The Los Angeles theater world underwent a historic leadership shift in 2023 when two artistic directors of color were placed at the helm of the city’s most prestigious nonprofit companies.
Snehal Desai, the former producing artistic director of East West Players, was appointed to lead Center Theatre Group, which consists of three separate theaters, the Ahamanson, the Mark Taper Forum and the Kirk Douglas. And playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney was chosen to lead the Geffen Playhouse, a more modest yet nonetheless nationally prominent venue with two stages, the Gil Cates Theater and the intimate Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater.
That same year, Pasadena Playhouse, under the galvanizing leadership of producing artistic director Danny Feldman, won the Regional Theatre Tony Award. It was an astonishing turnaround for a theater that had long been in a state of financial (and therefore artistic) turmoil.
The L.A. theater scene seemed poised for a renaissance, but the last two years have proved remarkably challenging. Post-pandemic woes — rising costs, fickle audiences, revenue conundrums — have persisted longer than anyone imagined. And intensifying headwinds, both political (a White House that has the arts in its crosshairs) and cultural (digital options rewiring how we entertain ourselves), have only compounded the economic hardships.
Before the ink had dried on Desai’s contract, the Taper, beset by budgetary shortfalls, announced that it would be suspendingprogramming for what turned out to be more than a year. (The long hiatus was ameliorated by special events, most notably stand-up comic Alex Edelman’s acclaimed solo show “Just for Us,” but the pause was nonetheless painful.) Layoffs reduced the staff by approximately 10%. Particularly damaging was the dismissal of several key associate artistic directors, veterans with discriminating taste and institutional know-how, which dealt a serious blow to CTG’s capacity to develop new work.
The programming at the Geffen Playhouse has become refreshingly diverse, aesthetically as well as demographically, under McCraney, who has been making the most of his position as playwriting professor at Yale by opening the door to a new generation of dramatists. There’s life at the Westwood venue when a new dramatic voice is commanding one of the stages or a classic is speaking to audiences as if it had been written expressly for them. But this doesn’t happen as often as one might hope. The gaps in the calendar are even more conspicuous when artistic possibility loses out to managerial timidity.
After taking a big swing with the Sondheim Celebration, a six-month festival honoring the legacy of Stephen Sondheim in 2023, Feldman has appeared to have scaled back on ambitious programming. He’s made a concerted effort to use local artists whenever possible, but not always to their best advantage. What happens in planning meetings happens in private, but the work of late has felt like it has been muscled into existence via executive mandate. The urgency that arises when artists are working to fulfill long-held dreams has been missing.
Recognizing the jeopardy of the moment, all three artistic directors are thinking outside the box to broaden and diversify their audiences. In addition to creating a more equitable and accessible environment, they have been experimenting with a wider array of genres (including horror), performance modes (such as alternative stand-up and concert cabarets) and schedules able to incorporate limited runs and sprightly pop-ups.
Theaters across America are holding on for dear life, so it might not seem fair to evaluate the artistic records of these leaders when the primary goal right now is survival. But there are better and worse ways of staying alive. And a reckoning with trade-offs can help clarify the values driving decision-making.
Snehal Desai, Center Theatre Group
Of CTG’s three theaters, the Ahmanson has been making the biggest splash. Desai is ultimately responsible for programming across the company’s portfolio of venues. But producing director Douglas C. Baker, who is supervised by managing director and CEO Meghan Pressman, has long been the key curator of the company’s biggest theater. Three productions from 2025 made my Top 10 list: “Life of Pi,” “& Juliet” and “Paranormal Activity” (a horror play that received a thrillingly sharp production). I might have included the holiday concert, “Ben Platt: Live at the Ahmanson,” if the show hadn’t opened past my deadline.
But the recent strength of the Ahmanson has thrown into relief weaknesses elsewhere at the company. The staffing reductions have clearly cut into CTG’s artistic muscle. Valuable expertise in the area of artistic development has been lost. The issue isn’t personnel numbers so much as experience and gravitas. A theater of CTG’s size can’t thrive in an autocratic mode. A collaborative art like the theater requires the give and take of a wide array of artistic perspectives uninhibited by internal politics.
Although I haven’t seen every offering at the Douglas, the venue seems even more of an afterthought since the company started its “One CTG” initiative. Treating the three separate theaters as part of a unified bill under Desai’s stamp makes sense in an era of reduced programming. But the work at the Douglas has had a grab-bag feel.
The powerful, disturbing 2023 production of “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord”now seems like a distant memory. The Douglas, on those rare occasions when it’s in use, has become the place to import projects that might appeal to a new audience, such as the “The Enormous Crocodile” (ages 3 and up). “Guac,” Manuel Oliver’s rousing one-man show honoring his son, who was killed in the 2018 Parkland shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, almost got lost in the eclectic trickle.
Desai reopened the Taper in 2024 with a Deaf West Theatre co-production of “American Idiot,”the musical derived from Green Day’s album. To anyone who had loved the original production of “American Idiot” or the way Deaf West Theater and director Michael Arden had reimagined the contemporary musical “Spring Awakening,” the production seemed like an ideal way to inaugurate a new era for this historic theater.
But the staging needed more time to gel, and it was no favor to Desai that his directing debut seemed so chaotic and poorly shepherded.
Larissa FastHorse’s “Fake It Until You Make It,” which was postponed when the Taper went on emergency hiatus, may not have benefited from more time. But it definitely could have used stronger dramaturgical input and perhaps some rethinking of the creative team. The less said about Robert O’Hara’s “Hamlet,”the better. But it was shocking to me that this half-baked play made it out of a workshop lab.
