Productions & Events
Fatherland - New York
Fatherland is the true story of an 18-year-old son who turned in his father to the FBI for his militant role in the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Fast-paced and powerful, Fatherland has landed off-Broadway following a sold-out Los Angeles run which the LA Times hails "will leave you shaken." This compelling tale is told verbatim from public statements, case evidence, and official court transcripts from the explosive trial that ignited a media frenzy and grabbed headlines nationwide.
I, Daniel Blake
A good man in a bad system.
Daniel is a caring, warm-hearted middle-aged man who suddenly finds himself unable to work. Katie hopes for a fresh start for herself and her teenage daughter. Both must navigate the nightmarish unemployment and public housing system while clinging to their dignity and humanity. A powerful, timely, and poignant story of people coming together in the face of a Kafkaesque network that refuses to see them as human beings. U.S. Premiere of the stage adaptation based on the acclaimed, award-winning film by Ken Loach film (Palme d’Or and BAFTA awards).
Walking the Beat 2024
Walking the Beat is a creative writing, theater and multi-media summer residency for local high schoolers and police officers. Together, students and officers create an original piece of theater, based on their own writings and reflections about the effect of gun violence personally, and within their communities.
Summer Flamenco Festival
Forever Flamenco returns to The Fountain Theatre with a blow-out Flamenco concert series running through the entire month of August. Join us for long-time Forever Flamenco favorites, new faces, and a beautifully rehabilitated indoor performance venue.
This summer, now, and forever, we can gather together to pay homage and tribute the beloved Godmother of LA Flamenco, Deborah Culver Lawlor. Together we will christen this space and consecrate it with our love. Olè.
Biddy Mason at Inner-City Arts
The Fountain Theatre’s “Fountain for Youth” arts education wing joins forces with Inner-City Arts, The Autry Museum of the American West and CounterBalance Theater to present Biddy Mason, a theatrical blend of video projection, music, song, movement and dramatic storytelling that brings the powerful and inspiring true story of an extraordinary Los Angeles citizen to life. Ten student performances take place May 20 through May 24 followed by two public performances for adults on May 31 and June 1. All performances take place at the Rosenthal Theatre, located at Inner-City Arts in downtown Los Angeles.
Biddy Mason Staged Reading
In 1848, an enslaved woman in Mississippi marches on foot alongside her owner’s wagon train across the country to California, where she wins her freedom in court. With heroic determination and unearthly compassion for others, Biddy Mason works hard in Los Angeles, saves her money, transforming herself into a successful businesswoman and philanthropist. She builds schools, feeds the poor, and helps launch the First AME Church, the landmark center of political and social action, earning Biddy the loving and respectful title throughout the City of Angels of “Grandma Mason.”
Fatherland
The true story of the eighteen-year-old son who turned in his father to the FBI because of his dad's role in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Fast-moving, powerful, and theatrical, Fatherland erupts verbatim from official court transcripts, case evidence, and public statements.
Unconditional, A Musical Memoir
Writer and performer Margot Rose (original cast member, I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road) — backed by a live, four-piece band — shares her funny and poignant story of family, loss, connection, community, and a backyard.
FREIGHT: The Five Incarnations of Abel Green
In the West Coast Premiere of this acclaimed solo play, J. Alphonse Nicholson (P-Valley, They Cloned Tyrone, Broadway's A Soldier's Play) embodies five incarnations of Abel Green, an African American "Everyman," as he travels through time as many selves, from a 19th Century minstrel to a fallen 21st Century securities trader. In each life, Abel is guided, distracted, helped, or hindered by a handful of characters with whom his destiny is forever intertwined.
Walking the Beat 2023: C.H.I.N Up! (Critical Hope is Needed)
Join us for the 2023 devised theatre collaborative production between cops and kids, bridging gaps and healing communities. 12 students and 6 law enforcement officers collaborating to find common ground, compassion, and hope.
Alice the Cat Book Signing with Tim Cummings
Join us for a special book signing event with Tim Cummings, author of Alice the Cat.
