SLIPPING
Monday, April 15th, 2013
A young man’s traumatic journey from adolescence to adulthood comes to vivid, heartbreaking, yet ultimately hopeful life in Daniel Talbott’s 2009 drama Slipping, whose Los Angeles premiere reunites its pair of New York stars under the incisive direction of its multitalented writer.
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A DOLL’S HOUSE
Sunday, April 7th, 2013
Eight and a half decades before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique set off what’s known as the Second-Wave Feminist Movement in the U.S., Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen created a heroine whose frustration at being “just a housewife” could well have inspired Friedan and her fellow women’s libbers.
Her name, as you may have guessed, was Nora, and if playwright Ibsen steadfastly asserted that he had not consciously “worked for the women’s rights movement,” A Doll’s House must certainly have inspired generation after generation of women in the years since its 1879 debut.
Ibsen’s masterpiece, incidentally the world’s most performed play, now arrives at San Diego’s The Old Globe Theatre in a World Premiere adaptation by translator Anne-Charlotte Hanes Harvey and director Kirsten Brandt that makes Nora, the Norwegians surrounding her, and Ibsen’s play itself seem considerably younger than their one hundred thirty-four years of age.
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REMEMBRANCE
Sunday, March 31st, 2013
His Protestant son was murdered by an IRA hit squad in the driveway of his father’s Belfast home. Her Catholic son was tortured, then shot to death by a vigilante Protestant street gang. Their late-in-life romance is at the heart of Graham Reid’s powerful 1987 drama Remembrance, not only one of the finest plays to be part of a Theatre 40 season, but quite possibly the best overall production I have seen at Beverly Hills’ premier 99-seat theater.
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ON THE SPECTRUM
Friday, March 29th, 2013
Young man with Asperger syndrome and young woman with autism fall in love to his single mom’s dismay.
Rarely has a play had as Hollywood-ready a “log line” as On The Spectrum, now getting its West Coast Premiere at The Fountain Theatre, and though Ken LaZebnik’s dramedy is not at the level of the stellar production it is being given at the Fountain, a pair of breathtaking lead performances and an extraordinary video/sound design are more than enough put it on every L.A. theater lover’s must-see list.
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MASTER CLASS
Monday, March 25th, 2013
Behind every great voice there must surely be a story, though few great voices have behind them a story as compelling as that of Maria Callas, the Greek soprano known the world over as La Divina, or so L.A. theatergoers will discover as Master Class, Terrence McNally’s Tony-winning Best Play of 1996, returns to our stages in an all-around superb production at Long Beach’s International City Theatre.
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WHAT MAY FALL
Friday, March 15th, 2013
A senseless random tragedy causes nine Minneapolitans to reevaluate their lives in Peter Gil-Sheridan’s What May Fall, now getting a compelling, beautifully acted, incisively directed West Coast Premiere at Hollywood’s Theatre Of NOTE.
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TENDER NAPALM
Tuesday, March 12th, 2013
The East London exes of Philip Ridley’s Tender Napalm could give the long-married spouses of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a lesson in how to use language as both weapon and aphrodisiac, or so Los Angeles audiences can now discover in the sensational West Coast Premiere of Ridley’s surreal romantic tragedy at the downtown warehouse-turned-performance space Six-01 Studio.
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LADYHOUSE BLUES
Sunday, March 3rd, 2013
Four years had passed since the Equal Rights Amendment was sent to the states to be ratified and three since Roe vs. Wade became the law of the land when Kevin O’Morrison’s Ladyhouse Blues first sent mid-1970s audiences back to 1919, a year after the end of World War I and the watershed year the Senate ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the vote just as the 1920s began to roar.
Andak Stage Company now revives Ladyhouse Blues under the impeccable direction of Anne McNaughton, offering L.A. audiences an all-around splendid production, one that transports us back nearly a century to the end of a decade in which the times, were (as Bob Dylan was to put it forty-five years later) most definitely “a-‘changin’.”
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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