'Sweeney Todd'...for Valentine's Day?
Plus 'The Notebook,' 'Brownstone,' 'More Miracles' and more non-miracles...
“Real-life tragedies and ironies have overshadowed the drama that’s on LA’s professional stages.”
That was the second sentence of my Angeles Stage post a year ago. It’s just as apt in the first Angeles Stage of 2026.
Since 2026 began, “breaking news” crises in the larger world keep popping up so frequently that it’s difficult for any theatrical production to burrow as deeply into my brain.
Last year’s January news flashes were more local because of the LA fires. This year’s calamities are more national and international. Our elected leader is becoming increasingly confused as well as corrupt, authoritarian, mendacious and addicted to expensive habits and hazards — such as oil and gas. Recently, he threatens to unconstitutionally “nationalize” the states’ elections management, probably with the goal of invalidating blue-state congressional-election results.
Does the theater that I’ve seen so far in 2026 reflect the urgency of this moment? No, for the most part.
Sure, it’s relatively easy for Bruce Springsteen to suddenly make a statement about our home-grown tyranny in his protest song “Streets of Minneapolis”. Likewise for a writer on late-night TV, or for someone who cancels a scheduled appearance at Trump’s perversion of the Kennedy Center. (In this week’s Kennedy Center “breaking news,” Trump now claims that he will shut it down on July 4 for two years of “renovations,” apparently leaving in the lurch the three Broadway tours that were scheduled to appear in DC after that date, among others).
Yet creating a fresh theatrical reaction to the Trumpian times requires more lead time. Maybe more reflections on the crises of January will crop up within the next year— when there will probably be even more crises ripe for commentary.
In the meantime…and the mean times
The best production that I saw in January opened on the last day of the month — Jason Alexander’s staging of “Sweeney Todd” at La Mirada Theatre.
Angeles Stage readers probably don’t need a briefing on the basics of the Stephen Sondheim/Hugh Wheeler musical about “the demon barber of Fleet Street.” It has been frequently produced here. In 2024, for example, the midsize A Noise Within produced it with a three-piece band, closely followed by an even smaller production at the Chance Theater in Anaheim.
However, in the 1251-seats La Mirada venue, with a 15-piece orchestra, “Sweeney Todd” is again as big as the title character’s lust for vengeance — and as cacophonous as the clanging chords of alarm sounded by Sondheim’s score. This grand guignol is gripping. The passions thrill, even as the actions of the characters chill.
Alexander’s revival is supposedly set within Jonas Fogg’s asylum. The first people we see are deranged inmates. Fogg is stationed primarily at the top of the stage, presiding over his domain as the inmates tell the story, mostly in song
I didn’t accept this notion as completely as Alexander describes it in a program note. Chances are that these inmates would not be competent storytellers, singers and dancers (the script is more often sung than spoken). But we need not take Alexander’s concept literally. It certainly succeeds in suggesting that, yes, the world as depicted is more or less an insane asylum.
Will Swenson’s Todd is reminiscent of the look of Johnny Depp’s Todd in the 2007 movie version, but Swenson’s singing voice is much richer than Depp’s. As Sweeney’s landlady/accomplice/would-be lover Mrs. Lovett, Lesli Margherita delivers a rowdy blast of musical comedy that temporarily leavens the horrors that surround her. Austyn Myers is terrific as her assistant Tobias, who is initially unaware of the nature of the ingredients in her meat pies. Chris Hunter’s Anthony makes the requisite magic from the song “Johanna.”
Paul Tate dePoo III designed the enormous set, magnificently lit by Jared Sayeg. But the citizens of La Mirada also deserve some of the credit. They fund the McCoy Rigby Entertainment productions at their civic facility.
By the way, I’ve noticed that La Mirada frequently uses this quote from the LA Times on promotional materials: “…one of the best Broadway-style houses in Southern California.” I wrote it in my 1995 Times review of a revival of the 1975 comedy “Same Time, Next Year.” The stars of that La Mirada revival were indeed Broadway-caliber, but I was referring primarily to the physical venue; the play already seemed dated.
Three decades later, this “Sweeney” suggests that most La Mirada productions themselves are also “Broadway-style” — in the most favorable interpretation of that ambiguous phrase. And the LA Times’ sole theater commenter these days, Charles McNulty, who has seldom ventured to La Mirada, might agree — judging from his “Sweeney” review.
