Author Archive
THE SANTALAND DIARIES
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
For any December theatergoer who’s ever said, “Not another Christmas Carol!”, The Blank Theatre offers the perfect holiday solution—Nicholas Brendon in David Sedaris’s The SantaLand Diaries, the true story of Sedaris’s humiliating but hilarious-in-retrospect stint as a Christmas elf at New York City Macy’s “SantaLand.”
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SOUTHERN COMFORTS
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009RECOMMENDED
When was the last time you saw a romantic comedy about a couple of 70somethings who fall head-over-heels in love? Maybe never? If so, playwright Kathleen Clark remedies this omission in Southern Comforts, now getting its West Coast premiere in an entertaining, well-acted production at Theatre 40.
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EXTINCTION
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
In Gabe McKinley’s deep-dark world premiere comedic drama Extinction, now playing at the Elephant Space in Hollywood, it is not an endangered species that faces the end of its days but rather the longtime friendship of Max and Finn, best buds since college. These two 30ish compadres have been spending their vacations together in Atlantic City since their undergrad days, drinking, drugging, and girl-hunting, but as Bob Dylan once put it, “The times they are a-changin.’” What happens when best friends’ paths in life diverge, one leaving the other in the lurch? Ask yourself this question: How would you react if your closest friend told you that he’d moved on? How far would you go to save this friendship, or failing that, to destroy it forever?
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KIDNAPPED BY CRAIGSLIST
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
A gorgeous barker/ringmaster/dominatrix rises out of wooden box and asks the assembled audience: Do you want to find a date? Sell your couch? Engage in sexual fantasies? Expose unspeakable secrets? She is soon surrounded by a band of loonies, including a woman wearing a saucepan as a hat—“It keeps the aliens out.” “Where are we?” you ask yourself, before realizing the obvious truth. We’re in the wacky world of Craigslist, as seen by Katie Goan and Nitra Gutierrez in their outrageously funny one-act, Kidnapped By Craigslist, now getting its West Coast Premiere in a snazzy production by the illustrious TheSpyAnts.
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WINTER WONDERETTES
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
The marvelous foursome known as the Wonderettes are back in town just in time for the holidays, making this is the best kind of news for theatergoers in search of Christmas cheer. Like The Marvelous Wonderettes, the show that made them famous, Winter Wonderettes is two acts of comedy, harmony, and nostalgia, and a seasonal treat for old and young alike.
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OKLAHOMO!
Friday, November 27th, 2009RECOMMENDED
No one in Los Angeles makes theater quite like Justin Tanner. His one-act comedies are the theatrical equivalent of a midnight cult movie, blending the zany, the edgy, the gay, and occasionally the downright bizarre with a charm very much their own. The best of Justin Tanner’s plays, like last year’s marvelously manic Voice Lessons (which won Laurie Metcalf StageSceneLA’s award for Comedic Performance Of The Year) or Teen Girl, Tanner’s salute to the John Hughes oeuvre, are a sure bet to garner critical raves and audience cheers. Even minor Tanner, like the current revival of 2004’s Oklahomo! (not a spelling error), is guaranteed fun.
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ARIAS WITH A TWIST
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
The proscenium of the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater has been reduced to about one-sixth its normal size, your second clue that you’re in for something completely different tonight. (The first clue was the young, trendy, a tad pansexual audience milling around the theater’s lobby, bar, and art gallery pre-performance.) Then, as music from another time, another place fills the auditorium, one reduced-size curtain rises only to reveal another, which opens to reveal yet another and another and another … until finally, you see before you a lifelike tuxedoed marionette coaxing out notes on the trumpet, a sensual, dreamlike tune with a 1940s Latin sound. Stars spin around the scrim which separates the audience from the mini-trumpeteer, colored lights flashing and galaxies exploding. We are told that we’re about to meet “an astrologer, a time-traveler, a polymorph.”
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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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