Author Archive
BENT
Sunday, April 18th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Recent years have seen great strides for the LGBT movement in the United States and even more so in certain other parts of the world. At the same time, as a visit to Towleroad.com will attest, anti-gay violence occurs on a daily basis, and in countries like Uganda, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, the mere fact of being gay can mean death, and not merely by your garden variety basher but by the government itself. Thus, Theatre Out’s production of Martin Sherman’s Bent comes at a propitious time indeed, and though a key directorial decision dilutes its power, a committed cast and one performance in particular make this an important piece of theater for LGBT playgoers and general audiences as well.
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BUDDY—THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY
Saturday, April 17th, 2010
February 3, 1959 will forever be known in the world of Rock & Roll as “the day the music died,” for it was on that date that 22-year-old Buddy Holly lost his life in a plane crash just five miles from Clear Lake, Iowa’s Surf Ballroom, the site of the pop star’s final concert.
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SEE WHAT I WANNA SEE
Friday, April 16th, 2010
Michael John LaChiusa’s See What I Wanna See is not your grandmother’s musical. There’s no star-struck romantic couple. There are no melodic love songs. There’s not a single dance number. No chorus line. No strings in the orchestra. And not a happy ending in sight.
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THE BOYS IN THE BAND
Thursday, April 15th, 2010
“You’re a sad and pathetic man. You’re a homosexual and you don’t want to be, but there’s nothing you can do to change it.” Thus speaks birthday boy Harold to his party host Michael in Mart Crowley’s 1968 off-Broadway hit The Boys In The Band, to which Michael later replies, his voice laced with bitterness, “Show me a happy homosexual, and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”
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SQUABBLES
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010
Every so often one comes across a little-known play that turns out to be a true theatrical gem. Squabbles, by Marshall Karp, is one such comedic treat, and Los Angeles audiences can find out exactly why in a terrific new production now playing at Glendale Centre Theatre.
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DOCTOR CERBERUS
Sunday, April 11th, 2010
It’s the mid-1980s and Franklin Robertson is a “husky” 13-year-old geek with a passion for late night scary movies. If horror host Doctor Cerberus is on the air, you can be sure that young Franklin will be in front of his TV set, enraptured. Tonight, the Transylvanian-accented Doctor (“with a Ph.D in Fear”) is screening “an American classic in the tradition of Citizen Kane and Gone With The Wind,” 1984’s Firestarter, starring Drew Barrymore and George C. Scott “just before he fired his agent.”
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THE BLUE ROOM
Sunday, April 11th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler’s 1900 play La Ronde so shocked the early 20th Century European theatrical world that it didn’t get its first public performance until 1920, and even then the play (and Schnitzler) were roundly attacked by critics and theatergoers alike. Hardly surprising, considering its plot—a sequence of not two or three, but ten sexual encounters. No matter that the most the play showed was a bit of foreplay, the actual sex taking place entirely in the audience’s imagination during brief blackouts. It was too much for Europe, let alone America, to take.
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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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