ANGELS FALL
Saturday, November 24th, 2012
Confine a group of strangers in an enclosed space and what do you get? Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential classic No Exit? Michael Leoni’s smash L.A. hit Elevator? TV’s Big Brother, now in its 14th season?
To this list Los Angeles theatergoers can now add Lanford Wilson’s Tony-nominated (for Best Play of 1982) Angels Fall, now getting a marvelous intimate staging by The Production Company, a 30th Anniversary revival which not only does ample justice to Wilson’s themes but does so in the most entertaining of ways.
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HUGHIE
Thursday, November 22nd, 2012RECOMMENDED
Andrew Schlessinger delivers a tour-de-force performance as a down-on-his-luck hustler in Hughie, a quirky Eugene O’Neill one-act that will be of greatest interest to fans of the Nobel/Pulitzer-prize-winning playwright.
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RISE
Wednesday, November 21st, 2012
Take a man and a woman with a shared past, place them in an enclosed space with no intermission to lessen the tension, and you’ve got a recipe for dramatic sparks. Scottish playwright David Harrower did just this in his multiple-Scenie-winning Blackbird, and Cal Barnes follows that example in his Hollywood Fringe Festival hit Rise, currently keeping audiences on the edge of their seats at Elephant Stages.
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AND THEN THERE WERE NONE
Monday, November 5th, 2012
A mysterious host invites eight guests, each of them a stranger to the others, for an island holiday off the coast of Devon, a pair of married servants in attendance and said host (or hostess?) nowhere to be seen. Does this sound like recipe for murder?
To a diehard Agatha Christie fan, it not only does, it sounds suspiciously like And Then There Were None (aka Ten Little Indians), published first as a novel in 1939 and then adapted for the stage by the author herself in 1943.
Hollywood’s Actors Co-op now revives this Christie gem in a production that makes for as entertaining and suspenseful a mystery thriller as any Christie fan or neophyte could possibly ask for, thanks to incisive direction by Linda Kerns and topnotch performances by an all-around terrific cast.
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THE BEAT GOES ON
Saturday, October 27th, 2012
Talent is ageless in The Beat Goes On, Jackie “Pink Lady” Goldberg’s latest senior-citizen song-and-dance showcase designed to entertain audiences from eighteen to eighty (and beyond) .
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JUSTIN LOVE
Saturday, September 22nd, 2012
Neil Patrick Harris. Zachary Quinto. Jesse Tyler Fergusson. Ricky Martin. Andrew Rannells. Jim Parsons. Matt Bomer. Cheyenne Jackson. Gavin Creel. Sean Hayes. Jonathan Groff. T.R. Knight. It seems lately that hardly a month goes by without another movie, TV, or Broadway leading man coming out of the closet—and coming out ahead career-wise, as the abovementioned dozen make perfectly clear.
Still, despite the increasing number of celebrity coming-out stories, there has yet to be a major A-list romantic/action hero movie star we can embrace as “Openly Gay,” someone the stature of a George Clooney or a Jake Gyllenhaal or a Bradley Cooper—to name three totally random examples. Someone like Justin Rush, the fictitious hero of Justin Love, the best new intimate stage musical I’ve seen in years, now getting a spectacular World Premiere at Celebration Theatre under the inspired direction of 4-time Scenie-winning Director Of The Year Michael Matthews.
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XANADU
Saturday, September 15th, 2012
Playwright Douglas Carter Beane provided a textbook example of how to turn a movie lemon into Broadway lemonade when he wrote the book for the stage adaptation of the turkey known as Xanadu, and lo and behold, one of biggest critical and commercial failures of the 1980s was transformed from flaming flop to fabulous hit!
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THE WORLD GOES ‘ROUND
Monday, September 10th, 2012
A bunch of Kander & Ebb songs assigned to Man 1, Man 2, Woman 1, Woman 2, and Woman 3. That’s pretty much what a theater company gets when Music Theatre International grants it the rights to The World Goes ‘Round, and that’s pretty much what audiences have been getting since the Kander & Ebb revue made its Off-Broadway debut back in 1991. Five singers performing songs from the Broadway classics Cabaret, Chicago, and Kiss Of The Spider Woman and lesser know Kander & Ebb gems like The Rink, The Happy Time, and Woman Of The Year.
Audiences expecting more of the same from Actors Co-op’s intimate-stage The World Goes ‘Round can instead plan on being bowled away by director-choreographer Robert Marra’s brilliant reconception of the Kander & Ebb revue as a sung-through musical. That’s right. The World Goes ‘Round is now a bona fide musical, and which manages to tell the stories of seven authentic, distinct, fully developed characters without a word of spoken dialog.
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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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