FELLOWSHIP! A MUSICAL PARODY OF “THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING”
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
Fellowship! is back in town, and it’s not just Lord Of The Rings fans who have reason to celebrate.
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THE SOMETHING-NOTHING
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
Fielding Edlow’s The Something-Nothing is a hilarious, biting, highly original look at a 20something love triangle in pre-9/11 New York City.
OKLAHOMA!
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
As the overture reaches its climax, lights come up on a middle-aged woman sitting alone on stage working a butter churn. Behind the woman is a farmhouse and fields of corn as high as an elephant’s eye, and her full-length country dress tells us we are in the early 1900s. From offstage comes a male voice singing a cappella, “There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow…” The voice grows louder until the man enters, wearing a cowboy hat and chaps. “Oh what a beautiful morning… Oh what a beautiful day,” serenades the man to the farm woman, who continues her churning.
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THE REHEARSAL
Sunday, May 10th, 2009RECOMMENDED
The French, They Are A Funny Race, or so goes the title of a 1955 Preston Sturges comedy. Not having seen that film, I’m not quite sure which “funny” its title refers to—“funny-amusing” or “funny-peculiar.” In Jean Anouilh’s The Rehearsal, it’s quite clearly a good deal of both.
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KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN
Monday, April 20th, 2009
When the folks at Musical Theatre Guild were planning their 2008-2009 season of rarely performed Broadway musicals, it probably didn’t occur to anyone that their one-night-only revival of Kiss Of The Spider Woman would come only months after L.A.’s first fully staged production of Kiss since Chita Rivera and the National Tour played at the Ahmanson in 1996. Havok’s production (which featured many MTG performers, and which many felt surpassed the Tour in excellence) would indeed be a hard act to follow. There was no way a “concert staged reading” could match Havok’s design elements or the complexity of the many production numbers which recently won Lee Martino the LADCC Award for Best Choreography. MTG’s readings are, after all, presented with minimal sets and lighting, and few if any costume changes, and the entire show is allowed only 25 hours rehearsal time per Actor’s Equity rules. On the other hand, what MTG could and did offer Monday’s audience at Glendale’s Alex Theatre was a whole bunch of superb performances, and a chance to go back to the basics of Terrence McNally’s book, John Kander’s music, and Fred Ebb’s lyrics. The result, I’m happy to say, was an absolute triumph.
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HERE LIES JEREMY TROY
Thursday, April 9th, 2009
About 25 years ago, a young thespian named Tim Dietlein read a 1965 comedy called Here Lies Jeremy Troy and said to himself, “That’s a show I’d like to do someday.” Now, in 2009, Dietlein’s dream has come true in a laugh-out-loud hilarious production of playwright Jack Sharkey’s “forgotten gem.”
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GHOSTS
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
The world hasn’t changed all that much in the 127 years since Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts was first performed. As the recent election proved, there are still people who point the finger of condemnation at those who break what they call God’s rules and those with a more humanistic point of view.
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EVERYBODY SAY “CHEESE!”
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
In his funny and touching World Premiere comedy Everybody Say “Cheese!”, Garry Marshall takes an affectionate look back at the mid-1960s, a time of discovery for women and confusion for men, a time when the “fairer sex” discovered as if overnight that no, a woman’s place wasn’t always in the home. Feminists like Betty Friedan were spreading the message that women could be anything they wanted to be, and housewives like Harriet Keenan were listening.
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