Last Summer at Bluefish Cove
1974. A group of queer women spend their summers together in a remote seaside town. Their enclave is disrupted when Eva, a naïve straight woman separated from her husband, stumbles unaware into their circle and falls for the charming, tough-talking Lil. This iconic lesbian play bursts with heartfelt friendship, laughter, and love.
Intermezzo: Chamber Music at the Fountain
The Fountain Theatre launches “Intermezzo: Chamber Music at the Fountain,” a bi-monthly series curated by vioIinist/violist Connie Kupka, formerly with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and cellist David Speltz, previously a member of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra under Sir Neville Marriner and principal cellist of the California Chamber Orchestra under Henri Temianka.
The Lifespan of a Fact
What’s more important: writing the truth, or telling a good story? he Fountain Theatre presents the West Coast premiere of the Broadway hit play, The Lifespan of a Fact. Based on the nonfiction book named “Best of the Year” by the Huffington Post, this highly entertaining, very funny new play follows young intern Jim Fingal, whose first assignment at an elite New York magazine is to fact check an essay written by a highly celebrated and cantankerous author. What Jim finds turns his world upside down. Thought-provoking, with zinging one-liners, The Lifespan of a Fact explodes into a hilarious slugfest between “facts” and “truth,” making it hard to imagine a play ever being more timely.
CITIZEN @ Inner City Arts
A provocative meditation on race, fusing prose, poetry, movement, music, and the visual image. A lyric poem, snapshots, vignettes, on the acts of everyday racism. Remarks, glances, implied judgments. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV — everywhere, all the time. Those did-that-really-just-happen-did-they-really-just say-that slurs that happen every day and enrage in the moment and later steep poisonously in the mind. And, of course, those larger incidents that become national or international firestorms. As Rankine writes, “This is how you are a citizen.”
My Body, No Choice
In June 2022, reproductive rights took a giant leap backward when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. In the United States, women can drive when they turn 16 and vote when they turn 18. But they can no longer decide for themselves on the issue that impacts them most.
In My Body, No Choice, eight of America’s most exciting female playwrights share what choice means to them through the telling of fiction and non-fiction stories rooted in personal experience. This is a time when women need to tell their stories.
Jazz at the Fountain feat. Lynne Fiddmont
Jazz at the Fountain continues with R&B singer-songwriter Lynne Fiddmont. Ms. Fiddmont tours the world as a vocalist and has worked with such artists as Stevie Wonder, Phil Collins, Lou Rawls, Barbara Streisand, and Natalie Cole. Her fourth album Power of Love is an eclectic collection of R&B grooves, ballads, and heartfelt soul classics.
Walking the Beat 2022: FLICKER
An Arts Education Collaboration between The Fountain Theatre and Elizabeth Youth Theater Ensemble.
Students and Officers in the Walking the Beat program leaned into a transformative group process.
Change is not transformation. Change is the modification of day-to-day external action for desired results. Transformation is modifying core-beliefs and long-term behaviors in profound ways. Dr. Bayo Akomolafe reminds us, “The pandemic brought chaos where we are able to see ourselves for the first time. Normal is fluid and fragile. The pandemic unearthed and did what decades of activism couldn’t.”
If I Forget
In the final months before 9/11, liberal Jewish studies professor Michael Fischer has reunited with his two sisters to celebrate their father’s seventy-fifth birthday. Each deeply invested in their own version of family history, the siblings clash over everything from Michael’s controversial scholarly work to the mounting pressures of caring for an ailing parent. As destructive secrets and long-held resentments bubble to the surface, the three negotiate—with biting humor and razor-sharp insight—how much of the past they’re willing to sacrifice for a chance at a new beginning. IF I FORGET tells a powerful tale of a family and a culture at odds with itself.
ROE
An urgent call to action in response to the upcoming Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that gave women the choice of a safe, legal abortion.
