THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
Sunday, October 26th, 2014
Queer Classics’ reinvention of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest, the Scenie-winning Hollywood Fringe Festival Production Of The Year, is back for a full-length run with almost all of its Comedic Ensemble Performance Of The Year cast intact—and if you’re any kind of Wilde fan (or simply want to enjoy ninety minutes of nonstop laughter), forget how many Earnests you’ve seen before and see this one. I repeat. See this one! (See it if it’s your first time too.)
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A Or B?
Saturday, October 25th, 2014
Sometimes the course a life takes can depend on something as inconsequential as a cell phone service provider, or so Abby and Ben discover in Ken Levine’s fascinating and funny romantic comedy A Or B?, now getting its World Premiere at the Falcon Theatre.
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PREMEDITATION
Friday, October 24th, 2014
Style may not be everything in Evelina Fernández’s Premeditation, but it plays a big part in making the playwright-actor’s comédie noire (or comedia negra) the exhilaratingly theatrical experience it is, and with Premeditation currently Ovation Award-nominated for Best Production, Direction, and Lighting Design, theatergoers can rejoice at the Latino Theater Company’s decision to bring it back as part of the month-long Encuentro 2014 festival at downtown’s Los Angeles Theatre Center. Premeditation is as stylishly directed, performed, and designed a production as you’re likely to see this or any month—and that is saying something indeed.
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GLORIOUS!
Saturday, October 11th, 2014
It’s been seventy years now since Florence Foster Jenkins met her maker, but the voice that could shatter glass and bring an audience to its feet (for a quick escape?) lives on seven decades later as International City Theatre delights audiences with Peter Quilter’s Glorious!, aka “the true story of Florence Foster Jenkins, the worst singer in the world.”
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WHAT I LEARNED IN PARIS
Friday, September 12th, 2014
The 1973 election of Maynard Jackson as Atlanta’s first African-American mayor is merely the backdrop for Pearl Cleage’s What I Learned In Paris, a romantic roundelay Noël Coward could have confectioned, its made-for-each-other exes J.P. and Evie giving Private Lives’ Elliot and Amanda a run for their money, albeit with a good deal more soul.
Following its 2012 World Premiere at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, Cleage’s entertaining if overlong comedy now arrives at Burbank’s Colony Theatre with some sparkling performances and an often fascinating look back at the heady changes wrought by the previous two decades’ Civil Rights crusade and the then burgeoning Feminist Movement.
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THE WESTERN UNSCRIPTED
Saturday, September 6th, 2014
They’ve improvised Shakespeare. They’ve improvised Film Noir and The Twilight Zone. They’ve improvised Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Chekhov. They’ve even had the chutzpah to improvise Stephen Sondheim, music, lyrics, and all. And now the improv geniuses who call themselves Impro Theatre are back for business at the Falcon Theatre with their latest (and one of their very best) confections to date—improvising a full-length “feature film” live onstage in that most quintessential of American movie genres: The Western UnScripted.
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IT’S JUST SEX
Monday, September 1st, 2014
A dinner party that morphs into a spouse-swapping swingers’ bash may well be the hook that has attracted audiences to Jeff Gould’s It’s Just Sex – A Comedy About Lust & Trust since its World Premiere at the Whitefire back in 2002, but it’s the playwright’s perceptiveness about male-female relationships, the depth he gives his characters, and the unexpected life changes each couple ends up undergoing that has turned It’s Just Sex into L.A.’s longest-running comedy (factoring in its later runs at the Zephyr and the Two Roads), sent it off-Broadway in 2013, and have now brought it back to NoHo’s Secret Rose Theatre with an upcoming Las Vegas run likely in the cards.
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REGRETS ONLY
Sunday, August 31st, 2014
It’s a measure of how much times have changed over the less than eight years since Paul Rudnick’s Regrets Only debuted off-Broadway that Rudnick’s contemporary comedy has already become what some critics might call “dated” … and it’s a measure of Rudnick’s comedic mastery that this matters not a whit, not with characters as wedding-cake delectable as those now onstage at San Diego’s Diversionary Theatre, and certainly not in a production as pitch-perfect as the one Jessica John has directed for America’s third-oldest continuously-producing LGBT theater.
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