So Cal Arts & Entertainment

It takes two people to make a great painting, so the old axiom goes—one to paint it and one to tell him when to stop. Perhaps Aaron Sorkin put it in his contract his script for Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” (at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa...

Long before “Private Benjamin” and “A Few Good Men,” there were movies about women in the military. Better movies like “Cry ‘Havoc’,” “Mrs. Miniver” and “So Proudly We Hail!” The latter, about US Army nurses and the living hell they faced on Bataan and Corregidor...

“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...