News And Blogs

Alexis Scheer is the playwright behind Our Dear Dead Drug Lord, onstage at the Kirk Douglas Theatre this month. Her other work includes adapting the book of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bad Cinderella, screenwriting for Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, and projects developed for HBO Max and Salma Hayek’s Ventanarosa. She was born and raised in a Jew...

21 Questions With Alexis Scheer

Roses are blooming, chocolates are sweet, and love is the factor that makes it complete. Valentine’s Day is this month, and the sugary scent of love encompasses all. With our rose-tinted shades on, we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to take a walk down memory lane and look at some of our favorite love-centric productions presented h...

A Rose-Tinted Stroll

HAPPY APRIL! It’s the month that starts off with dad jokes, belly laughs, prank calls, and awkward moments where you pretend to laugh at your director’s less-than-funny jokes. But for pranksters and comedians, this is the time to shine. Comedy is a unique tool that helps artists communicate their stories through laughs and cackles. It’s a sto...

‘Jokesters’ at Center Theatre Group

“Building [the Auntie Sewing Squad]...has been a radical experiment in generosity, intersectional alliances, and a paradigm outside of capitalism…If this is the end, we go down sewing,” Kristina Wong wrote of her experience founding the Auntie Sewing Squad—a mutual aid group born from the pandemic and the subject of her latest play, Kristin...

Going down sewing with the Auntie Sewing Squad

Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord, opening the Kirk Douglas Theatre season this February, recounts Wong’s rise to “mutual-aid doomsday cult leader” and “sweatshop overlord” after creating a community of Aunties to sew masks for vulnerable communities at the start of the pandemic. This group then grew nationwide, and her performance about...

Getting to know Kristina Wong

In Elephant Room: Dust from the Stars, an eclectic triad of magicians turned astro-nots take you on a virtual trip through time and space. You’ll arrive in the distant year 2020 against a dystopian backdrop of near total planetary collapse—a mysterious plague ravages the earth, temperatures are heating up, chaos rules the streets, democracy han...

The Journey to the Elephant Room

Mike Birbiglia made his Broadway debut last fall with The New One, but he is probably already on your radar thanks to his Off-Broadway shows (including Sleepwalk with Me and My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend), his films (he wrote, directed, and starred in Don’t Think Twice and acted in features including Trainwreck and The Fault in Our Stars), his stan...

All of Us Are in a Room with Mike Birbiglia

To portray the vast canvas of American periods and locales on display in A Play Is a Poem—Ethan Coen’s World premiere collection of short plays onstage at the Mark Taper Forum September 11 – October 13, 2019—it takes a large and capable cast. In just under two hours, the action onstage goes from the East Coast to the West Coast—twice—an...

Play or Poem; It Takes a Village

According to John Leguizamo, “we are all morons”—himself included, as he explains in his new show Latin History for Morons (onstage at the Ahmanson September 5 – October 20, 2019). In a classroom-like setting, the play hashes out a chronicle of Latin culture, one that is absent from the pages of conventional American textbooks—and both La...

‘We Are All Morons’

John Leguizamo’s Latin History for Morons, his new solo show onstage at the Ahmanson September 5 – October 20, 2019, has a simple premise: Leguizamo’s young son has been bullied at his upscale private school. According to the bully, there are no Latinx heroes in the history books. Leguizamo sets out to rectify this problem by excavating the l...

John Leguizamo’s Pan-Latinx Vision

For nearly 30 years, John Leguizamo has been creating and starring in landmark solo theatre productions that draw on his life to bring audiences around America laughter, understanding, and even catharsis. At the same time, of course, he’s graced our screens in everything from his recent Emmy®-nominated turn in When They See Us and roles in To Wo...

John Leguizamo Is Going to Rock You