When a show lists a Trauma Counselor in the credits and has a “healing space” outside of the theater proper, you know you are in for an intense experience. Kill Move Paradise will make you feel like you’ve been holding your breath for 75 minutes. That edge of your seat, breath-caught feeling is fitting, but […]

You’d think the big perk of being king is being able to do whatever you want. That is tragically not the case with Edward II, the duty-bound and defiant monarch of E2, an ambitious and sobering play by local scribe Bob Bartlett about the current cold wave of sexual intolerance that threatens to engulf hard-fought […]

Rep Stage’s gracious production of Stephen Temperley’s Souvenir: A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins makes you miss many things. Piano players in restaurants and cocktail lounges. Songs that make you shiver with ache, like “Violets for Your Furs.” Day dresses. Velvet hats and matching gloves. Most of all, kindness. The relationship between […]

If there was ever a time for old-fashioned spoofy fun, it’s now. Your chance to goof off comes courtesy of Rep Stage’s joy-buzzery production of The 39 Steps, directed by Joseph W. Ritsch with an arched eye for the comic and absurd. [adsanity_rotating align=”aligncenter” time=”10″ group_id=”1455″ /] Playwright Patrick Barlow’s stylish and silly send-up of […]

How can one play make you low in spirit but high on life? In less than two hours, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 takes you on a whip-smart ride between sadness that race and class issues remain unchanged since the 1992 Rodney King verdict and uprising—and  in some ways are actually worse—and exhilaration at witnessing fine […]

Things that are Round, Callie Kimball’s fine new play getting its world premiere at Rep Stage, could, with justice, be called Things that are Delusional, for it is the power and authority of things which are not true and not real which do the hard work of the play. It begins with an ordinary interview […]

The lean, black box staging of Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street by Joseph W. Ritsch packs a more muted wallop than other versions I have seen but is highlighted by a cast of eight gifted singing actors.

Sam Shepard’s obituary in the New York Times describes his plays as hallucinatory, though his Pulitzer Prize finalist, True West, is relatively close to naturalistic. Critics often count it as part of Shepard’s tragic Family Trio, even though it has plenty of opportunities for comedy. Rep Stage leans into the comedic and the bizarre, giving the […]