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6 days ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Andrew Child
The reviews for Life of Pi have arrived at a clear consensus. After its Sheffield premiere, the play took London, Boston, and then Broadway by storm eliciting praise and garnering prestigious awards for its sumptuous design elements.
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1 week ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Andrew Child
Before being tapped to direct A Doll’s House, Part 2 for Pasadena Playhouse, Jennifer Chang mostly remembered Ibsen’s canonical work as a play she read while in undergrad. It has been interesting, then, to not only reflect on a Norwegian play from 1879 through a contemporary lens, but to additionally reflect on Lucas Hnath’s 2017 play through 2025’s landscape.
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1 week ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Andrew Child
Anyone who has ever strolled down Grand Avenue and glanced up at the street light banners will agree: LA Opera has a brilliant marketing team. With each presentation, they seem to come up with a clean, unified vision that makes their upcoming production seem appealing and broadly approachable. Remember the yellow campaign plastered across the city announcing their recent production of Così fan tutte? The quirky fun of the staging was broadcast perfectly to the public.
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2 months ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Andrew Child
I went into LA Opera’s current offering, Michael Cavanagh’s staging of Mozart’s Così fan tutte without any preconceived notions of the libretto, and the program prepared me for the worst. Notes discussing the opera’s “troubling study in power and agency” or warning that “those who are troubled by the story (…) are in good company” seem to foretell of an uncomfortable evening. What dated gender norms and misogynist humor was I about to be subjected to under the thin excuse of a ‘gorgeous score’?
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2 months ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Andrew Child
When drag queen Peaches Christ reached out to cult cinema icon Mink Stole over 20 years ago about appearing in her upcoming celebration of the John Waters film Desperate Living, she never could have anticipated the friendship and collaborations that would ensue.
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2 months ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Andrew Child
When director Gregg T. Daniel saw Don Cheadle and Jeffrey Wright in the premiere of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog back in 2002, he knew it was a play he wanted to direct. “The writing is muscular, clever, funny, it just caught me,” he remembers. “I think the Pulitzers got it right,” he continues, reflecting on the play’s 2002 award, which made Parks the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer for Drama. “There’s a great sense of theatricality, an element of surprise.
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2 months ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Andrew Child
The Catalina Jazz Club is nestled in an industrial-looking building down a side street off Hollywood Boulevard. It is inconspicuous to say the least— one enters through a parking garage and waits in a courtyard that feels more like an office building than a performance venue. However, inside awaits a dinner club that boasts a surprising range of upcoming performances. John Cameron Mitchell’s cabaret show exhibited his demented, impish persona through a series of high-energy numbers.
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2 months ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Andrew Child
The team behind The Camp, a new opera currently premiering at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center’s Aratani Theatre should be commended for achieving precisely what they set out to do. With a superior level of artistry in terms of performance, composition, and design, the reality of the Japanese American concentration camps is relayed to contemporary audiences.
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2 months ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Andrew Child
There are many reasons Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most treasured works. It has a natural propulsion that can carry contemporary audiences through its deeply human narrative. It drips with sensationalism— violence, sensuality, witches, ghosts, madness, and prophesy are well-placed throughout its five acts. It has a lot to say about gender, about power and its ability to corrupt, about the selfishness inherent to human nature.
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Feb 5, 2025 | 
broadwayworld.com | Andrew Child
Beth Leavel is no stranger to LA audiences or to the Ahmanson Theatre, where she will open next week in the North American premiere and pre-Broadway engagement of Sondheim’s Old Friends: A Great Big Broadway Show. The photographic proof still hangs in the lobby: she traipsed these boards twenty years ago in the titular role of The Drowsy Chaperone before the show’s Broadway run. In chatting with her, it is clear she holds Los Angeles crowds in high regard.
