Terry Morgan

I've come to the inescapable conclusion that a lot of the shows I'm covering these days fall into the capacious category of "a great production of a disappointing play." This is, unfortunately, yet another of those reviews.

The Lost Studio's new production of Jemma Kennedy's "The Grand Irrationality:" a play where good actors make the best of an uneven script and suffer through a surfeit of set changes so ponderous they sink the show.

The commingling of the political and the personal in a play is a delicate business. A political piece, by its nature, is message-heavy, whereas most drama concerns the subtleties of relationships. An occasional show can pull off this mixture brilliantly, such as Angels in America, but often the results can be uneven.

It's a commendable experiment, with every word of the book narrated or performed in character, the kind of audaciously big theatre that one rarely sees anymore. The ensemble is terrific, the direction provides some amazing set pieces, and it left me with a new appreciation of the novel.

The Geffen Playhouse has commissioned a show it would like to be its own regular holiday show, Donald Margulies' Coney Island Christmas, but unfortunately, while this is a solid production, the play is at best a mildly entertaining trifle.

While it's great that some plays have important messages and others are triumphs of style and wit, it's worthwhile to remember the considerable pleasures of investing in the trials and tribulations of a sympathetic character. Such is the appeal of Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel, receiving a solidly satisfying production right now at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Theatre Banshee's latest show, the U.S. premiere of Murphy's The Muesli Belt, is a moving and funny character study buoyed by terrific performances.

Circle X Theatre Co. has been one of the best theatre companies in Los Angeles for fifteen years now. One thing the company has never lacked for is ambition, and this admirable quality is on display in their current world premiere, Bad Apples. It's a musical concerning the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2003 and the people involved in it.

There's two reasons to see this show: the play is rarely produced, and here's an opportunity to experience it as done by one of the best classics-based theatre companies in town. The second reason is that one will rarely see this play so well performed.

Lynn Nottage's play, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, is more intriguing as a concept than a reality. It looks at the marginalization of African-American actors in the twentieth century, an undeniably interesting subject, but then stumbles in multiple ways. The fault, unfortunately, is in the writing, and the strong cast in the new production at the Geffen Playhouse isn't able to overcome this problem.