TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT
Monday, November 14th, 2011
Imagine for a moment that Patrick Dennis had met his Auntie Mame when he was well into middle age rather than as a child. Imagine too that this meeting had occurred in the swinging ‘60s instead of the Roaring ‘20s, and that aunt and nephew had been British and not American. Imagine all this and what you’d come up with would be Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt, the famed author’s 1969 novel which playwright Giles Havergal adapted for the stage in 1989. It is this oh-so-clever stage adaptation that Burbank’s Colony Theatre now brings to vivid, imaginative life under the truly inspired direction of David Dean Bottrell.
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THE GOD OF ISAAC
Friday, November 11th, 2011
The neo-Nazi National Socialist Party Of America’s planned march through the heavily Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois, sends Isaac Adams on a quest to discover what it means to be a Jew in James Sherman’s hilariously original comedy The God Of Isaac, now playing at West Los Angeles’s Pico Playhouse.
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TWELFTH NIGHT
Sunday, November 6th, 2011
Even if you think you’ve seen enough Twelfth Nights to last you a lifetime, leave it to A Noise Within to put a fresh new spin on Shakespeare’s classic tale of gender-switching and mistaken identity. As for those seeing their very first Twelfth Night, ANW’s Caribbean-set retelling proves as entertaining an introduction to it as any lover of the Bard could desire.
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MOSES SUPPOSES
Monday, October 31st, 2011
1970 Oscar nominee Karen Black and David Proval of TV’s The Sopranos play longtime marrieds in Moses Supposes, Ellen Malaver’s entertaining family comedy—no, make that entertaining dysfunctional family comedy, now playing at the Zephyr Theatre.
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PRIVATE LIVES
Thursday, October 27th, 2011
Five of the best and brightest of the Hermosa Beach Playhouse’s unofficial “resident company” of stars have reunited under artistic director Stephanie A. Coltrin’s directorial baton to bring Noël Coward’s Private Lives to the South Bay Cities. Who could ask for anything more?
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I LOVE LUCY® LIVE ON STAGE
Monday, October 24th, 2011
Have you ever wondered what it might have been like to be inside Desilu Studios for a taping of the sitcom that revolutionized TV? If so, then let I Love Lucy® Live on Stage be your time machine back to the early 1950s—and ninety of the funnest/funniest minutes you’re likely to have all year.
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SHIRLEY VALENTINE
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
Chick flick fans of a certain age may recall British actress Pauline Collins’ Oscar-nominated performance as Shirley Valentine in the 1989 movie of the same name. If you’re like me, you sat entranced watching 40something Liverpool housewife Shirley leave the drudgery of her day-to-day existence for a life-altering holiday in Greece, her traveling companion not her inattentive, unappreciative lug of a husband but contest-winning best friend Jane—who promptly abandons Shirley upon arrival. Befriended by an English couple whose xenophobia proves too much to take, Shirley takes off into the night and into arms of a handsome Greek named Costas.
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PSYCHO BEACH PARTY
Monday, October 3rd, 2011NOT RECOMMENDED
No one sends up popular film genres with a campier (i.e. gayer) sensibility than Charles Busch, whether it’s the “Oriental” melodramas of Hollywood’s Golden Era in Shanghai Moon, or those ’50s/’60s Ross Hunter soap operas in Die! Mommy! Die!, or WWII “Women In Peril” thrillers in The Lady In Question, or the red-baiting propaganda films of the late ’40s/early ’50s in Red Scare On Sunset.
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