TWENTIETH CENTURY
Monday, February 6th, 2012
Screwball comedy is in expert hands as the Sierra Madre Playhouse revives Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s Twentieth Century, tweaked by Ken Ludwig to give the 1930s piece a 21st Century sensibility while maintaining all the classic elements of screwball.
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GOD OF CARNAGE
Friday, February 3rd, 2012
Long Beach’s International City Theater trumps the competition with its 2012 season opener of Yasmina Reza’s Tony-winning Best Play of 2009 God Of Carnage, a production which, while not technically its West Coast Premiere (Center Theatre Group got that honor by merely importing the Broadway team), nonetheless merits true event status for being built entirely from the ground up—brand new actors, a brand new director, and a brand new team of designers, all of them doing bang-up work on the ICT stage.
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ART
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
There’s nothing like star quality to turn yet another revival of an oft-produced play into an event—not celebrity stunt casting, but rather that combination of talent, individuality, and charisma that true stars bring to whatever project they undertake.
Such is the case with the Pasadena Playhouse’s fabulous all-star revival of Yasmina Reza’s Art, the French playwright’s Tony-winning Best Play of 1998.
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DIVIDING THE ESTATE
Monday, January 30th, 2012
The late, great Horton Foote returned to the small-town Texas he knew so well—in comedic mode this time round—in his Dividing The Estate, Tony-nominated as Best Play of 2009 and now playing at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre with two-thirds of its New York cast intact, including Foote’s daughter Hallie in the role that scored her a Tony nomination.
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BOEING-BOEING
Saturday, January 28th, 2012
There’ll be no louder peals of laughter in the South Bay over the next few weekends than those emanating from Rolling Hills Estates as the Norris Center For The Performing Arts presents an all-around splendid revival of Marc Camoletti’s saucy, sexy French farce Boeing-Boeing under James W. Gruessing’s sparkling direction.
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WHAT THE BUTLER SAW
Thursday, January 26th, 2012
Here’s a quick quiz for theater aficionados:
Who can name a screwball comedy which deals with, features, or mentions all of the following: depravity, disguises, gender identity, the government, hanky-panky, hermaphroditism, homosexuality, incest, insanity, marriage, mistaken identities, nymphomania, pederasty, psychiatry, rape, religion, reunited orphan siblings, slapstick, and transvestitism?
PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM
Monday, January 23rd, 2012
Woody Allen is back on screen—and better than ever—in his critically acclaimed box-office smash Midnight In Paris, making the Morgan-Wixson Theatre’s decision to program one of Allen’s earliest hits as part of their 2011-12 season a stroke of prescient genius. That Morgan-Wixson’s staging of Play It Again Sam, Allen’s late-1960s comedy about a Humphrey Bogart-obsessed nebbish, turns out to be quite a gem of a production is icing on the cake.
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THE 39 STEPS
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
A quarter century before Cary Grant found himself pursued across the United States by enemy spies mistakenly believing him to be a CIA agent in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller North By Northwest, a young man named Richard Hannay wound up in similar straits in The 39 Steps, one of the master of the suspense’s earliest hits, and one whose now iconic sequences include a train-top chase leading to Hannay’s daredevil jump onto the Forth Bridge, a seemingly fatal shooting of our hero midway through, hero handcuffed to Hitchcock Blonde heroine as he searches for a villain recognizable only by the missing top joint on one of his fingers, and a very public climactic scene at the London Palladium, much like the one Hitchcock later filmed at the Royal Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much.
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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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