TOPDOG/UNDERDOG
Friday, August 6th, 2010NOT RECOMMENDED
Ben Brantley, the chief drama critic of the New York Times (i.e. the most important theater reviewer in the United States) called Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog “as exciting as any new play from a young American since Tony Kushner’s Angels In America.” It was nominated for a Best Play Tony Award and won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. I found it one of the two longest evenings I’ve spent in a theater in the past year.
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THE GOOD BOOK OF PEDANTRY AND WONDER
Sunday, August 1st, 2010
In 1879, British lexicographer James Murray was hired by Oxford University Press to edit a new dictionary of the English language, a task expected to take about ten years and result in a 7,000-page tome. Holed up in a corrugated-iron garden shed on the grounds of Mill Hill School, Murray began the monumental undertaking with the help of a small team of assistants. Neither the linguist nor the dons of Oxford could have imagined that it would take until 1928 for the dictionary to be completed (nearly a decade after Murray’s death) and that the final product would end up a twelve-volume tome instead of the initially planned four volumes.
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OPUS
Thursday, July 8th, 2010
Tales of rock bands’ acrimonious breakups are the stuff of legend—think Smashing Pumpkins, The Doors, Talking Heads, Pink Floyd, and of course The Beatles. Michael Hollinger’s Opus, now in its Los Angeles premiere at the Fountain Theatre, makes it clear that the world of classical music is no less volatile—and perhaps even more so.
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KING LEAR
Sunday, June 27th, 2010
When L.A.’s Classical Theatre Ensemble sets out to do its very first fully staged production of a William Shakespeare play, the result truly merits event status, especially when it is the Antaeus Company staging King Lear with not one His Majesty but two royal monarchs—Dakin Matthews and Harry Groener—and two entirely different casts to support them.
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ELEVATOR
Sunday, June 20th, 2010
Take a bunch of strangers and trap them in an enclosed space for a significant enough length of time and it’s a sure bet they’ll come out changed by the experience—if plays and movies are to be believed. Take the jurors in Twelve Angry Men, Tom Hanks and assorted others in You’ve Got Mail, or the high school kids in The Breakfast Club. Eleven jurors changed their verdict, Tom decided to leave Parker Posey for Meg Ryan, and the Princess, Jock, Brain, Criminal, and Basket Case all revealed themselves to be night-and-day different from our first impression of them and bonded in the process. Such is the stuff of stage and screen fiction.
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ARCADIA
Saturday, June 19th, 2010RECOMMENDED
The venerable Sierra Madre Playhouse challenges its subscribers and theatergoing regulars with something quite different in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, an intellectual comedy whose characters discuss physics, thermodynamics, computer algorithms, fractals, population dynamics, and chaos theory—as well as others of a slightly less scientific bent.
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AMADEUS
Friday, June 18th, 2010
For the past several years, August Viverito and T L Kolman have been stripping down big stage, big budget Broadway productions to their brilliant essentials on the matchbox stage of the Chandler Studio Theatre in North Hollywood. Now, to the ranks of their superb downscalings of M Butterfly, Equus, and Sweeney Todd can be added The Production Company’s equally outstanding re-envisioning of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus.
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A SHAYNA MAIDEL
Thursday, June 17th, 2010
On the surface, Rose White would appear to be the quintessential All American New Yorker circa 1946. She has her own West Side apartment, a good job, a fashionable wardrobe, and an independent lifestyle. Scratch a little deeper, however, and you’ll discover that Rose White is European-born Rayzel Weiss, the daughter of Polish Jews born just a decade before Hitler’s rise to power. Papa Mordechai and four-year-old Rose emigrated to America in the mid-1920s, but older sister Lusia came down with scarlet fever shortly before the family’s planned departure, so Mama and Lusia stayed behind. Then came the Nazis, and mother and daughter were shipped off to Auschwitz along with everyone else in their extended family. Only Lusia survived. Now, a year after the declaration of peace in Europe, older sister has come to America at last.
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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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