FACING EAST
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009
The religious bigotry that led in large measure to the passage of Prop 8 last November is given a human face in Carol Lynn Pearson’s powerful one-act play, Facing East, now being brought beautifully to life by San Diego’s Diversionary Theatre.
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THE BIG FUNK
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
If ever there was a stage/film writer whose work defies easy categorization, it’s John Patrick Shanley. Films like Moonstruck and Joe And The Volcano are fanciful, quirky romances. Recent Shanley plays like Doubt and Defiance are straight-forward albeit complex looks at the “closed societies” of the convent and the military. Earlier theatrical works run the gamut from the dark romantic eroticism of Danny And The Deep Blue Sea to the bizarre surrealism of The Dreamer Examines His Pillow and Beggars In The House Of Plenty.
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TENNESSEE IN THE SUMMER
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009
Tennessee Williams was a complicated man, to say the least. Not the nicest person to be around. Putting it mildly, he was a screwed-up mess, or at least that’s how he comes across in Joe Besecker’s Tennessee In The Summer. Still, there are far less interesting people to spend an hour and a half with than the multi-award-winning playwright, especially as brought to vivid and complex life by Dan Alemshah in the ”member-initiated production” currently playing Tuesdays through Thursdays at West Coast Ensemble under Justin French’s assured direction.
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DOUBLE INDEMNITY
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
Adapting Double Indemnity for a 99-seat theater could easily prove disastrous. Make the wrong directorial, acting, or design choices and the enterprise could easily turn into an unintentional sequel to Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Steve Martin’s brilliant parody of film noir.
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BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA
Saturday, February 21st, 2009
Though he never appears on stage during the play’s 90-minute running time, the real star of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, currently wowing North Hollywood audiences, is the man who conceived and directed the supernaturally screamalicious production—Ken Sawyer. In lesser hands, and without the state-of-the-art sound and lighting equipment at the NoHo Arts Center, Hamilton Dean and John L. Balderston’s stage play might be a campy, creaky mess. Instead, it is an entirely thrilling evening of theater which provides the pleasures of the greatest horror films—shocks and screams galore—in three dimensions and surround sound.
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VIOLET SHARP
Monday, February 16th, 2009RECOMMENDED
On the evening of March 1, 1932, Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., 20-month-old son of aviator Charles Lindbergh, was kidnapped from the Lindberghs’ New Jersey home. Lindbergh, Sr., who had achieved international fame as the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic, and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh, herself an accomplished aviatrix, ended up paying the $50,000 ransom demanded by the unknown kidnapper(s) only to have their son’s decomposed body discovered just miles from their home on May 12. A little over four years after the kidnapping, a German named Bruno Hauptmann was executed for the crime, protesting his innocence till the end.
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THE JAZZ AGE
Sunday, February 15th, 2009
Anyone needing ammunition against those who claim that there is no theater (i.e. great theater) in Los Angeles have only to invite the naysayers to The Blank’s production of The Jazz Age and lo and behold—crow will be eaten. Everything about this West Coast premiere of Allan Knee’s biodrama is first-class grade-A brilliant, from its direction (by Michael Matthews) to its superb trio of actors (Jeremy Gabriel, Luke Macfarlane, and Heather Prete) to its exquisite design to the above-stage band led by Ian Whitcomb.
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TIME STANDS STILL
Thursday, February 12th, 2009
Donald Margulies’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Dinner With Friends held a microscope up to the lives of two married couples, a foursome of best friends for a decade. Throughout the course of the play’s two acts, the audience sees the two couples as they see one another … and as they see themselves in the privacy of their own homes.
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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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