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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FRUIT FLY
Monday, January 9th, 2012
Leslie Jordan answers the age-old question—“Do gay men really become their mothers?”—in his latest autobiographical one-man show, Fruit Fly, and as anyone who’s ever seen the Chattanooga native in Sordid Lives or on Will And Grace can well imagine, there’s not likely to be a more delightful autobiographical one-man show in any foreseeable future.
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THE GAYEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER!
Friday, December 23rd, 2011
The old adage that “timing is everything” proves doubly true for the Paul Storiale-directed production of Joe Marshall’s The Gayest Christmas Pageant Ever! A not yet fully rehearsed opening weekend was hardly the most propitious time for inviting critics to review its West Coast Premiere, and without sufficient rehearsal, the draggy production I saw two weeks ago lacked (among other things) the razor-sharp timing so essential in a screwball comedy. Fortunately, this reviewer’s schedule has permitted a return visit, and I can happily report that this new, improved The Gayest Christmas Pageant Ever! merits a largely unqualified WOW! What a difference time and timing can make.
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MY THREE ANGELS
Sunday, December 18th, 2011
A trio of convicts transported to 1910 French Guiana prove Christmas guardian angels to an absentminded shopkeeper, his long-suffering wife, and their lovesick daughter in Sam and Bella Spewack’s charming 1953 comedy My Three Angels, delightfully revived for 21st Century audiences by theGROUPrep at the Lonny Chapman Theatre.
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CHRISTMASTIME IS QUEER 4
Wednesday, December 7th, 2011
The talented writers and actors of Playwrights 6 are back onstage at Celebration Theatre for the first time in seven years with the latest installment of their popular anthology of holiday/LGBT-themed one-acts, Christmastime Is Queer 4. Despite not even a dash of the nudity that made 2004’s Christmastime Is Queer 3: Naked Christmas particularly memorable, this all-new collection of playlets may well be the best of the bunch so far.
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