Best of Long Beach Theatre, 2025

Why didn’t we think of this before?! People love lists, right?

In 2025, I saw 20 theatrical works in the LBC and/or by Long Beach-based companies, and more often than not I came away at least reasonably satisfied. But there were five clear standouts. So, without further ado, in chronological order…:

Into the Woods — Musical Theatre West

When you do Sondheim, you’re cooking with gas — but that shit can blow up in your face if you don’t have the talent necessary to bring out all the flavorful genius of one of musical theatre’s most demanding doyens. The Musical Theatre West peeps are pros, though. Act One was great fun (“Agony” in particular); but Act Two, where 70% of the show’s brilliance and the better part of its great music resides, was arresting. If you saw only the rondo of recrimination “Your Fault”, you’d know that this was an ensemble without a weak point. And the finale, “Children Will Listen”, had all the oomph it needed to serve as the capstone of a magnificent edifice. Even with a couple of directorial choices that missed the mark, this April show was easily the best thing  that had been staged in Long Beach to that point in 2025 and set a bar high for the rest of the year.

The Library of Maps — Long Beach Opera

After their December 2024 one-off opener of a season dedicated solely to the “sonic meditations” of Pauline Oliveros, I thought Long Beach Opera’s year would be a complete bust for me. Seventy minutes of minimalist improv while sitting in a room full of shredded newspaper is not my idea of a great performance (though the newspaper bit was more thoughtful and aesthetically pleasing than it sounds). I liked their more ambitious March offering better — the site specificity, exploiting the entire grounds of L.A.’s Heritage Square Museum, was a real treat — but aleatory music doesn’t generally turn me on. Then, however, came May’s The Library of Maps: An Opera in Many Parts, performed just twice in the Queen’s Salon aboard the Queen Mary. Maybe I can’t say it’s the best thing LBO has ever done, but they’ve never given me a more pleasurable experience. Though inspired by Oliveros and drawing upon a small sampling of the two-dozen poems loosely comprising the libretto for her opera-concept, director/producer James Darrah and musical director Christopher Rountree helmed an original creation (“No score exists for the piece,” I was told, “no musical sketches”) of largely improvised music that never seemed to meander, with all eight performers exercising a discipline that unfailingly served the moment and the whole. The skeleton of a plot — we’re on a ship at sea, where the captain has just died and a new mapmaker has been born unto a library that contains all the maps in the universe; passengers and crew drift across the sea of time on a voyage without a fixed destination — mattered far less than the immersive gorgeousness of the music and mise en scène. As soon as it was over, I wanted them to perform the whole thing again. Wow.

A Doll’s House — Long Beach Shakespeare Company

I gave up on Long Beach Shakespeare Co. years ago — not because they were ever bad, but I simply found myself writing more or less the same review every time — Competent, minimalist Shakespeare in a black box — which I didn’t imagine was doing them a great service. But when I heard they were mounting Ibsen’s protofeminist tour de force, I had to see what’s what. I never expected it would be one of the best things I’d see all year, but great casting and thoughtful, unobtrusive directing, with no scene or snatch of dialog rushed, allowed all of Ibsen’s nuance to come across (despite much of the audience laughing at everything that seemed quaint through their veil of 21st-century, short-attention-span ignorance). With the emergence of the “womanosphere” in recent years, the choice to stage this story of unwitting complicity with patriarchy was extra timely. The play’s final scene is a true emotional and thematic climax if ever there was one, and the actors —including Ceili Lang as Nora, excelling at every stop along Nora’s broad character arc — played it for everything it’s worth.

Predictor — The Garage Theatre

How much do I know about the history of the at-home pregnancy test? A helluva lot more now that I’ve seen a staging of Jennifer Blackmer’s entertaining telling of how a 27-year-old non-scientist combined creativity and common sense to package the necessary elements so women could know what’s what privately — and the decade-long, sexist delay in bringing her breakthrough to the American market. Opening as an episode of an imaginary ‘60s gameshow called Who Made That? before launching into the narrative proper, Predictor never progressed too far down any one track before switching it up with flashbacks and fantasy sequences, a farrago of scenes that collide and interpenetrate ceaselessly, rhythms breaking against contrary rhythms. Director Jessica Variz grokked both the substance and style of Blackmer’s script and had her cast jumping through all the right hoops to deliver the goods.

A Christmas Carol — Long Beach Playhouse

Prior to 2025, Long Beach Playhouse had done a show based on Dickens’s classic novella a full 13 times. From seeing more than half of these, I can tell you that no two were the same, and some were quite good. But director Carole Louise Nicholson worked some fresh magic on this tried-and-true tale of redemption and viewing others as “fellow–passengers to the grave and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.” With a perfect [I used that word a lot in my full review] cast from Scrooge to Tiny Tim, meticulous costumes and makeup, and understated lighting that’s every bit as thoughtful as every other element, iteration #14 was a masterclass in the dramatic arts, a piece of theatre whose every second was subsumed into a continuous flow, with each moment playing out organically and those moments succeeding each other in such a way that each scene seemed to have naturally sprouted from the one it replaced.

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Although we’ll have to wait to see whether in 2026 Long Beach can produce any shows matching the above five, tune in right here next month to read about the general state of theatre in Long Beach as we launch into the second quarter-century of the millennium, including capsule histories and updates on every theatre company in town.