Author Archive
PARASITE DRAG
Friday, August 13th, 2010
The storm clouds on the Central Illinois horizon pale beside the shadows of abuse, adultery, addiction, illness, incest, and suicide in Parasite Drag, Mark Roberts’ slice of Midwest life now getting its Southern California Premiere at the Elephant Theatre Company. Electrically directed by David Fofi in association with Don Foster and powerfully performed by a quartet of topnotch actors, Parasite Drag mixes dramatic confrontations with biting dollops of humor to gripping effect.
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THE LAST ROMANCE
Sunday, August 8th, 2010
Life begins at eighty or so for the two lead characters in The Last Romance, Joe DiPietro’s charming, funny, andvery romantic new comedy now in its West Coast Premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre. Like DiPietro’s earlier Over The River And Through The Woods, The Last Romance offers some of the best comedic roles ever for septuagenarian and even octogenarian actors, and was written especially for two of them, Marion Ross of TV’s Happy Days fame and WWII vet Paul Michael, her real life partner.
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ROBIN AND THE 7 HOODS
Sunday, August 8th, 2010
Take a couple dozen songs written by multiple Oscar winners Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, hire a couple dozen Broadway and regional theater triple-threats to perform them to Tony-winning director/choreographer Casey Nicholaw’s fancy footwork, string them together with a plot suggested by a 1962 Frank Sinatra flick, call the confection Robin And The 7 Hoods—and you’ve got the thoroughly enjoyable World Premiere (and possibly Broadway-bound) new musical now delighting audiences at San Diego’s Old Globe Theater.
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SHAKE
Saturday, August 7th, 2010
There’s something about Reverse Chronology that can work magic with a tale of innocence lost. Take for example Harold Pinter’s Betrayal or Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, the former beginning with the end of a marriage and ending with the characters’ first meeting, the latter starting off with three irreparably estranged friends and climaxing with the threesome as starry-eyed best-friends-forever. There’s something particularly poignant about a happy ending when you already know the disillusionment yet to come.
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TOPDOG/UNDERDOG
Friday, August 6th, 2010NOT RECOMMENDED
Ben Brantley, the chief drama critic of the New York Times (i.e. the most important theater reviewer in the United States) called Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog “as exciting as any new play from a young American since Tony Kushner’s Angels In America.” It was nominated for a Best Play Tony Award and won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. I found it one of the two longest evenings I’ve spent in a theater in the past year.
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BOYS’ LIFE
Thursday, August 5th, 2010
Howard Korder writes insightfully—and hilariously—about the male psyche in his 1988 comedy Boys’ Life, smashingly revived (and smoothy updated to the 21st Century) by Crown City Theatre Company. Impeccably acted and directed, this is a production which ought to disprove once and for all any notion of Los Angeles not being the great theater town it is.
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IN THE HEIGHTS
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010
When West Side Story premiered on Broadway in 1957, one might have assumed that sometime over the following half century, another hit Broadway musical would center on Latino life in New York City, or on Latino life anywhere for that matter. It would, after all, make sense for a musical as revolutionary as West Side Story to engender others that followed its ground-breaking example, right?
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Since 2007, Steven Stanley's StageSceneLA.com has spotlighted the best in Southern California theater via reviews, interviews, and its annual StageSceneLA Scenies.
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