Author Archive
THE DIVINERS
Saturday, March 6th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Don’t go expecting a happy ending in Jim Leonard, Jr.’s The Diviners. The play’s prologue reveals Buddy Layman’s fate from the get-go. “He’s dead now for certain. He’s passed on beyond us. The idiot boy is dead. Buddy Layman’s gone.”
MEN OF TORTUGA
Thursday, March 4th, 2010
In a stylish but sterile white office suite, three well-dressed men are discussing what appears to be an assassination plot with a rather scruffy, tattooed visitor whom one surmises to be the prospective assassin. The latter has qualms, not about the equipment he’ll be using, but about the pane of glass he’ll have to be shooting through. The window could affect the trajectory, he explains, adding that even humidity can affect a bullet’s course. “I’d have to say you have a low chance of success,” he informs the others. Since neither the time nor the place of the assassination can be changed, he concludes that a rifle is clearly not the answer. “If you want to do it, you’ll have to bomb the whole room,” he suggests. Maybe do it with a missile? The oldest of the three plotters has an even better idea—to put someone in the room who is willing to pay the price. He then volunteers to be that man.
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ESCANABA IN DA MOONLIGHT
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
Movie star/playwright Jeff Daniels affectionately skewers the natives of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (aka the Yoopers) in his hit comedy Escanaba In Da Moonlight, now making a return engagement at San Pedro’s Little Fish Theatre. As an authentic Yooper might put it, “Dis is some funny show, and dat’s da trute.”
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WIT
Sunday, February 28th, 2010
To paraphrase English poet John Donne, Death is not “too proud” to come knocking on 50-year-old Vivian Bearing’s door in Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit, now making a return visit to Los Angeles in a production by Actors Co-op that simply could not be better.
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THE UNEXPECTED MAN
Saturday, February 27th, 2010NOT RECOMMENDED
A middle-aged man and woman are strangers seated across the aisle from each other on a train. The man is Paul Parsky, famed novelist and author of a The Unexpected Man, among numerous other titles. The woman is Martha, a Parsky admirer who just happens to be halfway through reading The Unexpected Man, a copy of which she carries in her purse. For the next ninety minutes or so, Paul and Martha reveal their thoughts in a series of inner monologs before finally engaging in brief conversation.
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ANOTHER VERMEER
Saturday, February 27th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Art forger Han van Meegeren has been imprisoned by the Dutch following the end of World War II for having allegedly sold a beloved national treasure—an original Vermeer—to Nazi Reich Marshall Hermann Goering. His defense? That he was in fact a patriot who saved many Dutch lives. The painting, he asserts, was one he had forged, and the fortune Goering paid for it ($7 million in today’s currency) was money that otherwise would have gone into the war effort. Criminal or patriot? Artist or swindler?
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BACKWARDS IN HIGH HEELS
Friday, February 26th, 2010
It’s been said that Ginger Rogers became a star doing everything her dance partner Fred Astaire could do … but backwards in high heels. The Oscar-winning actress-dancer now gets her very own tribute musical, Lynette Barkley and Charles McGovern’s Backwards In High Heels, and it’s hard to imagine a better production of “The Ginger Musical” than the one just opened at Long Beach’s International City Theatre.
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KISS ME KATE
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
Compared to the 510 years that Petruchio has been telling Katherina to “Kiss me, Kate” in William Shakespeare’s The Taming Of The Shrew, the mere 62 that he’s been doing the same thing in Cole Porter’s Tony Award-winning Kiss Me Kate seem like no time at all, especially in as fresh and fun a production as the one currently on stage at Glendale Centre Theatre.
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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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