PLEASE DON’T ASK ABOUT BECKET
Tuesday, August 30th, 2016
Wendy Graf puts a personal face on the question of nature vs. nurture in Please Don’t Ask About Becket, the playwright’s latest family drama now getting an often compelling World Premiere guest production at The Sacred Fools Theatre Black Box.
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BLUEPRINT FOR PARADISE
Saturday, August 13th, 2016
The weeks leading up to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor provide the historical backdrop for Blueprint For Paradise, Laurel M. Wetzork’s fascinating, fact-inspired look at the unlikely friendship between the heiress wife of an American Nazi sympathizer and the African-American architect hired to design a “refugee compound” on fifty-acres of the couple’s Pacific Palisades estate.
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A RAISIN IN THE SUN
Sunday, July 31st, 2016
Star turns you’d expect to see at the Pasadena Playhouse or the Geffen distinguish Ruskin Group Theatre’s 57th-anniversary revival of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award-winning A Raisin In The Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s piercing look at racial discrimination, gender roles, family values, and burgeoning African-American identity—a modern American classic that remains as relevant today as it was in the pre-Civil Rights Era 1950s.
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FOOL FOR LOVE
Friday, July 8th, 2016
I may never go gaga for Fool For Love, but if ever a production could make me a believer in Sam Shepard’s overheated take on Greek tragedy in today’s Wild Wild West, it’s the one now playing at the Davidson/Valentini Theatre thanks to some refreshingly subtle directorial touches and a quartet of superb performances, chief among them star turns by Burt Grinstead and Charlotte Gulezian.
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SMOKE
Monday, July 4th, 2016
Fearless only begins to describe Patrick Stafford and Emily James’ stunning performances in Kim Davies’ walk-on-the-wild-side two-hander Smoke, now running in raw, risk-taking Rogue Machine rep with the similarly single-word-titled Honky and Bull.
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A FEW GOOD MEN
Saturday, July 2nd, 2016
An edge-of-your-seat suspense-filled script, a mystery it would take a Sherlock Holmes to solve, courtroom sequences that would do Perry Mason proud, razor-sharp direction by Tony Pauletto, a topnotch production design, and crackerjack performances by a cast of twenty-four, most particularly by KC Clyde in the role that scored a pair of Toms (Hulce and Cruise) respective Tony and Golden Globe nominations, all of the above add up to a NoHo Arts Center guest production of Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men that rivals work being done by L.A.’s finest intimate theater companies.
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THE ECCENTRICITIES OF A NIGHTINGALE
Sunday, June 26th, 2016
Ginna Carter gives quite possibly the year’s most brilliant dramatic performance as Alma Winemiller in Pacific Resident Theatre’s absolutely superb revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Eccentricities Of A Nightingale, impeccably directed by Dana Jackson.
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GOLDEN BOY
Monday, June 20th, 2016
They don’t write plays like Golden Boy anymore, which is just one reason to check out the Stella Adler Lab Theatre Company’s revival of the 1937 Clifford Odets classic. Another is Mattia Bartoli’s electric star turn as violinist turned pugilist Joe Bonaparte.
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