Lyle Zimskind

ZJU's new production, "Nightmares," begins with one of the company's patented moments of total darkness and sustains it while what starts out as the sound of a normal human gasp escalates and escalates until it fills the room with what might be terror or might be excitement, something sinister or something exhilarating.

The Schlomo of the title is a 49-year-old, twice-divorced Al Goldstein look- and talk-alike (Jonathan Goldstein, presumably no relation) who prefers to go by the name of Richard and is so much smarter than most people that he's accumulated $450 in savings and lives in a dingy little one-bedroom in East Hollywood.

Two construction workers--one Nigerian, one African-American--bitterly vie for a single contract job to build a bunk bed. A couple of advertising-obsessed women in the Burbank Olive Garden wait desperately for a celebrity sighting. Three scarred characters seek reconciliation with their own pasts on the way to Coldwater Canyon. And a pair of lost souls try to find each other in the ethereal space where they're unwittingly trapped together. In what's getting to be a tradition on the Los Angeles theater scene, the Son of Semele Ensemble's fourth annual Company Creation Festival kicks off another new year.

The best thing about 'The Invisible Play,' currently in its West Coast premiere production at Theatre of NOTE in Hollywood, is its initial premise. But the show suffers from an undeniable vision problem.

"Invisible Cities" is a new operatic work by young New York composer Christopher Cerrone. The Industry is director Yuval Sharon's upstart Los Angeles opera company devoted to exploding traditional modes of staging new theatrical musical dramas. In this production, audience members wander around the train station and happen upon body-mic'd singers and dancers performing, usually simultaneously, in different areas in and outside the building. Equipped with high-tech wireless headphones, we can always hear everyone at once, even as for most of the performance we can almost never see everything that's going on at any given time.

Deanna Jent's "Falling," now receiving an impeccable West Coast premiere production, directed by Elina de Santos at Rogue Machine, is about the intense, heartbreaking travails of dealing with a severely autistic family member. But plays about human disabilities are tough to pull off.

Since its 1976 debut, Philip Glass's legendary avant-garde opera "Einstein on the Beach," directed by Robert Wilson, has attained near-mythic status as a landmark in contemporary art music. But it was never performed on the west coast until last year and it debuts in southern California tomorrow night, when LA Opera, in collaboration with CAP UCLA, presents the work at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Arguably the most popular opera of them all, Bizet's 'Carmen' should be a rousing crowd-pleaser, but LA Opera's opening night was underwhelming.

The annual Hollywood Fringe Festival is back in its fourth edition with around 200 shows running day and night in over 20 theater venues, all in one neighborhood, through the end of the month. Last week, we posted our thoughts on nine offerings we'd seen in three days. Here's how we liked three more randomly selected shows we've caught recently.

The annual Hollywood Fringe Festival is back in its fourth edition with around 200 shows running day and night in over 20 theater venues, all in one neighborhood, through the end of the month. On Thursday we posted our thoughts on six offerings we saw earlier in the week. Here's how we liked four more randomly selected shows we've seen since then, listed in roughly descending order of recommendation.