So Cal Arts & Entertainment

Very few people could entice me to listen to an evening of Broadway show tunes. Not my drug of choice. But Bernadette Peters is one of the chosen few. She could sing selected passages from the Yellow Pages, the Racing Form, or the glossary of a textbook on...

F.P. 1 DOESN'T ANSWER (1932) is a German science fiction film made just before the Nazis turned their movie industry into a propaganda machine. Recently released on video, it would be wholly unfamiliar if not for one detail—Peter Lorre appears in a comedic supporting...

On my first visit to New York in 1975, I met with a friend who was working at the Public Theatre. There was a line around the block—if memory serves—for a show that had opened the night before. “A Chorus Line” soon transferred to Broadway and the rest is history. The...

Orange County actors are releasing a tremendous amount of wild, pent-up energy these days, as I’ve witnessed this past week in Costa Mesa Playhouse’s presentation of the zany farce “The Complete Works of Shakespeare (abridged)” and Newport Theatre Arts Center’s...

It’s not every day a director calls you with an invitation to see a new show. The director was Mark Travis and the show was called “A Bronx Tale,” starring a cast of one, a young actor I’d never heard of named Chazz Palminteri. I was knocked out by it. Here was a guy...

Not too sure about the so-called New Normal, but the new “Next to Normal,” at Anaheim’s intimate Chance Theater through Feb. 27, is a smash. Granted, a show about mental illness will not be everyone’s cuppa, and this Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning musical might hit...

While I’m waiting for live theater to come back to life I’m catching up on vintage films, and books about entertainment personalities of the past. And I have a lot of catching up to do, at the rate Kino Lorber and other companies are putting out Blu-ray releases....

Remember when actors were the special effects? The OC premiere of Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman (at the Chance Theater in Anaheim through Oct. 24) exemplifies what makes live theater so magical, at a pivotal time in this era of pandemic—the art of storytelling, a...