Tellingly, the best play at the Taper in the last couple of years — Jocelyn Bioh’s “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”— was a touring production.
The issue isn’t the judgment behind the programming but the care in readying the work for presentation. CTG is desperately trying to find a sustainable path forward, but the theater must replenish its artistic brain trust to regain lost stature.
Grade: B
Tarell Alvin McCraney
The McCraney era at the Geffen Playhouse started in earnest with a mesmerizing revival of his play “The Brothers Size.”The work felt like a brand new piece in Bijan Sheibani’s percussive production, which transformed the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater in such a way that the theater’s second stage no longer feels secondary.
A potent revival of “Waiting for Godot,”starring Rainn Wilson and Aasif Mandvi, was another standout offering in 2024. (Indeed, this encounter with Samuel Beckett’s absurdist masterwork left a much deeper impression than the recent Broadway production starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter.) But a miscast Steppenwolf Theatre Company co-production of Michael Frayn’s ingenious backstage farce “Noises Off” last winter was a lumbering affair, proving that a great play and a storied theatrical partner aren’t enough to guarantee success.
McCraney’s sometimes counterintuitive choice of which of the Geffen Playhouse’s stages to use can pay dividends. The world premiere of Rudi Goblen’’s “littleboy/littleman” followed the example of “The Brothers Size” and made the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater seem like the most dynamic venue in town. But both Sara Porkalob’s “Dragon Lady,” a musical built around its playwright-performer, and Roxana Ortega’s solo show “Am I Roxie?” seemed lost on the Gil Cates Theater main stage.
“Furlough’s Paradise” by a.k. payne was the most exciting new play I saw in Los Angeles in 2025. The playwright, like Goblen, was one of McCraney’s former students. The Yale professor clearly has a keen eye for writing talent. But that’s what made the inclusion of Jake Brasch’s hackneyed and hyperactive recovery drama, “The Reservoir,” a touring co-production that occupied a precious slot on the main stage last year, such a head-scratcher.
Questions have been raised about McCraney’s commitment to Los Angeles and his connection to the local theater community. (Yale is on the other side of the country, and Miami, he’s said himself, is his “spiritual home.”) I wish that the plays wouldn’t start so late on opening nights and that the music pouring out of speakers was a decibel or two lower so that conversation might be attempted before the show and during intermission. House management needs new marching orders. But there’s no denying that McCraney has made the Geffen Playhouse a more vibrant, dynamic and inclusive place.
Grade: A-
Danny Feldman, Pasadena Playhouse
A 2023 profileI wrote of Feldman carried the headline: “The best theater in L.A. right now? It’s in Pasadena.” A little more than a month later the theater was named the recipient of the 2023 Regional Theatre Tony Award. The following year, for an L.A. Times series called “L.A. Influential,” I profiled Feldman once again. This time the headline read: “Danny Feldman: The man who saved L.A. theater.”
Feldman continues to impress as an institutional leader. Last spring, Pasadena Playhouse announced that it bought back its landmark Elmer Grey building, lost in bankruptcy in 1970.
The official State Theatre of California, as Pasadena Playhouse has been designated, seems finally on stable footing. But Feldman has been more cautious artistically since winning so much recognition for his theater.
A disappointing revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Topdog/Underdog” and a hamstrung production of Lucas Hnath‘s “A Doll’s House, Part 2”have left an unflattering impression of top-down producing. Feldman’s commitment to reinvestigating the American musical canon is laudable, as is his determination to showcase these shows with a full orchestra. But the work, sometimes absent a cogent lead (as was the case with the otherwise sparkling production of “La Cage aux Folles”), doesn’t always seem artist-driven.
Gloria Calderón Kellett’s “One of the Good Ones,” a sitcom about representation striking obvious political and theatrical chords, was a popular hit. But popularity shouldn’t have to come at the expense of artistic quality. I found enough to savor in Martin Crimp’s language-drunk update of “Cyrano de Bergerac” and certainly thought Jonathan Spector’s “Eureka Day”hit the satiric bull’s-eye. But having seen both plays done in New York with different companies, I was uncomfortably aware of what L.A audiences were missing.
The postponement of a revival of “Amadeus” left the door open for Julia Masli’s winningly bizarre “ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.”This interactive show by a genre-blurring comic wasn’t a perfect logistical fit for the Playhouse’s stiff proscenium setup. But it was a worthwhile test of the theater’s flexibility, and it tapped into the vitality of a new strain of comedy, much as Kate Berlant’s show “Kate” had done in 2023. New audiences have obviously become the holy grail.
The three shows announced for the 2025-26 season — Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” Lerner and Loewe’s “Brigadoon” and Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson’s “Mexodus” — certainly have my attention. A British play with a pedigree (starring the virtuosic Jefferson Mays), a Golden Age musical, and a hip-hop history lesson that’s been recorded for Audible are all works I’m eager to see. But would anyone mistake this lineup for the vital center of Los Angeles theater?
Grade: B
Finding a sustainable path is clearly the objective of these nonprofit theater leaders. And that means balancing financial responsibility with artistic risk. Ambition mustn’t be squandered. If artistic directors are guilty at times of playing it safe, the public has a role in making the landscape more hospitable for bold ventures. Theater lovers must recognize that their values are a reflection of where they place their attention and invest their time and money. They must also realize that the art form hasn’t a chance of flourishing without their robust support.
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