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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A GIANT ARC IN THE SKYCAPE OF DIRECTIONS
Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Playwright Michael Vukadinovich takes a half dozen or so Biblical characters and stands them on their ear in his lyrical, fantastical new play A Giant Arc In The Skyspace Of Directions Or The Story Of Miracles.
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TRYING
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
There are times when all it takes is two actors to fill a stage, to fill it with humor and drama and heart. Trying, Joanna McClelland Glass’s much-loved two-hander, provides a pair of actors with just such an opportunity to shine.
WIREHEAD
Sunday, February 21st, 2010RECOMMENDED
Anyone thirty-five or older can remember a time in their teenage or adult lives when they functioned quite well without the Internet or a cell phone. Those days are long gone, prompting most of us of a certain age to wonder how we ever did without. Our lives have become so technology-dependent that that if a person’s cell phone doesn’t have Internet access (heaven forbid!), he or she is seriously behind the times. (I need to get with it on this!)
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COUSIN BETTE
Saturday, February 20th, 2010
Who would ever have thought that a 164-year-old French novel would provide the basis for the juiciest, funniest, most twisted 3-act, 3-hour family saga since Tracy Letts’ August Osage County? But that’s precisely what Jeffrey Hatcher’s delicious adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s Cousin Bette has turned out to be, particularly under the brilliant direction of Jeanie Hackett and as performed by the superb troupe of actors who make up the Antaeus Company, “L.A.’s Classical Theater Ensemble.”
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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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