Josefina López wrote “Real Women Have Curves,” based on her experiences as an undocumented Mexican immigrant working in a Boyle Heights garment factory, nearly 40 years ago.

Since then, López’s script has yielded a play, a feature film starring America Ferrera and, most recently, a Broadway musical. The latter, which opened at the James Earl Jones Theatre in 2025 and closed after 104 performances, will make its post-Broadway debut next spring as part of an original production at Pasadena Playhouse during its 2026-27 season, the theater announced Thursday. Producing Artistic Director Danny Feldman called the lineup “bigger than our Sondheim season.”

The season begins with a new production of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s tragicomedy “The Visit,” directed by Tony Award winner Darko Tresnjak and starring Jefferson Mays. (Fans will remember the pair’s memorable collaboration from this season’s “Amadeus.”) Next up is the long-awaited L.A. premiere of “Passing Strange,” the Tony-winning musical based on the life of L.A.-born musician Stew, directed by Tony nominee Zhailon Levingston (“Cats: The Jellicle Ball”). A yet-to-be-announced winter production will follow, then “Real Women Have Curves: The Musical.” Finally, a revival of Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which brings Alfred Molina back to the Playhouse stage, caps the year.

When Feldman learned that “Real Women Have Curves” did not have a national tour lined up, he took matters into his own hands — believing it essential that a story centering L.A.’s Latino community be told at a time when it’s hurting.

“Celebrating a community is another form of resistance and power in these times,” Feldman said.

The artistic director compared the tone of “Real Women Have Curves” to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, which many found cathartic for its exuberance.

“[The musical] deserves to have a production at the scale and scope that we do here at Pasadena Playhouse,” Feldman said.

Since Feldman took the reins at the Playhouse in 2016, the historic theater has blossomed into a thriving arts ecosystem. In 2023, the Playhouse received the Regional Theatre Tony Award after its critically lauded Sondheim Celebration spiked both audience engagement and the theater’s artistic profile. Just last year, the theater bought back the building it lost to bankruptcy in 1970, and greatly expanded its educational offerings.

A more risk-averse leader might use such triumphs as permission to take their foot off the gas. Instead, Feldman has assembled a demanding lineup that will require the Playhouse to operate on a larger scale than ever before.

“We’re up for the challenge. We’re ready, and our audiences respond to work when it pushes the limits,” the artistic director said.

That proved true for “Amadeus,” which Feldman called “one of our biggest hits of all time.” The artistic director said the show excelled because of its high production value — something regional theaters are rarely able to execute.

The creative team for “Amadeus” will aim to replicate that success when they reunite for “The Visit,” a play Tresnjak has wanted to tackle for 40 years.

“The work gets so much deeper when you’ve built the trust,” Feldman said. Plus, recycling a star is a classic move for regional theaters, which historically operated as repertory companies that showcased the same group of performers in different roles and thereby exhibited their range.

The artistic director said that he was also compelled by the unique tone of “The Visit,” which Dürrenmatt wrote while Europe was reckoning with its complicity in World War II. The script is as dark as it is entertaining and absurdist.

“It’s a play ultimately about morality and how a community inch-by-inch becomes OK with something that they should not be OK with,” Feldman said. He added that theater excels at getting audiences to laugh in the auditorium, and then mull things over on the way home.

Following “The Visit,” the Playhouse will up the energy with two musicals, “Passing Strange” and “Real Women Have Curves,” (with the undisclosed show falling in between). Feldman considers “Passing Strange” a part of the Playhouse’s ongoing effort to revisit landmark American musicals.

“It was a musical that was revolutionary and changed the game,” he said, characterizing the show as “a rock concert where a play breaks out.”

Strangely, for a coming-of-age story written by an Angeleno about a musician from South Central L.A., “Passing Strange” never made it to L.A. after its 2008 Broadway debut. The musical, which had its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, arrives at the Playhouse just in time for its 20th anniversary.

While “The Visit” and “Real Women Have Curves” will be presented largely as is, “Passing Strange” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” directed by Jessica Kubzansky, will be lightly updated for contemporary audiences.

Williams published multiple versions of his play and never truly stopped revising it, Feldman said, “so we’re trying to figure what best suits our production in our world.” Audiences can rest assured that the emotional core that secured the play’s spot in the theater canon will be preserved no matter what changes are made.

Feldman said he regularly hears the refrain from visitors, “When the world is crazy, I just want to escape. I want to come to you and escape.” But what he thinks people actually mean when they say that is: “I want to be in community. I want to have an experience that is above me and bigger than me, with other people.”

“It’s why I’m making the case that theater is going to be more relevant and important in decades to come than ever before in my career,” he said. The more technology continues to dominate our lives, and the more we become isolated as a result, the more precious those moments in the theater are, Feldman added.

He sensed it when audiences roared with laughter during the Playhouse’s production of “Eureka Day,” and during a beat of pin-drop silence in “Amadeus.”

“Those moments of lightning, of electricity, in a room — that’s what I live for,” he said. “That’s what we do best.”

Within the family at the center of Blue Heron, the black sheep is a blond. Fair-skinned teenager Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) is an outlier among his siblings, two jostling preteen boys and watchful, 8-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven), who are all darkly featured and take after their Hungarian parents (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa). Jeremy’s hair color doesn’t really matter, of course, but the contrast makes a useful shorthand for Jeremy’s otherness. 