Notes on ‘The Notebook’ and other musicals
The first big production to arrive in LA in 2026 was the tour of the Broadway musical “The Notebook,” which spent three weeks at the Pantages but then moved on to Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa, where it plays through Sunday.
Its narrative was born in 1996, as a novel by Nicholas Sparks. In 2004 it was transformed into a movie that made a lot of money, starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. The stage musical opened in Chicago in 2022, opened and closed on Broadway in 2024, and began its commercial tour last September.
In the story’s framework, an old man reads aloud to his now-Alzheimer’s-afflicted wife from her “notebook” about their marriage, in an attempt to help her remember their earlier years, when they first met — as well as a decade later when they re-united, just as she was about to marry another man. Characters from those earlier years emerge, singing and dancing as well as speaking.
I watched the movie only after seeing the musical. The film flows more smoothly. The problem with the musical is that it uses three sets of actors for the narrative’s three time periods instead of the two sets of actors in the movie. The movie’s Gosling and McAdams, clearly the stars, played the characters in both of the earlier decades. In the musical, separate actors play those characters who are only a decade apart. This sometimes creates moments of confusion and congestion.
This is especially true if your seats are close to the back of these huge venues. I could hardly make out the actors’ faces the first time I saw “The Notebook,” from a distant seat at the Pantages. So I arranged to see it again from a much closer seat. Everything became clearer, and I appreciated the individual performances in a way that I couldn’t from the remote boondocks.
I still don’t fully appreciate the score. Perhaps because the plot is somewhat cliched, many of Ingrid Michaelson’s songs sound like standard pop, not necessarily written for these characters. Bekah Brunstetter adapted the book. Michael Greif and Schele Williams are the credited tour directors.
Speaking of musicals, the premiere of the home-grown “Kid Gloves” is occurring through mid-February, at the Skylight in Los Feliz. At least on its opening weekend, this musical satire, by Matthew Leavitt (book and lyrics) and Nathan Wang (score), staged by Richard Israel for Village Green Productions, didn’t seem ready. It lasted about 110 minutes — with no intermission. The concept is an easy target — different types of adults, mostly cartoonish, are auditioning to host a kids’ show on an obscure streaming network. I laughed at first, but by the end I was spending more time editing the script in my head, wondering if this production was really just a workshop.
“The Altruist,” at Group Repertory on North Hollywood, might count as a quasi-musical. In it, a youngish LA man receives two terminal-disease diagnoses. Ain’t we got fun? Author Bill Fitzhugh seems to think so. The show uses old public-domain melodies with new lyrics for song and dance, plus pre-recorded instrumentals. It might be a would-be satire, but I didn’t laugh, especially in rather abstruse passages of dialogue that consider the legalities of the doomed man’s decision to sacrifice all of his organs to others who need them — and therefore accomplish something before he dies. An emcee who wants to turn the young man’s story into a Broadway musical provides meta commentary. Some performances feel wobbly, particularly the singing, and the choreography is (perhaps intentionally?) cliched.
Three’s company…or three’s a crowd?
Two current productions are more or less constructed as three plays in one.
The more carefully constructed of the two is Open Fist’s LA premiere — recently extended through March 14 — of Catherine Butterfield’s “Brownstone” in Atwater Village (although it was seen in 2008 on the edge of Greater LA, in its first production, at Laguna Playhouse).
The script depicts characters living in the same New York townhouse in different eras (late ‘30s, late ’70s, 1999-2001). Over the course of the play, the different pairs of residents take turns in the spotlight, but they also often share stage space simultaneously. That space — the interior of the brownstone — is the hub. The shifting stories held my interest and skillfully connected via Ron West’s staging and Jan Munroe’s set design.
By contrast, the three one-acts that make up “More Miracles,” at Culver City’s Actors’ Gang, seem much more haphazardly thrown together. The first of the three, “In Recovery” by Mary Eileen O’Donnell, caught my attention beforehand with its premise/promise of a contemporary therapy group for classic children’s literature figures. Brent Hinkley is quite remarkable as one of them, an aging Humpty Dumpty, greatly assisted by David Robbins’ sound design, but the writing of this extended comedy sketch is a bit spotty. There might be just a few too many characters in scenes set outside the therapy room.
