SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS
Thursday, October 6th, 2011
The 1954 MGM musical movie hit Seven Brides For Seven Brothers comes to life in-the-round at Glendale Centre Theatre in a production that provides old-fashioned G-rated family entertainment under Robert Marra’s assured direction.
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HIGH FIDELITY
Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
Musical Theatre Guild’s awesome one-night-only “concert staged reading” of the 2006 Broadway flop High Fidelity has confirmed what Hunger Artists’ West Coast Premiere first suggested in July. I am madly in love with HiFi, and if the cheers which greeted last night’s reading are any indication, I am not the only one who feels this way.
SHOOTING STAR
Sunday, September 18th, 2011
There’s something about airport terminal waiting areas that makes them ripe with dramatic possibilities. A few years back, Departures provided the writer-actors at the NoHo Arts Center with over half a dozen waiting area vignettes, and earlier this year, Having It All’s female fivesome met cute and bonded while stranded waiting for postponed flights. Now it’s former couple Reed and Elena who happen upon each other in a blizzard-bound Midwest airport twenty-five years post-love affair in Steven Dietz’s Shooting Star, getting its West Coast Premiere at Burbank’s Colony Theatre.
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BEAU JEST
Thursday, August 25th, 2011
Perhaps the three best words of advice to offer any theater company hoping to stay in business year after year are the following: Know Your Audience. The post-retirement set who make up Glendale Centre Theatre’s loyal subscribers keep coming back again and again because they trust GTC to give them the kind of time-proven hit musicals and plays that they grew up enjoying, shows like this season’s Forever Plaid, To Kill a Mockingbird, Big River, and 1776, to name just a few.
Beau Jest, the current Glendale offering, isn’t going to win any “Drama Critics’ Circle” awards for sophistication, daring, or cutting-edgedness. In fact, the New York Times savaged a New Jersey production back in 1994 in a review which still shows up first if you Google the title. But tell that to last night’s mostly over-65 crowd, who loved every one of Beau Jest’s sitcommy jokes and archetypical characters, and you know what? Even though I’m not quite as up there in age as the majority of the aforementioned, I too had a ball from start to finish, thanks in great part to the terrific talent who’ve put together GCT’s latest offering.
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ON GOLDEN POND
Saturday, July 30th, 2011
Hal Linden and Christina Pickles as Norman and Ethel Thayer in On Golden Pond. What more needs to be said? With stars like these in a play as beloved as Ernest Thompson’s Drama Desk Award-winning Outstanding New Play of 1979, Burbank’s Colony Theatre could well have its biggest hit ever, and justifiably so. Linden and Pickles deliver award-caliber performances in a play that hasn’t lost an iota of its humor or charm, directed to pitch perfect perfection by Cameron Watson, and featuring a supporting cast every bit as wonderful as its two stars.
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AFTER THE AUTUMN
Sunday, July 17th, 2011
If horse-blinder Alan Strang was a tough nut for psychiatrist Martin Dysart to crack in Peter Shaffer’s Equus, then the nameless Army Captain in Matthew Kellen Burgos’ engrossing new dramatic one-act After The Autumn proves an even greater challenge to the doctor assigned to his case.
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FLEETWOOD MACBETH
Friday, July 8th, 2011
They’ve done As You Like It as “As U2 Like It,” A Winter’s Tale as “A Wither’s Tale,” Much Ado About Nothing as “Much Adoobie Brothers About Nothing,” A Midsummer Night’s Dream as “A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream,” and Hamlet as “Hamlet The Artist Formerly Known As Prince Of Denmark.” Now, the Troubadour Theater Company (affectionately nicknamed The Troubies) are back with a revival of their 2004 musical spoof of Macbeth, which they’ve titled “Fleetwood Macbeth.”
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A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
Friday, July 1st, 2011
It takes a good deal of chutzpah to chop an hour off the running time of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a great deal of talent to pull it off, a feat which Vanguard Rep has performed to perfection—and to gales of laughter—in an open-air production certain to delight audiences of all ages, and that includes Shakespearephiles-and-phobes alike.
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