Los Angeles Theater

The Los Angeles Times, 2011-06-16
The roundtable discussion -- hosted by the Los Angeles Times' Culture Monster blog and moderated by Times theater critic Charles McNulty -- touched on a wide range of topics and elicited a diversity of opinions from the panelists, who acknowledged that there are no easy answers to encompass such a sprawling and fractured cultural landscape.

Back Stage - National Edition, 2013-02-21, Vol.54 (8), p.16-16
New York is particularly known for its elaborate choices when it comes to theater, and Hollywood is known more for its movies and TV shows - however, California's theater scene has been improving steadily over the last few years. Sadly, some actors believe that doing theater in a town that is all about film and TV is a waste of time, and Secret Agent Man argues this with examples of several California plays he has seen.

The Los Angeles Times, 1995-10-01
Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cameron Mackintosh and Disney musicals do just fine here. There's also the renowned Mark Taper Forum with its sampler of mainstream regional theater fare: Its season usually consists of a couple of newish plays that have been praised elsewhere, another comedy or drama (sometimes a classic) and one or two Taper commissions or co-productions, which tend to have either an ethnic or social-issue angle. Due in large part to the overweening presence of the film/TV industry, it's hard to classify L.A. as a true theater town, but it's not for lack of theater. On any given weekend night more than a hundred venues are presenting shows locally. Despite this, there is an unfulfilled serious theater audience; many Angelenos have grown accustomed to traveling East to see work they can't find here.

The Advocate (Los Angeles, Calif.), 1980-09-18 (301), p.32

London Magazine, 1970, Vol.10 (1), p.78

The Los Angeles Times, 2004-02-26

The Los Angeles times, 1997-10-31
The problem is partly one of perception. "After something like {my recent staging of} 'Skylight,' " says Taper producing director Robert Egan, "I have more people come up to me and say, 'I never expected to see this quality of theater in L.A.' People still look at theater in L.A. as a bit of an aberration." This season, the city's long-standing resident houses--the Mark Taper Forum and the Pasadena Playhouse--have scheduled mostly dramaturgically conventional plays and hardly any premieres. The newest resident theater, the Geffen Playhouse, is mostly following suit, offering traditional fare targeted to the same Westside audience that constitutes much of the Taper's subscriber base. L.A.'s theaters are, in short, ever eager to make their mark, and for decades that has meant exploring the cutting edge.

The Los Angeles times, 1995-04-16
Those beliefs have come in handy lately-especially as the Taper has found itself in the midst of the continuing national experiment known as multiculturalism that took hold beginning in the late 1980s. As the flagship theater in increasingly racially charged Los Angeles, the Taper provides a revealing case study of some of the major audience-building challenges facing arts institutions today.