So Cal Arts & Entertainment

“Black people don’t vote but they hold symbolic weight,” a mayoral candidate tells us at the outset of August Wilson’s “Radio Golf,” at A Noise Within (ANoiseWithin.org) in Pasadena through Nov. 13. The candidate, real estate developer Harmond Wilks (Christian...

From the moment an explosion interrupts the opening song in "Nina Simone: Four Women" at South Coast Repertory, you know this show is not going to be the usual theatrical experience. Christina Ham’s impressionistic musical drama about the ‘60s African American...

At the suggestion of friend, I listened to the soundtrack of “Hamilton” before catching the show about America’s first secretary of the treasury opening night at Segerstrom Center for the Arts (scfta.org) in Costa Mesa—where it runs through Oct. 16.  The touring...

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...