HAMLET
Friday, October 30th, 2009RECOMMENDED
Since William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is considered by many to be the greatest play ever written, with just about every major stage actor having at one time or other tackled its title role, it’s noteworthy to say the least whenever a theater company takes on the challenge of staging it. John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, Ralph Fiennes, and Broadway’s latest Hamlet, Jude Law, are hard acts to follow. Nevertheless, on a shoestring budget and without a single “name” in their cast, the Knightsbridge Theatre’s National American Shakespeare Company has staged a highly commendable Hamlet featuring excellent work by a young actor named Joshua Hayden as the Prince Of Denmark.
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CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
How do you adapt a 550+ page novel like Dostoevsky’s Crime And Punishment for the stage? If you’re playwriting team Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus, you pare it down to ninety minutes with a cast of three actors to play all the characters. Well, not actually all of them. Of the two-dozen or so major roles in the Russian classic, Campbell and Columbus have chosen the nine they consider most important, given one actor the pivotal role of Raskolnikov the student/thief/murderer, and divvied up the remaining eight roles between the other two cast members.
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BETTER ANGELS
Saturday, October 24th, 2009
An elderly man enters from the back of the theater, climbs slowly onto the stage, and apologizes for his late arrival. Pointing to a star-spangled banner framed upstage center, he declares, “A beautiful flag, is it not?,” adding, “Forty-five stars.” (Program notes give the year as 1909.) This elderly man, John Hay, informs us that he is going to tell us a story … about “a man, a lady, and a man whose secretary I was. The lady will be new to you, but the man will be as familiar to you as the penny in your pocket.”
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AS WHITE AS O
Friday, October 23rd, 2009RECOMMENDED
Synesthesia is a neurological condition involving an involuntary cross-wiring of the senses, in which people may taste what they feel, smell what they touch, and see letters in color, something like this: 
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WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
The first act of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf is called “Fun And Games,” but beware. These are not your usual party games, as audiences can once again discover in Hermosa Beach Playhouse’s absolutely sensational revival of the 1962 Broadway classic. Under Stephanie A. Coltrin’s expert direction, and featuring bravura lead performances by Matthew Brenher as George and Suzanne Dean as Martha, this is a production that more than holds its own against the Bill Irwin/Kathleen Turner Broadway revival which played the Ahmanson a few years back, or last season’s Ovation-nominated staging at the Rubicon.
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NEVER LAND
Thursday, October 8th, 2009NOT RECOMMENDED
Take some of L.A.’s finest actors, including the extraordinary Shannon Holt, the ever reliable William Dennis Hunt, and Lisa Pelikan, so memorable as Amanda Wingfield in the Colony Theatre production of The Glass Menagerie a few years back. Surround them with a design team made up of some of our city’s most gifted artists, Jared A. Sayeg on lighting and Cricket S. Myers on sound, to name just two. Then, saddle them with one of the longest and most perplexing plays you’re likely to see this or any year and the result is Phyllis Nagy’s Never Land, a production that seemed to me as if it would Never End.
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THE SEAGULL
Saturday, September 26th, 2009RECOMMENDED
The award-winning Chance Theater takes on Chekhov’s The Seagull with admirable results, the production featuring excellent performances, astute direction, and a gorgeous design. Then again, what else would you expect from Orange County’s finest intimate theater?
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CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
It’s been thirty years since Mark Medoff’s Children Of A Lesser Gods opened theatergoers’ eyes to a new world, a silent world in which hand gestures take the place of the spoken word, and to a character who steadfastly refuses to venture out into what most would call “the real world.” Technological breakthroughs since 1979, particularly the growth of the Internet and more recent developments like cell phone texting, have considerably reduced the schism between the hearing and deaf worlds. Still, as Deaf West Theatre’s fine 30th Anniversary production of the Tony, Drama Desk, and Olivier Award-winning play makes clear, the deaf world and that of hearing people remain very different indeed.
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