Next up is “Nun Fight,” written and directed by Willa Fossum. It’s the most audacious — or excessive? — of the three, taking us to depths of violently rapacious behavior that none of us (at least non-Catholics) might expect from nuns, and it probably would offend some Catholics who might happen upon it.
The closing “16 Summers” is the most conventional of the three — an autobiographical solo performance by Ayindé Howell, dealing with father-son and other masculinity issues, with a few hip-hop and direct-address-to-audience segments.
Family fractures?
If Catholics might be most receptive to “Nun Fight,” the target audience for “Jewish for Dinner,” at Santa Monica Playhouse, is — who would have imagined? — Jews. A young-adult woman is attracted to a architect who is working with her rabbi on a synagogue project. She initially assumes he’s Jewish, but then learns that he isn’t. Will her family care? Much of the comedy stems from the architect’s frantic effort to quickly become more Jewish. Lou Stone Borenstein’s script is funny, but it’s hard to know if people who aren’t at least Jewish-adjacent, if not Jewish, would understand enough of the laugh lines.
Many plays depict family fights, but Stacey Martino Rivera’s “The Circle,” at Greenway Court Theatre, is one of the most bloated sessions of familial yelling that I’ve seen — or heard. Of the nine main characters, eight are in the same Latino-Irish-American clan, mostly in south Texas — although the initial scene is set in LA, where one of the family units lives. Actually, the play might benefit from completely cutting its first 15 or 20 minutes. It ran 2 hours, 45 minutes when I saw it. The one non-family character is a grumpy MAGA follower who somehow becomes a prisoner of one of the men in the family; I never quite believed this.
Back to the ‘40s with two Theatre 40 shows
Theatre 40 was perhaps the busiest company in Greater LA in January. It mounted two productions at different locations.
The premiere of Christopher Franciosa’s “What Opa Did” is still running at the company’s home base on the campus of Beverly Hills High School, through February 15. In it, a young American woman in the 1990s visits her half-Jewish grandfather in Germany to find out more about what he did and did not do during World War II. Eventually we learn that’s she’s seemingly on a covert mission for the Simon Wiesenthal Center (perhaps coincidentally, its headquarters is about a mile southeast of where we’re watching the play). But the plot is too tangled for me to say more. It doesn’t help that the actor playing the younger “Opa” looks nothing like the actor playing the older version.
Theatre 40’s other January production was director Cate Caplin’s shipshape revival of J.B. Priestley’s drawing-room morality drama “An Inspector Calls” — first produced in the mid-’40s but set in 1912. The production occupies a drawing room in the 1928 Greystone mansion (now part of a Beverly Hills city park). The most modern touch was that a woman — the formidable Mouchette Van Helsdingen — played the mysterious Inspector, investigating the members of a wealthy family who might be complicit in a young woman’s suicide. This should be revived for a longer run — at Greystone or some similar site.
Solos, including Justin Tanner’s
“My Son the Playwright”, in the intimate upstairs Rogue Machine space on Melrose, is the latest effort by one of my favorite LA playwrights, Justin Tanner. Although most of Tanner’s greatest hits are ensemble efforts, using other actors, this is a solo in which Tanner plays two characters — his own father expressing disdain for his son, and then some version of Tanner himself, apparently decades earlier. During an intermission, Tanner changes clothes and wig, and the set’s furnishings also change from his father’s household in northern California to his own LA digs of that previous time period. Both characters seem a bit over-the-top in this tiny space — at first to somewhat comical effect, but each act becomes a bit tiresome before it ends.
I’ll take note of two other solos that have already closed after brief January runs. Their subjects and problems were somewhat similar. “All the Devils Are Here”, at BroadStage in Santa Monica, was Patrick Page’s excursion through Shakespeare’s villains. Page is a capable interpreter of the Bard, both as a scholar and as an actor. The lighting design was effective. Still, the fact that it was just him on stage, even in passages that aren’t soliloquies, even in women’s roles, felt a bit like grandstanding.
Ditto for Eddie Izzard’s solo “Hamlet” in its brief run at the Ricardo Montalbán Theatre in Hollywood. Izzard is a comic, not a scholar, but he warned us that his recitation of the play wouldn’t be comedy. Still, his performance was more about his own amazing memory and vocal range and fashion sense than it was about Shakespeare’s play. My guess is that anyone seeing it without much previous experience with the play and knowledge of which characters say which lines would be completely befuddled.