THE HASTY HEART
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
John Patrick’s The Hasty Heart is that theatrical rarity—a comedy-drama that is as heartwarming as it is heartbreaking, a life-affirming story about impending death that is, amazingly, oximoronically, a feel-good tearjerker.
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GRACE AND GLORIE
Saturday, June 12th, 2010
Take two very different individuals, put them in the same space over a period of days, weeks, or years, and watch how they change each other’s lives. This is a formula that has worked to perfection in the Colony Theatre’s critically acclaimed productions of Trying and Educating Rita. The same formula works its magic once again in Tom Ziegler’s Grace And Glorie, a gem of a “two hander” sure to be as much a critical and audience favorite as its predecessors, all three superbly helmed by director Cameron Watson.
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YELLOW
Friday, June 11th, 2010
It’s been four years since Del Shores’ Greatest Hits (Sordid Lives, Southern Baptist Sissies, and Trials And Tribulations Of A Trailer Trash Housewife) packed audiences into the Zephyr Theatre for eight memorable months, and over seven years since Shores’ last new play debuted. Since then, Shores and company have gone on to tour the country with the writer’s particular brand of Southern-fried charm and humor, and to produce Sordid Lives: The Series to considerable acclaim. Still, it’s been far too long since Angelinos have had the chance to experience the Shores magic live on stage.
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AGATHA CHRISTIE’S BLACK COFFEE
Monday, June 7th, 2010
Agatha Christie and Hercule Poirot give Theatre 40 one of its best productions with the Queen Of Crime’s classic mystery thriller Black Coffee, one which delivers at least as many laughs as thrills, the entire cast delivering sparkling performances with just the right amount of tongue in cheek.
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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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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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ACTING: THE FIRST SIX LESSONS
Friday, April 9th, 2010
There’s an old black-and-white fan magazine snapshot of TV star Lloyd Bridges and his then teenage son Beau circa Sea Hunt. In the shot, Bridges Sr. and Bridges Jr. are reading a copy of Richard Boleslavsky’s 1933 guide to Acting: The First Six Lessons. Now, some fifty or so years later, 68-year-old Beau and his 23-year-old daughter Emily are staging Boleslavky’s classic text at Theatre West, and the result is an often enthralling and edifying hour and a half of theater, brought to life by a multi-award-winning actor at the peak of his gifts and a exciting young actress just beginning her journey.
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THE DRAWER BOY
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
In the early 1970s, a group of Canadian actors traveled to rural South Ontario to interview local farmers and their families about their lives, and the result was a theatrical event called The Farm Show. Twenty-five years later, one of those actors, Michael Healey, wrote a play about what this experience had meant to him. His resulting 1999 dramedy The Drawer Boy has since become a regional theater favorite, and the nigh-on perfect production now playing at Beverly Hills’ Theatre 40 makes it clear just why The Drawer Boy has tickled so many fancies and touched so many hearts.
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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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