RABBIT HOLE
Sunday, October 27th, 2013
Run, do not walk, to the La Mirada Theatre For The Performing Arts, where McCoy Rigby Entertainment is treating theater lovers to an absolutely brilliantly directed, acted, and designed production of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Hole.
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SUNNY AFTERNOON
Sunday, October 20th, 2013
On November 22, 1963, at about half-past-noon Dallas time, President John F. Kennedy was shot as his motorcade passed in front of the Texas School Book Depository … and thirty minutes later was pronounced dead. On November 24, the President’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself fatally shot by local nightclub operator Jack Ruby as a nation sitting glued to their TV screens looked on in horror.
But what about the forty-eight hours separating these two America-shattering events?
Playwright-director Christian Levatino and his gangbusters theatre company* let us be flies on the walls of the Dallas Police Headquarters where Oswald spent his last two days under police interrogation in Levatino’s gripping new play Sunny Afternoon, now getting its official World Premiere following its Best-Of-Fringe-winning workshop at last June’s Hollywood Fringe Festival.
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WAIT UNTIL DARK
Saturday, October 19th, 2013
Some plays simply cannot be updated to the 21st Century. Take for example Wait Until Dark, Frederick Knott’s classic 1966 thriller about a blind New York City newlywed targeted by a trio of thugs out to find the heroin-filled doll they believe to be hidden somewhere in the walk-down flat she shares with her photographer husband—a play entirely dependent on there being just one land-line phone in the apartment and a (now virtually non-existent) phone booth on a nearby corner.
That’s why, when I heard that playwright Jeffrey Hatcher was adapting Wait Until Dark for the Geffen Playhouse “in a new time/setting,” my first thought was “They must be kidding!” Then I found out that Hatcher was actually taking Knott’s thriller back in time to WWII New York City and that thought turned to “Wow! What a clever idea!” Not only a clever idea, it turns out, but one that proves as exiting in execution as in theory.
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RII
Thursday, October 10th, 2013
William Shakespeare. The Theatre @ Boston Court. Two names you wouldn’t normally expect to see in the same sentence let alone in the first paragraph of a review. But wonder of wonders, Boston Court is currently wowing an audience of Shakespeare buffs and T@BC regulars with its very own version of Richard II, one they’ve redubbed RII if only to let the world know that, just as Boston Court isn’t your grandparents’ theater, this isn’t your grandparents’ Richard II—not by a long shot.
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THE FEW
Monday, October 7th, 2013
Samuel D. Hunter. Remember that name, because if the three Sam Hunter plays I’ve had the great good fortune to see over the past twelve months are any indication, this Idaho-born, New York-based playwright is one whose name you’ll be hearing for years to come. A Bright New Boise and The Whale have proven him “one to watch.” The Few (his latest, now getting the sensational World Premiere it deserves), further cements the young playwright’s place in contemporary American theater.
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TIME STANDS STILL
Saturday, October 5th, 2013
A wounded photo-journalist’s return home from the war zone proves even more challenging than a life lived on the edge in Donald Margulies’ intelligent, perceptive, often funny, always compelling Time Stands Still, now getting a superb Orange County Premiere at Anaheim’s Chance Theater with crackerjack director Marya Mazor assuredly at the helm.
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THE NORMAL HEART
Saturday, October 5th, 2013
Larry Kramer’s landmark drama The Normal Heart gets its first L.A. staging in nearly two decades, and tough as it may be to revisit the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic, this absolutely brilliant production is one that no Los Angeles theater lover should miss, and the younger the audience the better.
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THE LION IN WINTER
Sunday, September 29th, 2013
It’s a classic nighttime soap, that is if Dallas or Dynasty had been set in 12th-Century England. It’s a Shakespeare history, that is if you could understand every word the actors are saying. It’s a 1960s film classic that won Katharine Hepburn the third of her four Best Actress Oscars.
It’s Peter Goldman’s Broadway flop play-turned-Hollywood hit movie, and if (as Wikipedia puts it rather ungrammatically) “The Lion in Winter is fictional and none of the dialogue and actions is historical,” it still makes for one of modern American theater’s most entertaining dramas and offers actors some of the meatiest roles of their careers—proof of which is now onstage at the Sierra Madre Playhouse.
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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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