Whether or not the Los Angeles Times’s recent “52 Best Places to See Plays and Musicals in Southern California” comes anywhere close to providing that info, the list makes one thing clear: the Times don’t know Long Beach.
To fill that nescience, Random Lengths News presents the state of the theatrical arts in Long Beach, starting with the one and only Long Beach entry in the Times list….
INTERNATIONAL CITY THEATRE
at the Beverly O’Neill Theatre, 67 Long Beach Blvd. / (562) 495-4595 / ictlongbeach.org
Unless you’re talking about facilities (the Beverly O’Neill is nicely tricked out and without a bad seat in the house), it’s dubious to include ICT on any arts list with “best” in the title. Aside from consistently solid mise en scène, what happens there is…well, let’s say I want realism or some sort of humanized stylization, while ICT has the actors reciting their lines at each other, emoting, and holding reactions way too long. The resultant style can drain the life out of even truly powerful scripts (e.g., Doubt: A Parable). Sure, on occasion I’ve liked their work, but….
Of course, I haven’t seen anything at ICT for over a year, because in June 2024, after covering them faithfully for well over a decade — sometimes when literally no other media outlet would (it’s a news desert out here, folks) — I was informed that “ICT has decided to offer only a limited number of press comps to a specific list of media outlets” and I was excluded. Because this has nothing to do with a lack of space — the Beverly O’Neill seats over 800, with never half that many attendees at an ICT performance — the reason is obvious: ICT is trying to control the public narrative by cutting off access to critics (I was told by a reliable source that I’m not the only one) who have the temerity to suggest there’s room for improvement.
BOTTOM LINE: ICT bills themselves “Long Beach’s Resident Theatre Company,” like nobody else in this town counts. But if you want the best that Long Beach has to offer, look elsewhere.
MUSICAL THEATRE WEST
at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center, 6200 E. Atherton St. / (562) 856-1999 / musical.org
Aside from ICT, Musical Theatre West is the only theatre company in Long Beach that has any real money behind it — the Carpenter is the city’s ritziest venue — and it only highlights the Times’s LBC blindness that ICT rates a mention while MTW does not. At worst, Musical Theatre West delivers professional extravaganzas of material that is uninspiring (for me, at least — I’ll stay away when I know in advance that I simply don’t like a given offering). At their best — a mark they hit with some regularity — you get Broadway-quality production (on the modest side, at least — they don’t have that much money) coupled with top-flight talent and inspired directorial choices. A prime example was 2023’s production of An American in Paris, a show so good I sought out the film and found it severely lacking by comparison.
BOTTOM LINE: From Rodgers & Hammerstein to Sondheim, from jukebox musicals to unlikely adaptations of films, MTW delivers the goods.
LONG BEACH SHAKESPEARE COMPANY
at the Helen Borgers Theater, 4250 Atlantic Ave. / (562) 997-1494 / lbshakespeare.org
For a decade I saw most every show Long Beach Shakespeare Co. produced, but finally I stopped going, because almost all of my reviews were identical: Competent, traditionalist, minimalist Shakespeare in a black box. That’s not nothing — incompetent Shakespeare is commonplace — but writing the same thing over and over didn’t seem fair. Still, I always felt a bit guilty about ignoring a company that was so consistently plugging away, so when I saw they were doing Ibsen’s A Doll’s House — a script I like (sidenote: there’s plenty of Shakespeare that I don’t) — I had to have another look. I was so impressed that later this month I’ll be checking in on their latest Shakespeare offering, Julius Caesar (one of the Bard’s best).
BOTTOM LINE: Competent, minimalist Shakespeare? Sure. But there’s more to LB Shake. In fact, this year only two of their 12 scheduled shows are by their namesake. The other 10 include a number of “Radio Style Live On Stage” performances (e.g., their annual War of the Worlds à la Orson Welles). Whatever the show, it’s the cheapest ticket in Long Beach.
THE GARAGE THEATRE
251 E. 7th St. / (562) 283-373 / thegaragetheatre.org
Full disclosure: I’m friends with this company. But that wasn’t the case when I first reviewed them back in the Aughts and dug them enough to keep coming back. Nor does it prevent me from writing negative reviews when that’s how I feel; and their taste in scripts doesn’t always align with mine (but find me a theatre company where that’s not the case). Fortunately, more often than not I like what I see — including some of my all-time favorite theatrical experiences. One of those highlights just how little real attention the Times pays to Long Beach: In 2018, the Garage obtained the rights to do the world-premiere staging of Tom Stoppard’s radio play Darkside. Despite the fact that the Times had ignored the Garage for most of the Garage’s 20-year history and hadn’t reviewed a single one of their shows since 2011, the Garage peeps thought this might change things. The world premiere of a Tom Stoppard, THE most Tony-decorated playwright in history?! But while Stoppard himself deemed the production serious enough to send a representative from his management team in England to check it out, despite the Garage’s several overtures, the Times couldn’t be bothered to come 30 minutes down the 710. Well, fuck them.
