greedy
Saturday, January 8th, 2011
Some of Hollywood’s busiest and best TV/film actors return to their stage roots in the West Coast Premiere of greedy, Karl Gajdusek’s dryly amusing though frustratingly cryptic dark mystery suspense comedy given about as fine a West Coast Premiere as can be imagined by the talented bunch who call themselves Red Dog Squadron.
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ISLAND OF BRILLIANCE
Sunday, December 19th, 2010NOT RECOMMENDED
Eighteen-year-old Evie is reputed to be one of the top students in her New Jersey high school, but you wouldn’t know it from her college interviews. She tells the Princeton interviewer that she applied to the Ivy League school because her guidance counselor “thought I might get in.” She tells the Dartmouth interviewer that he applied there to see if the school is worth attempting suicide for. (Someone she knows tried to off himself when the school rejected him.) As for Yale, she tells the boy next door that she can’t remember whether she applied there or not.
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ELEVATOR
Saturday, December 11th, 2010
Few L.A. theater success stories can rival that of Michael Leoni’s Elevator. Opening last June at the tiniest of the Hudson theaters for a mere seven performances at the Hollywood Fringe Festival, Elevator proved such a hit with audiences that it returned in July for a month-long run. Good fortune then struck with a Critic’s Choice review in the L.A. Times, and Elevator’s producers had themselves a bona fide hit. In September, the show re-reopened at the considerably larger Hudson Mainstage for another month of performances, ultimately re-re-reopening in October at the Macha, where it now heads into the homestretch of a smash two-week-turned six-month run fueled almost entirely by word-of-mouth—though the L.A. Times review certainly didn’t hurt.
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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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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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