So Cal Arts & Entertainment

  South Coast Repertory pushes the concept of colorblind casting to the edge with their current production of Jane Austen’s "Sense and Sensibility" (in Costa Mesa through Sept. 29). Purists and history buffs may object at first glance to the multi-ethnic ensemble...

Take a wild guess what Ingrid Bergman did between leaving Sweden and coming to Hollywood. No, she didn’t go to Italy and make a porno flick (that I know of), but she did stop in Germany long enough to appear in a Nazi propaganda film about modern women. That’s the...

If you think you’re going crazy in the heat, the folks at Fullerton’s STAGEStheatre are one up on you. They’ve gone completely off their nut, at least the cast and crew of William Robert Carey’s “Idol Minds.” This is not one of those sophisticated French farces; it’s...

What are the chances of seeing a beautifully restored version of “Little Orphant Annie” (1918), starring a youthful Colleen Moore in her earliest extant movie? Pretty good, now that film historian and preservationist Eric Grayson has decided to make this long-held...

How many “Macbeths” and “Twelfth Nights” will audiences for Shakespeare support? An infinite number, it seems. Will people come to see something of the Bard’s so seldom staged most have never even heard of it, for example “The Winter’s Tale”? Yes, as it turns out—even...

There’s a little community called Niles in the Bay Area, south of Oakland, that has a unique claim to fame. In the early days of cinema, Charles Chaplin made a series of comedies there and “Broncho Billy” Anderson, the movies’ first cowboy star, made westerns. More...

“Greater Tuna” is served up not in a casserole dish, but by actors who know what they’re doing when it comes to satire. It would be easy to go over the top—after all, this zany, comedic look at the denizens of a tiny town somewhere in Texas lends itself to broad...