BOTTOM LINE: More than 25 years on, the Garage keeps doing it their way. Friendliest, loosest, most intimate theatre in the LBC, capable of delivering truly fantastic stuff.
LONG BEACH LANDMARK THEATRE COMPANY
at First Congregational Church: 241 Cedar Ave. / (562) 366-0085 / lblandmark.org
Emerging from a meeting of the minds of choir members and staff at Long Beach’s historic First Congregational Church after they produced a one-off “musical saga” about the city’s history to celebrate the church’s centennial, a proto version of the theatre troupe that would be LB Landmark began producing shows in 2014, with official formation as a company three years later. Somehow I’d never heard of them until 2023, when I got wind that they were producing Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. In a church?! This I had to see. Well, it was far better than I hoped, fully doing justice to Sondheim’s genius. But I was more surprised by their next show, the SoCal debut of Groundhog Day: The Musical, which didn’t strike me as promising but was a true joy. Although I didn’t love their most recent offering, Jagged Little Pill: The Musical (Alanis ain’t my bag), it was a big hit. They don’t produce a lot of shows each year, but I’m always looking forward to the next.
BOTTOM LINE: LB Landmark falls firmly in the “community theatre” category, but that doesn’t stunt their ambition. And the beautiful church they call home is a truly unique place to see such work. Don’t shuffle off this mortal coil without seeing at least one show here — and don’t be surprised if you want to come back for more.
LONG BEACH OPERA
no fixed venue / (562) 470-7464 / longbeachopera.org
Under the guidance of Andreas Mitisek, between 2003 and 2020 Long Beach Opera produced as many as a half-dozen operas each year; and though they often leaned toward “modern” and “minimalist” — e.g., they staged multiple works by both Philip Glass and Stewart Copeland — all fit neatly within what comes to mind when we most of us think of opera: plot, spectacles, arias, etc. But in 2021 James Darrah took the helm and somewhat flipped the script, favoring a broader interpretation of “opera” (which literally translates as simply work and originally included a wide variety of musical performance). This philosophical change has yielded mixed, less predictable results. Some shows (such as 2023’s The Horse) have been little more than aleatory music with no real follow-through on their supposed concept. But others, such as last year’s The Library of Maps, have dazzled. And when they do lean more into plot/spectacle, they’ve done some of the best and most acclaimed work in LBO’s history, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Central Park Five, which world premiered at LBO, and Kate Soper’s The Romance of the Rose (also a world premiere).
That unpredictability has included the cancellation of four scheduled shows within the last three seasons; and a press release previewing 2025–26 listed only two shows, one of which opened the same day as the press release, the other being a two-night recital at the end of January. New CEO Michelle Magaldi, who came on board in September, explains that LBO “is really ambitious, and in some cases has gotten ahead of itself in planning — and for various reasons that resulted in cancellations.” She calls 2025–26 “a reduced season, [which] is really a chance for us to do some resetting of some of our practices [and] reframing of how we build our seasons. We want to make sure we’re not in a position of cancelling shows.” She says perhaps one additional will be announced for 2025–26, but that otherwise, “We just need to take a bit of a breather to rebuild some of our production practices and infrastructure to be able to produce at a greater scale. […] We’re really taking this time to look forward. […] We’re building some projects on a longer time scale so that we can put the proper pieces in place in advance and have a proper planning cycle.”
BOTTOM LINE: Anytime LBO puts on a show, there’s a chance of greatness, so keep your eye out for anything they do this year; but they won’t be giving you regular opportunities before 2026–27.
