage, gazes into the audience and sings in an emotional crescendo, “Who lives, who dies, who tells the story?” The lights dim, the crowd erupts, and the 2,000 high school kids in the audience know exactly who will tell the story: It’s them. Thanks to a curriculum project backed by the “Hamilton” creators, thousands of students at high schools in...