If “other” sounds inexact, that’s the point. To the frustration of his devoted but exhausted parents, there’s been no straightforward diagnosis for what ails Jeremy – for the mood swings, the “acting out.” A move at the beginning of the film to a new home is hopeful but short-lived: The mystery of Jeremy, to himself and to others, persists.   

Much of Blue Heron is set over the course of one summer on Vancouver Island in the late Nineties, mirroring filmmaker Sophy Romvari’s own backstory, though the film shouldn’t be confused for straight autobiography. (Her 2020 short film, “Still Processing,” explored her family’s struggles with mental health through first-person documentary.) Still, the remarkable texture of these family scenes and how they favor Sasha’s childlike perspective – her small hands as they handle a potato peeler for the first time, the easy smiles as her mother dabs sunscreen on her face – feels intensely personal. There’s a hushed, dreamy quality to these scenes, mimicking memory itself, that plays into Blue Heron’s remarkable ability to hold two seemingly contradictory things to be true. Sasha can resent her brother and love him. Jeremy can be terrifying and in pain. A film can be whisper-quiet and still trip the wires in your brain that scream “danger.”

With very little dialogue and no cookie-cutter story beats, this fraught family life is vividly, tenderly rendered by Romvari and her naturalistic cast. That makes it all the more disorienting when, at arguably the moment of highest drama, Romvari shifts to a different vantage point. Boldly, she is asking the audience to look anew at what we’ve seen: to acknowledge what we saw was not the whole picture (how could it be, from an 8-year-old’s eye line?). The effect for me – and I suspect for you too, if you’re the kind of person who likes to take a movie apart and understand how it ticks – is exhilarating. 

But not entirely effective – and in this reservation I gather I’m the outlier; Blue Heron has been rapturously received at festivals and by critics. This second half (of which I’m loath to spoil the specifics) becomes at once more experimental and more documentary-like, and revolves around a muted performance stranded in the in-between of drama and docudrama. Nothing ruinous, but a hangnail nonetheless on a film that otherwise had me in its thrall.

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This article appears in May 8 • 2026.

The internet’s most controversial looksmaxxer is in hot water again.

Clavicular, born Braden Eric Peters, has been charged in Florida’s Miami-Dade County in connection with a video that circulated on social media showing an alligator, which appeared to be dead already, being shot repeatedly in the Everglades. Two others are also facing charges in connection with the incident: Andrew Morales, 22, known online by the moniker “Cuban Tarzan,” and Yabdiel Anibal Cotto Torres, 26, who goes by “Baby Alien.”

Peters is facing a misdemeanor charge of unlawfully discharging a firearm in a public place, according to court records obtained by The Times. The Miami-Dade state attorney’s office filed the charges April 29.

Steven Kramer and Jeffrey Neiman, attorneys for Peters, told The Times in a text message, “Our client has been summoned to appear for a misdemeanor charge that stems from following the instructions of a licensed airboat guide. He relied on that guidance. No animals or people were harmed. We are confident that once the full picture is understood, people will see this for what it is.”

The shooting took place at the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area boat ramp dock on or about March 26, court records said. The video shows the men aboard an airboat firing at the alligator more than a dozen times.

“Yeah, it’s definitely dead,” Peters is heard saying after firing.

Shortly after the video went live on social media, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission announced it had launched an investigation into the incident.

“Florida’s wildlife and waterways deserve respect, not content farming,” Lt. Gov. Jay Collins said March 26 on X. “Under my watch, anyone who abuses wildlife in Florida will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.”

Morales’ attorney Richard Cooper emailed The Times a statement Wednesday. “We urge the public not to rush to judgment. Importantly, there is no allegation that any animal was injured, and the available evidence does not support the sensationalized narrative that has circulated online,” the statement read. “My client relied on information and guidance provided by those in authority and had no criminal intent.”

An arraignment has been scheduled for May 20.

The face of “looksmaxxing,” a subculture hyperfocused on taking extreme measures to perfect one’s physical appearance, Peters has admitted in interviews that he uses appetite-supressing and performance-enhancing drugs, as well as recreational party drugs, and has said he chisels his face by smashing his bones with a hammer.

The same week Peters’ alligator video caught the authorities’ attention, the manosphere influencer was arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor battery. He was taken into custody on a warrant issued by the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office and released soon after on bond. Police allege that in February the 20-year-old internet celebrity instigated a fight between his girlfriend, Violet Lentz, 24, and a 19-year-old influencer at a Kissimmee, Fla., short-term rental. That incident was also live streamed to his hundreds of thousands of followers.

Then in April, Peters was live streaming from a Miami nightclub when he appeared to overdose on camera. In the video, Peters is seen taking a swig of an unknown substance and then subsequently starting to mumble, sway and close his eyes as the camera panned away.

TMZ obtained the audio from a 911 call alerting emergency services to the possible overdose of a 20-year-old man. Additional videos, taken by bystanders, showed Peters being carried out of the nightclub.

A source close to Peters told The Times that he was hospitalized for the overdose and checked himself out the following morning. Within hours of his release from the hospital, he was back on streaming platform Kick and telling his followers he would be out at a nightclub that night to promote its grand opening.