June 23 - July 10
Fri - Sun 8pm
Outdoor Stage
Billy Valentine - Jazz Under The Stars
Featuring
Billy Valentine - Singer
STUART ELSTER – PIANO
RUSS MCKINNON – DRUMS
CHRIS COLANGELO – BASS
and special guest –
TOM SCOTT – SAXOPHONE
Outdoor Stage
Detained
How do families stay together, even when they are kept apart? The Fountain Theatre presents a gripping new docudrama, a compilation of true stories that explores the rippling impact of mass deportations on families. The world premiere of Detained, written by 2021 Lorraine Hansberry Award-winning playwright France-Luce Benson and directed by Mark Valdez, winner of the 2021 Zelda Fichandler Award.
Numbered Days
Two-time Emmy®, Peabody and SAG award-winning actor Anna Gunn (Breaking Bad) stars as playwright Corey Madden in an audio theater production of Madden’s moving and poetic memoir, Numbered Days. The real-life love story of two passionate people who use the power of music and words to sustain them through their “numbered days” has been transformed into a four-episode podcast by L.A.’s celebrated Fountain Theatre. Release date: February 14, Valentine’s Day
The Children
Tony Nominated. L.A. Premiere
What is our responsibility to the future? What legacy do we want to leave? The Los Angeles premiere of The Children, written by Lucy Kirkwood and directed by Simon Levy, asks those questions and more in its Los Angeles premiere at the Fountain Theatre, indoors.
Kirkwood’s funny and astonishing Tony-nominated play is a taut and disquieting thriller about responsibility, reparation and what one generation owes the next. With the outside world in chaos following a devastating environmental disaster, two retired nuclear engineers live a quiet life in a remote cottage on the lonely British coast — until a surprise visit from a former colleague upends the couple’s equilibrium and trust.
Smashing Barriers in Opera and Beyond
An in-person conversation with author, lecturer, and Metropolitan Opera commentator William Berger and internationally acclaimed opera star Morris Robinson, exploring political and gender issues not only in opera but in the systemic marginalization of the arts in our country. What modern issues are at stake in the works of Giuseppe Verdi? What can we do about racism in the works of Richard Wagner? Why does this matter today? Mr. Berger’s latest book of recent and new essays, Seeking the Sublime Cache, will be available for purchase and signing.
Forever Flamenco - Flamenco Del Mundo
Featuring:Lakshmi Basile - Dancer / Director
Manuel Gutierrez - Dancer
Cristina Moguel - Dancer
Oscar Valero - Singer
Jose Tanaka - Guitar
Kambiz Pakan - Guitar
Forever Flanenco: Entre Amigos
Featuring:Alexandra Rozo - Dancer / Director
Vanessa Albalos - Dancer
Manuel Gutierrez - Dancer
Jose Cortes - Singer
Alex Jordan - Guitar
Gerardo Morales - Cajon
Forever Flamenco by Fanny Ara
Featuring:
Fanny Ara - Dancer / Director
Timo Nuñez - Dancer
Reyes Barrios - Dancer
Gabriel Osuna - Guitar
Gerardo Morales - Percussion
Antonio de Jerez - Vocals
Mateo Amper - Piano
Noche de Flamenco, by Reyes Barrios
Dancers: Lakshmi Basile, Timo Nuñez and Reyes Barrios.
Singer: Antonio de Jerez
Guitarists: John Moore and Kambiz Pakan.
Forever Flamenco by Vanessa Albalos
Vanessa Albalos — Baile & Director
Briseyda Zárate — Baile
Cristina Lucio — Baile
Oscar Valero — Cante
Kambiz Pakandam — Guitarrista
Forever Flamenco - Asi Baila Mi Corazon, by Briseyda Zárate
Briseyda Zárate — Artistic Direction Choreography & Baile
Vanessa Albalos — Baile
Cristina “La Tigresa” Lucio — Baile
Antonio de Jerez — Cante
Jose Tanaka — Toque
Fountain Theatre Leadership Transition
After 34 years as artistic director, Fountain Theatre cofounder Stephen Sachs has announced his retirement at the end of 2024.
“After thirty-four years of serving Los Angeles and the national field as Artistic Director of the Fountain Theatre, I have chosen to retire by the end of this year. A flurry of feelings swirls through me as I reach this decision. Launching, nurturing, developing, and leading the growth of the Fountain Theatre for more than three decades have been the most joyous and meaningful years of my professional life.”