A PANTO ON TARGET Laguna Playhouse, in concert with Lythgoe Productions, has fashioned an Americanized version of the classic, wildly popular, British holiday pantomime.  While it may not check all the boxes for our friends across the pond, it features plenty of verbal treasures ripe for its target…

A FASHION ICON WALKS THE RUNWAY AGAIN Well, it’s not exactly a runway, yet Jeanna de Waal, the actor tapped to embody the princess in La Jolla Playhouse’s new musical DIANA, certainly models quite an array of fashions from the Broadway costumer William Ivey Long to stunning effect.…

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE! “Yesterday” (actually quite a few days ago) we continued our mission to see as many shows as possible during our stay in Las Vegas. Susie Reese and I decided that the MIRAGE casino deserved another visit for BEATLES LOVE. The Beatles song catalogue comprises the sound of…

HORSIN’ AROUND IN SARSAPARILLA CITY “Over there!”, the kids scream excitedly. “You can, you can!”, a bespeckled boy urges on the sheriff.  “I’m going to be an astronaut”, the timid, young lady observes in response to a question about dreams. Leaning over, totally engaged in the action. Bouncing…

FUN HOME…SHORT FOR FUNERAL HOME? Ostensibly, that’s right; it is set primarily in a funeral home.  At its core the Chance Theater production could be said to center on a dysfunctional family. I suppose in this way it shares some parallels with the curiously engaging TV series “Six…

WHO’S READY TO GET KINKY? Well…that’s the pitch emblazoned on the program cover of the production currently on the boards at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts with the 3-D Theatricals version of KINKY BOOTS. Maybe this pitch floats your boat, but for this critic the…

A TALL ACHIEVEMENT Seeing Tommy Tune on CBS reminded me of one of my Broadway obsessions. I saw GRAND HOTEL 4x in New York and to this day I regard it as the greatest directorial achievement I have witnessed among several hundred Broadway productions. This Wright & Forrest score,…

A LIFE DIMINISHED, YET JUBILANT Few of us experience the trauma in our own life faced by Billie Holiday in her journey. Rape, abandonment, jail, racism, drug addiction, poverty – all of these impacted the life of one of the greatest singers of the 20th Century. Throughout…

A LITTLE GIRL FINDS SOLACE IN BOOKS Children comprise the core of Roald Dahl’s widely read MATILDA now entertaining families at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts.  And the youthful ensemble “smashingly” schools the audience in this exuberant, good vs. evil story. The opening number “Miracle” seals…