THE GIFT HORSE
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
Lydia R. Diamond’s Stick Fly was one of the biggest critical successes of last year’s theater season, scoring nominations and/or wins at L.A.’s Big Three award ceremonies—the Ovations, the LADCCs, and the LA Weeklys.
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L.A. NOIR UnSCRIPTED
Sunday, May 2nd, 2010
They’ve done Jane Austen UnScripted, Tennessee Williams UnScripted, and William Shakespeare UnScripted to rave notices and audience cheers. Impro Theatre now turns its talents to L.A. Noir UnScripted, and the 100% improvised result may well be their very best UnScripted yet.
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THE PHILADELPHIA STORY
Sunday, May 2nd, 2010
Fans of 1930s comedies will want to cheer Actors Co-op’s revival of Philip Barry’s 1939 hit The Philadelphia Story, a title quickly recognized by film buffs as that of the Oscar-winning 1940 movie classic starring Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and James Stewart. (Hepburn starred in both stage and screen versions, with the plot of the MGM adaptation sticking much closer to the Broadway original than did, say, the movie versions of You Can’t Take It With You or Stage Door.)
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SEE WHAT I WANNA SEE
Friday, April 16th, 2010
Michael John LaChiusa’s See What I Wanna See is not your grandmother’s musical. There’s no star-struck romantic couple. There are no melodic love songs. There’s not a single dance number. No chorus line. No strings in the orchestra. And not a happy ending in sight.
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THE BOYS IN THE BAND
Thursday, April 15th, 2010
“You’re a sad and pathetic man. You’re a homosexual and you don’t want to be, but there’s nothing you can do to change it.” Thus speaks birthday boy Harold to his party host Michael in Mart Crowley’s 1968 off-Broadway hit The Boys In The Band, to which Michael later replies, his voice laced with bitterness, “Show me a happy homosexual, and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”
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ACTING: THE FIRST SIX LESSONS
Friday, April 9th, 2010
There’s an old black-and-white fan magazine snapshot of TV star Lloyd Bridges and his then teenage son Beau circa Sea Hunt. In the shot, Bridges Sr. and Bridges Jr. are reading a copy of Richard Boleslavsky’s 1933 guide to Acting: The First Six Lessons. Now, some fifty or so years later, 68-year-old Beau and his 23-year-old daughter Emily are staging Boleslavky’s classic text at Theatre West, and the result is an often enthralling and edifying hour and a half of theater, brought to life by a multi-award-winning actor at the peak of his gifts and a exciting young actress just beginning her journey.
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LASCIVIOUS SOMETHING
Thursday, April 8th, 2010
Liza is August’s Lascivious Something in Sheila Callaghan’s provocative, adventurous, stimulating, surprising new play of the same name. Better put, she was his lascivious something back in the 1960s when the two were fighting the good fight against the Vietnam War and all things rigid, boring, and traditional.
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CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Actors Co-op is attempting pretty much the impossible—a 90 minute version
of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime And Punishment, featuring a cast of three. The
adaptation, written by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus, debuted
several years ago in Chicago, where it won the Jefferson Award for “Best New
Adaptation.” The playwrights deserve high marks for condensing a mammoth
novel into a one-act play without sacrificing cohesion. Its message of
redemption is particularly appropriate for the Christian-based Co-op. Director
Ken Sawyer is a master of the visual, and the production looks great.
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