TAKE ME OUT
Thursday, September 30th, 2010
Baseball superstar Darren Lemming of the New York Empires would seem to have it made. Blessed with a physical beauty and athletic prowess most can only dream of, the biracial outfielder’s Golden Boy status has kept him above whatever bigotry a lesser man might likely have encountered in major league sports. So certain, in fact, is Darren of being above it all that when he comes out publicly as gay, he expects few if any repercussions from the announcement. Yes, other baseball players might suffer from the homophobia rampant in professional athletics, but not Darren Lemming—that is until pitcher Shane Mungitt arrives to rescue Darren’s loss-plagued team and all hell breaks loose.
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DEAR HARVEY
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
Before Sean Penn’s Academy Award-winning performance as Harvey Milk, it’s a fair guess that not too many people under the age of forty had ever heard of the first openly gay man elected to a major public office in the U.S. Dustin Lance Black’s movie changed all that, and now, Dear Harvey, a powerful dramatization of Milk’s words and those of the people who knew and worked with him, arrives at West Hollywood’s Lee Strasberg Theatre as a companion piece to the film, and one well worth seeing.
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MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG
Saturday, September 18th, 2010
For a show that lasted only sixteen performances in its original 1981 Broadway run, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along has had a remarkable “afterlife.” Over the past three decades, there’s probably not an American musical theater company that hasn’t staged it at least once. This reviewer alone has seen five productions of Merrily in the last four and a half years, Actors Co-op’s current revival being the latest and quite possibly the overall best of the bunch—and that’s saying a lot.
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THE WEB
Friday, September 17th, 2010
While surfing the Internet, Chris Quiñones makes a shocking discovery—someone with the very same name as his, a Chris Quiñones who graduated with very same high school class, has the same date, place, and even hospital of birth, the same Columbian father and Jewish mother… The very same Chris Quiñones, yet subtly different in small details like the fact that for one Chris a particular time of import is a.m. but for the other p.m. Chris stays online all night searching, until finally the trail left by Chris II ends about a year ago, in Djibouti, after which his doppelganger has seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth.
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FIVE WOMEN WEARING THE SAME DRESS
Friday, September 10th, 2010NOT RECOMMENDED
Five Women Wearing The Same dress spend a couple of hours doing what women often do; they talk—about men, about life, about love, about relationships, about sex, in Alan Ball’s Five Women Wearing The Same Dress, now playing in Hollywood’s Theater Row at the Ruby. Not much happens during the course of the play’s two acts. Marriages and relationships don’t come apart, though one of the latter does start to blossom. No great new friendships are forged, nor do any fall to pieces. Sort of like real life, when you come to think of it.
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EAT THE RUNT
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
A candidate for a high-level fund-raising position in a major big city art museum is interviewed by various museum higher-ups in Avery Crozier’s Eat The Runt, now getting its Los Angeles Premiere at Theatre Of NOTE.
If the above mini-synopsis seems hardly the stuff of great drama, let alone the laugh-out-loud comedy that Eat The Runt is, then wait till you hear the gimmick that makes it a truly unparalleled theatrical experience.
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CHESS IN CONCERT
Thursday, August 19th, 2010
While watching a recording of the 2008 London production of Chess In Concert at Royal Albert Hall, Musical Theatre Of Los Angeles’s Eduardo Enrikez and Bonnie McMahon were struck with a flash of divine inspiration (or out-and-out insanity)—to stage their own Chess In Concert with a 10-piece orchestra and 20-member cast in a 99-seat theater. A daunting task to say the very least, but then again so were MTLA’s revivals of Ragtime and West Side Story, just two of the Broadway mega-musicals which the creative duo had scaled down to 99-seat dimensions to critical acclaim and audience cheers.
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PARASITE DRAG
Friday, August 13th, 2010
The storm clouds on the Central Illinois horizon pale beside the shadows of abuse, adultery, addiction, illness, incest, and suicide in Parasite Drag, Mark Roberts’ slice of Midwest life now getting its Southern California Premiere at the Elephant Theatre Company. Electrically directed by David Fofi in association with Don Foster and powerfully performed by a quartet of topnotch actors, Parasite Drag mixes dramatic confrontations with biting dollops of humor to gripping effect.
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