‘A Soldier’s Play’: Theater Review

It’s no secret that the hills of L.A.’s gorgeous Los Feliz neighborhood boast a veritable treasure trove of architectural gems. One of them is this enchanting French Tudor Revival, built in the 1930s and designed by Frank Scott Crowhurst, the architect responsible for Walt Disney’s nearby family home and Burbank studio.

A musical drama about the imminent demise of a shipbuilding town in the North East of England, and a union’s last-ditch attempt to reclaim the village’s pride? Audiences: No thanks.

A show based on the real-life friendship of longtime pals Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest is on its way.

SiriusXM announced on Thursday (Feb. 6) that Pearl Jam is set to take the stage of the iconic Apollo Theater next month for an exclusive show.The invitation-only concert for SiriusXM subscribers and Pandora listeners, taking place on March 26, will mark the first time the legendary rockers have ever performed at the historic venue, and will occur just hours prior to the release of the band's eleventh studio album, Gigaton.

Silent Sky — Photo: Scott Suchman

The idea that Samuel Beckett’s plays are actually funny in performance is considerably more honored in theory than in practice. But happily, a rare pairing of his “Endgame” and the little-seen “Rough for Theatre II,” now playing at the Old Vic in London, bucks the trend.

When an ancient woman seeing out her last days in a trash can asserts that "nothing is funnier than unhappiness," it's impossible not to laugh. But then she, and playwright Samuel Beckett, quickly add a corrective: "We laugh with a will in the beginning.

It took a trio of MacArthur Fellows — composer Matthew Aucoin, playwright Sarah Ruhl and director Mary Zimmerman — to bring to the boards L.A. Opera's world premiere Eurydice, a vibrant and musically of-the-moment take on a tale that has been adapted to the medium roughly 70 times before.

Paul Mazursky's 1969 film comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a witty social satire about the sexual revolution and the confusion it engendered among a generation, was perfect for its era. Now there's a new musical adaptation, receiving its off-Broadway world premiere with The New Group and staged by the company's artistic director, Scott Elliott.

The business of real estate is notoriously cutthroat — but luckily, Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles is like a family.

There's an awful lot of baggage attending the new modern-day riff on the classic Greek tragedy Medea. Written and directed by Simon Stone "after Euripides," as the program puts it, this version retains very little of the original beyond the essential plot element of a scorned woman murdering her children.

Pilgrims — Photo: Christopher Banks

Spring Awakening: Evan Daves — Photo: C. Stanley Photography

Merry Wives — Photo: Cameron Whitman

The Confession of Lily Dare fairly begs the question: Why stay home watching old films on Turner Classic Movies when you can see Charles Busch send them up in his gloriously campy, cross-dressing fashion? Returning to the parodistic style with which he made a name for himself in such comedies as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Psycho Beach Party and Die, Mommie, Die! (the last two also made into movies), the actor-writer here delivers an amusingly loving send-up of the sort of melodramatic, pre-Code

A life hanging perilously in the balance of charged-up, polarized opinions: This courtroom drama could easily have been titled “Twelve Angry Women.” But playwright Lucy Kirkwood (“Chimerica,” “The Children”) is far too strong and imaginative a writer for so hand-me-down a cliché. Instead she opts for “The Welkin,” an old English term for the vault of the sky, and the scope of that word indicates the scale of her ambition.

Watching the new comedy by the normally more adventurous playwright Bess Wohl, it's hard to avoid the feeling that it resembles a never-aired episode of Everybody Loves Raymond. The play features a squabbling elderly couple and their adult children who trade sharp one-liners while dealing with a domestic crisis.

There has always been a reassuring earnestness about Sting — a rock star fueled by art and activism, content to consume himself with projects not necessarily driven by fame and fortune. His latest isThe Last Ship, a reboot of his commercially disappointing 2014 Broadway show, a semi-autobiographical look at a dying shipyard town in the north of England.There were all sorts of reasons the original production didn’t fly on Broadway, but Sting’s glorious music was not one of them.