YEAR ZERO
Saturday, June 4th, 2011
In fact, our very first glimpse of Vuthy in Michael Golamco’s Year Zero is of a shaggy-haired, hugely bespectacled teenager rapping about his life to said skull. “Everywhere I look, all I see is ghosts,” he syncopates to the prerecorded beats of a cassette tape. “All around me up in here, all I see is ghosts.”
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NO WORD IN GUYANESE FOR ME
Sunday, May 29th, 2011
Anna Khaja returns to the stage in Wendy Graf’s powerful solo piece No Word In Guyanese For Me, the recent Ovation-award winner bringing to vivid life a young Guyanese who discovers after her family’s move to New York City that she is a lesbian—and that there is no word in her native language for the person she is.
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FINDING THE BURNETT HEART
Sunday, May 29th, 2011
You’d think by now there’d be no need for yet another teenage coming out story, nor would you be likely to expect a playwright to have anything new to offer on the subject.
You’d be wrong.
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THE CHAIRS
Wednesday, May 11th, 2011
A pair of nonagenarians are the only characters visible throughout most of The Chairs, but who knows how many invisible ones there are on stage by the end of Eugène Ionesco’s “tragic farce,” the latest production from A Noise Within—and a terrific one as might be expected from California’s Home For The Classics.
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LITTLE ME
Monday, April 18th, 2011
Take music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, and a book by Neil Simon and what do you get?
You get Little Me, a 1962 Broadway gem that starred Sid Caesar in a septet of roles, scored ten Tony nominations (winning one for Bob Fosse’s choreography), closed way too soon due mostly to a newspaper strike, then toured the country with most of its original cast, its L.A. run one of the earliest musicals seen by a certain Steven Stanley just a year into his teens.
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THE ECCENTRICITIES OF A NIGHTINGALE
Sunday, April 17th, 2011
“The thing for you to give up is your affectations, your little put-on mannerisms that make you seem, well, slightly peculiar to people. You express yourself in fantastic high-flown phrases. Your hands fly about you like a pair of wild birds! You get out of breath, you stammer, you laugh hysterically and clutch at your throat.”
–Reverend Winemiller, The Eccentricities Of A Nightingale
It can’t have been easy for Tennessee Williams growing up gay in the South in the early 20th Century, and the above-quoted advice could easily have been given to him by a well-meaning father unaware of the hurt his words could inflict. In fact, words like these are probably still being heard, even in 2011, by gay youths whose outcast status leaves them very little faith that it will ever (in the words of a spate of recent YouTube videos) “get better.”
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JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS
Sunday, April 10th, 2011
When the musical revue Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well And Living In Paris began its over four-year-long run off-Broadway in January of 1968, Jacques Brel was indeed still alive, and at the age of thirty-eight, one assumes still well and most likely still living in Paris. Sadly, a little over ten years later, Brel was dead at forty-nine, a life ended much too soon.
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JAMAICA, FAREWELL
Wednesday, April 6th, 2011
Check the local theater listings and it seems at times that every performer has an autobiographical solo show up his or her sleeve. Few solo shows, however, ever achieve the success of Debra Ehrhardt’s Jamaica, Farewell, with Rita Wilson (aka Mrs. Tom Hanks) as its above-the-title producer and Joel Zwick, the director of My Big Fat Greek Wedding and every single Hershey Felder one-man-show, at its helm.
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