Last week I began the saga of my third journey to perform at the annual Tennessee Williams / New Orleans Literary Festival, where Karen Kondazian and I had the honor of presenting our original A Witch and a Bitch, reprising our roles as dueling divas in scenes from last fall’s award-winning Fountain Theatre production of Tennessee’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore at Jackson Square’s historic Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre.

Having just returned from my third spring journey traveling to the incredible Crescent City to perform at and attend the annual Tennessee Williams / New Orleans Literary Festival, my head is full of dizzying pictures and my poor ol’ body is completely exhausted, sufficiently debauched, and probably about 20 lbs. heavier. Still, I’m artistically refreshed and ready to return again as soon as possible.

Harrowing! Sub-Human! Sadistic! A ballet choreographed to march music....mesmerizing! Other thoughts, positive and negative will register in your mind as you watch the prisoners of The Brig arising in the morning and returning to their beds that same day. In two hours, you will live, work and peer over the barbed wire into a "normal" day with Prisoners 1 to 10 as they wash, clean and make due with their Marine jailers who have great expectations which the prisoners must meet....or else!

Although the ideas still make sense, the words are convincing, and the delivery is rat-a-tat-tat, somehow, for this writer, the lights have dimmed and the hilarity of Jackie Mason just doesn't gleam the way it used to.

“Sometimes,” playwright Don Zolidis states in his desperately dark comedic free-for-all The World’s Largest Rodent, “you just have to jump off the ledge of sanity and see if there aren’t some adjustments to be made.” Luckily for LA theatregoers, Zolidis and the Victory Theatre Center’s co-artistic director Tom Ormeny linked hands like Thelma and Louise and took just such a daring plunge, right off that precarious precipice of what is commercially assured to attract those notoriously fickle audiences in our culturally desolate town.

For all those oldtimers like me who may have forgotten, high school was not only about pimples and going steady and sock hops, even back in 1908 or whenever I was there. Playwright John C. Russell contributed an important link in the chronicling of American culture with his 1991 play Stupid Kids, now making its belated LA premiere at the celebrated Celebration Theatre

Can we talk? I remember first seeing Joan Rivers performing live in the late 70s at a tiny little supperclub off Little Santa Monica in Beverly Hills. She was, of course, blindingly funny and ruthlessly topical. Now, thirtysomething years later, Rivers has returned to LA’s Westside with her new autobiographical “play” Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress at Geffen Playhouse. Sadly, as funny as Rivers still is, this world premiere presentation, even energized by the imaginative directorial leadership of local Evidence Room hero Bart DeLorenzo...

I beg to differ with everyone else in the civilized world: The astonishingly romantic music of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s nearly forgotten, grossly overlooked, continuously and repeatedly demeaned chamber opera Aspects of Love is to me his finest effort in his long and fruitful career—and there isn’t one dancing feline, roller-skating rollerboy, singing saviors or Norma Desmonds, nor even one crashing chandelier in sight. Instead, there are just beautiful, delicate songs in Aspects guaranteed to sweep you away with them and an actual storyline where the characters have fascinating individual tales to tell and lessons to learn.

For his first venture as a playwright, the Blank’s prolific artistic director Daniel Henning chose a difficult—albeit captivating—subject. With the world premiere of his theatrical docudrama Dickie & Babe: The Truth About Leopold & Loeb, Henning makes a noteworthy debut as a writer and, even though his introductory effort is still a tad bumpy in places, it’s certainly a significant first pass.

The incredibly classy Wynn Hotel has one dynamic longtime tenant, the water-themed and breathtakingly delicious Franco Dragone-helmed Cirque du Soleil clone Le Reve, which debuted at the Wynn a few weeks after the hotel opened its doors in the spring of 2005. It wasn’t long after that auspicious premiere that Steve Wynn’s team announced the exclusive opening of the Broadway Tony-winning hit musical Avenue Q, set to play in an adjacent space to Le Reve sans the 68½-foot pool of water where 2,087 patrons sit spellbound nightly.