FAIRIES WITH CHILDREN
Saturday, November 13th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Gay best friends go underground in a Pomona cul-de-sac in an attempt to change the hearts and minds of conservative America in John Trapper’s Fairies With Children (The Yes On Hate Episode), a World Premiere comedy now playing at the Meta Theatre.
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CRIMES OF THE HEART
Wednesday, November 10th, 2010
East West Players 2010-11 season continues with its second smash hit in a row—an absolutely splendid staging of the quirky Southern comedy Crimes Of The Heart. The third major Southern California revival of Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play since May, East West’s is the first to feature an all-Asian American cast—and why not? As Artistic Director Tim Dang has stated, “Asians do live in the South, Asians do speak with Southern accents and Asians historically have been part of the American landscape for well over a century.” Since Hollywood casting directors remain for the most part blithely unaware of this reality, it’s up to theater companies like East West to give members of the Asian American acting community roles like Henley’s delightfully quirky Magrath sisters—parts which Elizabeth Liang, Kimiko Gelman, and Maya Erskine bring to vivid, authentic, hilarious, and emotionally resonant life.
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BLITHE SPIRIT
Sunday, November 7th, 2010
WWII London had just undergone the eight months of sustained bombing by Hitler’s Luftwaffe (and seen tens of thousands of its citizens killed, and even more injured) when Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit opened in June of 1941, offering shell-shocked Londoners a welcome escape from the horrors of the night skies and keeping them laughing throughout the war—for a grand total of 1997 performances.
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MOONLIGHT AND MAGNOLIAS
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010
Diehard Gone With The Wind fans may well have seen the 1939 classic 1939 times, but few may be aware of the five days movie mogul David O. Selznick shut himself, director Victor Fleming, and script doctor Ben Hecht inside his office, the three men subsisting entirely on a diet of bananas and peanuts, as Hecht rewrote the entire script of Gone With The Wind, a book he’d never read. Or at least that’s how Hollywood scuttlebutt would have it.
Playwright Ron Hutchinson imagines what might have transpired behind those closed doors in his hit comedy Moonlight And Magnolias, now making its Hermosa Beach Playhouse debut in a delightfully fresh new production. Once again HBP Artistic Director Stephanie A. Coltrin proves herself one of the most reliable directors in town, eliciting splendid performances from Patrick Vest (Selznick), Cylan Brown (Fleming), Joel Bryant (Hecht), and Nicole Wessel (Selznick’s harried secretary Miss Poppenghul). Moonlight And Magnolias is a show which will entertain and elucidate anyone who’s ever seen GWTW, and that’s just about everyone on the planet, right?
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BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010
A decade and a half before Samantha “Bewitched” Darren Stephens, a gorgeous young sorceress named Gillian cast a spell over New York publisher Shep Henderson in John Van Druten’s 1950 Broadway comedy Bell, Book, And Candle, best known for its 1959 film adaptation starring James Stewart and Kim Novak. Though the original stage version made it into John Gassner’s Best American Plays series as one of 1945-1951’s seventeen best (alongside Death Of A Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Mister Roberts), Bell, Book, And Candle has pretty much disappeared from theatrical view, at least in major professional productions. That’s why its arrival at Burbank’s Colony Theater qualifies as rather an event, even more so because unlike many mid-century plays, Van Druten’s romcom holds up very well indeed, scarcely seeming sixty years of age.
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GOD’S FAVORITE
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010
A messenger from God arrives at the Long Island mansion of multimillionaire business tycoon Joe Benjamin and informs him, “If you cherish your children and wife, the house that shelters you, the clothes that warm you and the flesh that covers you, if pain, calamity and disaster do not in any manner whatsoever appeal to you, then renounce your God!” Joe refuses, and is soon afflicted by a series of calamities that would test the patience of Job. Does this sound like a Neil Simon comedy to you?
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DIVING NORMAL
Wednesday, October 20th, 2010
The lives of three 20something New Yorkers intersect in Diving Normal, Ashlin Halfnight’s smart, funny, engrossing comedy-drama now getting its West Coast Premiere at the SFS Theatre under Neil H. Weiss’s astute direction.
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THE BUTCHER OF BARABOO
Friday, October 8th, 2010
The Coen Brothers meet Beth Henley in Marisa Wegrzyn’s The Butcher Of Baraboo, a quirky bit of Fargo crossed with Crimes Of The Heart, now getting its Los Angeles premiere at North Hollywood’s The Road Theater Company.
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