Theater Reviews

Find out about other productions and show times in our theater listings — and don't miss Jeff Smith's theater blogs in Out & About.

La Jolla Playhouse stages John Guare's tour de farce His Girl Friday

Ben Hecht was a writer’s writer. He won the first Academy Award for a screenplay (Underworld, 1927). He rewrote the first nine reels of Gone with the Wind in seven days. He wrote 35 books ...

Lamb's Players stage musical drama Fiddler on the Roof

Lamb’s Players’ Fiddler on the Roof is one of the best shows they’ve ever done. Ever. The title comes from a wall painting Marc Chagall did for the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre in 1920. He ...

Be a Good Little Widow at the Old Globe

Miscast melody

She flits about like a sand flea, never in one place, or one state of mind, for long.

Old Globe maps Other Desert Cities

"Families are terrorized by their weakest member,” says a character in Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities. The line’s got that yowza zing to it, as if a fire-spewing profundity. But give it some thought ...

Federal Jazz Project time travels at the Rep

The good news about the Rep’s Federal Jazz Project: music lovers unfamiliar with the name Gilbert Castellanos are in for a surprise, maybe even an epiphany. The San Diegan’s a world-class trumpet player who can ...

The Old Globe stages Ibsen classic A Doll's House

I don’t mean to reduce Ibsen’s drama, but in some ways you could subtitle A Doll’s House “Behind the Scenes with Ken and Barbie.” Torvald and Nora Telmer live in such a profoundly rigid society ...

The Old Globe presents A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder

You see a great number in a musical and stop the show with rabid applause. But how many times have you really wanted the show to stop — and have them repeat the number on ...

The Mountaintop: The Rep stages Dr. King's last night on Earth

I make it a hard and fast rule when entering a theater: leave expectations at the door. Even if I know the play or the subject, I want as clean a slate as possible. Be ...

San Diego Musical Theatre presents a killer diller Chicago at the Birch in North Park

San Diego Musical Theatre’s knock-out production of Bob Fosse’s Chicago must close Sunday, March 3. If you like your entertainment steamy, decadent — and all that jazz — then sprint, don’t just run, to the ...

Gem of the Ocean docks in Old Town

“What good is freedom if you can’t do nothing with it?”

The Old Globe stages The Brothers Size

They are three African-American males at San Pere, Louisiana, near the Bayou. Ogun Henri Size, a mechanic, prides himself for being a responsible adult. Free-spirited younger brother Oshoosi’s back from two years in prison. Now ...