Michael Michetti

At an impressionable age, Michael Michetti's parents took him to see a show at the Old Globe Theatre, near his home in San Diego County. It was a Shakespeare play with scenes in a forest, and as the action shifted to that setting, actors holding branches became the trees. Young Michetti was delighted by that little bit of stage magic.

Resistance is futile. The music of "Carousel," with its hypnotic score and soaring love songs ("If I Loved You," "You'll Never Walk Alone"), has survived telethons, high school graduations and Simon Cowell. Now this Rodgers and Hammerstein perennial is back in L.A. with a fresh take and a rising new star. Opening tonight at UCLA's Freud Playhouse, the Reprise staging of "Carousel" marks the American theater debut of Alexandra Silber, a Los Angeles-born talent already celebrated in London for her West End performance as Julie Jordan, a young mill worker in late-19th-century New England who falls hard for Billy Bigelow, a carnival barker torn between love and grift.

Michael Michetti, co-artistic director of Pasadena's Theater@Boston Court, is one of L.A.'s busiest -- and most eclectic -- directors. He began his tenure at Boston Court in 2003 by setting "Romeo and Juliet" in 1836 antebellum New Orleans. His staging there of "Pera Palas," Sinan Unel's epic exploration of Turkey's Western and Islamic influences presented with Antaeus Company, was a multiple 2006 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award winner.

How does one stage "Hamlet"? Let us count the ways. The ghosts of Hamlets past -- no pun intended -- haunt contemporary directors, who must distinguish their own efforts in a crowded field. Then there's the problem of casting the play, which too often serves as a vanity project for third-rate Hamlets ill-equipped for the task. In his current staging at A Noise Within, director-adapter Michael Michetti grasps the play's potentially prickly challenges with boldness and ingenuity.

It's great to see a stubborn, rarely produced Bertolt Brecht play revived with the brio director Michael Michetti brings to "Edward II," a Circle X Theatre Company production at the Actors' Gang. Michetti's staging begins with the sound--to quote an earlier Brecht title--of drums in the night, startling enough to elicit a nervous laugh from the audience. The drummers, Stephanie Bettman on one side of the stage and percussion composer Paul Rudolph on the other, stay busy for much of the evening.

Resistance is futile. The music of "Carousel," with its hypnotic score and soaring love songs ("If I Loved You," "You'll Never Walk Alone"), has survived telethons, high school graduations and Simon Cowell. Now this Rodgers and Hammerstein perennial is back in L.A. with a fresh take and a rising new star. Opening tonight at UCLA's Freud Playhouse, the Reprise staging of "Carousel" marks the American theater debut of Alexandra Silber, a Los Angeles-born talent already celebrated in London for her West End performance as Julie Jordan, a young mill worker in late-19th-century New England who falls hard for Billy Bigelow, a carnival barker torn between love and grift.

How does one stage "Hamlet"? Let us count the ways. The ghosts of Hamlets past -- no pun intended -- haunt contemporary directors, who must distinguish their own efforts in a crowded field. Then there's the problem of casting the play, which too often serves as a vanity project for third-rate Hamlets ill-equipped for the task. In his current staging at A Noise Within, director-adapter Michael Michetti grasps the play's potentially prickly challenges with boldness and ingenuity.

Call him the Android of La Mancha. Brent Spiner, the actor best known as Data, the pallid android on TV's "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and various film incarnations of the show, is boldly going where no one from the planet Omicron Theta has gone before -- to L.A.'s Reprise Theatre Company to star in the Broadway musical "Man of La Mancha." Spiner made a number of on- and off-Broadway appearances early in his career, including "A History of the American Film," "Sunday in the Park With George," "Big River," "The Three Musketeers" and the New York Shakespeare Festival's "The Seagull."

When you hear Gershwin in the great outdoors, you are usually restricted to overplayed concert works and song standards. Admittedly, there isn't much room for exploration, given his limited output, but most programmers don't bother to try. Friday night at Descanso Gardens, Rachael Worby and the Pasadena Pops Orchestra did bother.

Michael Michetti and Jessica Kubzansky, two respected L.A. stage directors, will become the joint artistic directors of the new Boston Court Theatre, a $3.8-million structure with a 99-seat theater and a 60-seat recital hall that has been built in Pasadena. The two have never worked together, which isn't surprising, considering that directors seldom work in tandem.

Michael Michetti, co-artistic director of Pasadena's Theater@Boston Court, is one of L.A.'s busiest -- and most eclectic -- directors. He began his tenure at Boston Court in 2003 by setting "Romeo and Juliet" in 1836 antebellum New Orleans. His staging there of "Pera Palas," Sinan Unel's epic exploration of Turkey's Western and Islamic influences presented with Antaeus Company, was a multiple 2006 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award winner.

At an impressionable age, Michael Michetti's parents took him to see a show at the Old Globe Theatre, near his home in San Diego County. It was a Shakespeare play with scenes in a forest, and as the action shifted to that setting, actors holding branches became the trees. Young Michetti was delighted by that little bit of stage magic.

It's great to see a stubborn, rarely produced Bertolt Brecht play revived with the brio director Michael Michetti brings to "Edward II," a Circle X Theatre Company production at the Actors' Gang. Michetti's staging begins with the sound--to quote an earlier Brecht title--of drums in the night, startling enough to elicit a nervous laugh from the audience. The drummers, Stephanie Bettman on one side of the stage and percussion composer Paul Rudolph on the other, stay busy for much of the evening.

You wouldn't expect a room that was designed primarily for suburban city council meetings to serve well as a 19th century English chamber of horrors. Think again. Michael Michetti's staging of "Sweeney Todd," the Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler musical, at the Scherr Forum Theatre in Thousand Oaks, is intensely focused, capturing the material's slashing irony, mordant wit, creepy jolts and final pathos.

Just before the original opening date of his solo "Shiva Arms," Doug Motel's friends told him to "break a leg," in the time-honored tradition of theater. Motel came close, breaking a foot, but this only slightly hampers his oddball tale about 11 misfits living in a rundown Hollywood apartment.