THE BLUE ROOM
Thursday, December 9th, 2010NOT RECOMMENDED
When David Hare’s The Blue Room was staged at the Pasadena Playhouse in 2002, it ran about 90 minutes without an intermission. The same play now being presented at The Moth Theatre on Melrose lets out at about 10:50. Even figuring in an 8:10 start time (par for the course in 99-seat L.A. theater) and a 15 minute intermission, that’s a whopping 55 minutes longer—without adding new dialog.
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GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Sunday, November 21st, 2010
Over the past two decades, Glendale’s A Noise Within has tended to offer three kinds of plays, one each per Fall or Spring season. There’s something by Shakespeare, something by Ibsen, Moliere, Shaw, or an ancient Greek or Roman, and something more contemporary, say a play by Odets, Anouilh, Williams, Miller, or O’Neil. Now, with Neil Bartlett’s 2007 adaptation of Charles Dickens’ 1861 novel Great Expectations, California’s Home For The Classics gets the chance to merge the classical and the modern for an evening of classical contemporary (or contemporary classical) theater at its finest.
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EQUUS
Saturday, November 20th, 2010
Peter Shaffer’s Equus presents a greater than usual challenge to a university drama department choosing to undertake a production of the Tony Award-winning Best Play of 1973. Roles like those originated on Broadway by Anthony Hopkins and Peter Firth require a depth of talent and life experience that not all drama majors possess. Shaffer’s ideas about God, sex, and morality might easily whoosh over the heads of actors in their late teens and early twenties. Finally, there is the play’s much publicized nudity, doubtless an important factor in the show’s more than 1200 performances in its original Broadway run, but an element that might prove problematic in a student production.
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LITTLE FLOWER OF EAST ORANGE
Friday, November 12th, 2010
“Dysfunctional” doesn’t begin to describe the O’Connor family in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Little Flower Of East Orange, now in its West Coast Premiere engagement by the Elephant Theatre Company. Indeed, elderly matriarch Marie Therese Sullivan O’Connor, and her grown son and daughter Danny and Justina are so totally f*cked up as to make Amanda, Tom, and Laura Wingfield seem positively well-adjusted by comparison.
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BECKY SHAW
Sunday, October 31st, 2010
Gina Gionfriddo takes a fresh new look at the repercussions of blind dating, or at least of one particular blind date, in her wickedly funny, often biting, highly original Becky Shaw, now getting a terrific West Coast Premiere at South Coast Repertory.
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THE AUTUMN GARDEN
Friday, October 29th, 2010
It’s September of 1949 and summer is drawing to an end at the Tuckerman home-turned-guesthouse on the Gulf of Mexico, about a hundred miles from New Orleans. Proprietress Constance Tuckerman, her house filled with the usual mix of longtime summer guests, is about to welcome Nicholas Denry, the man who broke her heart twenty-three years earlier, into their midst, thereby setting the scene for the Chekhovian weekend Lillian Hellman brings to life in 1951’s The Autumn Garden.
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THE TRAIN DRIVER
Thursday, October 21st, 2010RECOMMENDED
The partnership of Athol Fugard and The Fountain Theatre has possibly led to more awards and award nominations than any ongoing collaboration between writer and theater in the Los Angeles area. Fountain productions of Fugard’s The Road To Mecca, Exits And Entrances, Victory, and Coming Home have won raves from local reviewers and numerous Ovations and LADCC awards, among others. The arrival of Fugard’s latest, The Train Driver, a work the playwright describes as “the most important play I’ve written” therefore seemed a good opportunity to see what all the kudos have been about.
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FDR
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010NOT RECOMMENDED
The Pasadena Playhouse has reopened only nine months after the sad announcement that it was closing its doors for good, news worth celebrating in the streets with fireworks to light up the sky. If only FDR, the production chosen to welcome back Playhouse subscribers and friends, were equally deserving of a celebration.
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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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