CALIFORNIA REPERTORY (Cal State Long Beach)
at the University Theatre, south side of campus / (562) 985-4500 / csulb.edu/theatre-arts
Once upon a time — i.e., in the ‘00s and ‘10s — the graduate theatre program of Go Beach! was producing shows on the Queen Mary (after they were forced out of Edison Theatre for repairs that wouldn’t be effected for damn near 20 years) of such high quality that I half-wondered if this were a case of false advertising, with professionals running the show. But the reason was simple: Theatre Department Chair Joanne Gordon didn’t fuck around. On her watch, the standards were so high that even the undergraduate shows were often great, while the work produced by the graduate program was everything you could ask for. A spectacular example was Melissa James Gibson’s Current Nobody, a great script brought to vibrant life by Gordon and a crop of actors who were true pros regardless of their grad-student status. (I’ll never forget the slo-mo fight scene set to the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage”.) But as soon as Gordon moved on, the dip in quality was precipitous. After a couple of years Cal Rep returned somewhat to form — 2017’s Machinal was very good, and 2023’s Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play was an aesthetic delight — although the lows were sometimes unbearable. But it was the slippage behind the scenes (the last straw was when I was all set up to review a show, only to get an e-mail the day of saying they gave away my seat) that chased me off bothering. I can’t tell you anything about the quality since 2024 — though unless things have changed, if you buy a ticket, prepare to endure sitting amongst a slew of students on their cell phones, clearly in attendance only because of course credit (evinced by the line of kids after the show getting their program stamped or whatever). I once saw a guy who for an entire show — I mean two acts! — played NBA2K (he was the Bulls). I don’t mean to throw them all in the same barrel — plenty of these kids are dialed in and truly enthusiastic, really fun people to share a play with — there are enough bad apples to spoil the bunch; and as far as I could tell, the university has no interest in curtailing the behavior.
BOTTOM LINE: Historically, Cal State Long Beach has demonstrated that, with the right leadership, it can create with the best of them. But without such leadership, you get more or less what you expect from the term “student theatre.” That doesn’t mean it’s never worth seeing, but caveat emptor.
SHAKESPEARE BY THE SEA
numerous SoCal parks / 310-217-7596 / shakespearebythesea.org
Founded in 1998, 27-year-old MFA candidate Lisa Coffi decided that as a thesis project she (with a little help from her friends) would stage her own Shakespeare festival. More than 1,000 people came out to San Pedro’s Point Fermin Park; and a year later the same group founded Little Fish Theatre. But you won’t read about the latter here, as Little Fish pulled up stakes from San Pedro (largely due to security issues, they say) for the ostensibly safer pastures of Redondo Beach. And now that Shakespeare by the Sea has attenuated its San Pedro connection — visiting San Pedro’s 22nd Street Park for only one performance of one show, rather than starting and finishing their summer run of both seasonal offerings at Point Fermin — Long Beach is their home base, at least as much of a home base as there can be for a yearly pair of touring shows, kicking off each season at the Bandshell in Recreation Park. But wherever you see them, count on competent, traditionalist Shakespeare brought in at almost exactly two hours, regardless of script length, with the production values you might expect from an outdoor staging with traffic in the background, with piped-in film score-type music that sometimes helps, sometimes hinders the proceedings. Each cast tends to be a mix of competent Shakespearean acting with a couple/few outstanding performances. And although I said “traditionalist,” last season’s Julius Caesar was their first “modern-verse” adaptation, so who knows exactly what the future holds for these guardians of the past?
BOTTOM LINE: There’s a long, healthy tradition of Shakespeare in the park, one in which perhaps everyone should partake at least once. It’s not the best way to ingest the Bard, but it’s kinda neat nonetheless. Shakespeare by the Sea is the only game in town for this, and it’s always free (donations greatly appreciated), so go.
LONG BEACH PLAYHOUSE
5021 E. Anaheim St. / (562) 494-1014 / lbplayhouse.org
I had never seen a show at LB Playhouse when I started as theatre critic for The District Weekly c. 2008. We reached out about my coming to a staging of Of Mice and Men and were told that we were not welcome. My publisher sent me anyway. Immediately, I understood why they didn’t want us: their populist aesthetic was not something anybody at our edgy, snarky alt-weekly was likely to appreciate. I focused my criticism on Steinbeck’s bad script and from then on respected their wishes that we leave them alone. But then came new leadership that was happy to have me (now with the Long Beach Post) and a slate of plays — such as 2011’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore — that showed they were tacking away from appealing solely to the blue-hair crowd. With two spaces — the Mainstage downstairs, the Studio Theatre above — Long Beach’s oldest theatre company produces not only more theatre per year than anybody else ‘round here, but also the widest variety (and that’s not even counting their Studio Collaborative season, when each winter they allow outside theatre troupes to cheaply rent the Studio Theatre for a week). Even though I stay away when they’ve got on tap is not to my taste (Neil Simon, Nöel Coward, Agatha Christie), in a given year, I might approach double digits with them. Their willingness to try just about anything leads to the occasional misfire (for example, musicals aren’t their specialty), but they also produce real gems, such as last year’s production of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman. And every year closes with a new staging of A Christmas Carol, with this year’s being a master class in the theatrical arts.
BOTTOM LINE: At 90, LB Playhouse is showing no signs of decrepitude. Almost no matter what you want from a night of theatre, you’ll find it here at some point.