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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THE WILD PARTY
Friday, March 12th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Just like the kids who pooled their talents to “put on a show” in 1939’s Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland flick Babes In Arms, so the young 21st Century performers of Still Hungry Theatre have banded together to stage Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party on a shoestring—with commendable results.
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HARAM IRAN
Thursday, March 11th, 2010NOT RECOMMENDED
In 2005, the Western world recoiled in horror at photos of Iranian teenagers Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, hangman’s nooses around their necks, about to be put to death for, it was reported at the time, the crime of consensual homosexual acts.
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WIT
Sunday, February 28th, 2010
To paraphrase English poet John Donne, Death is not “too proud” to come knocking on 50-year-old Vivian Bearing’s door in Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit, now making a return visit to Los Angeles in a production by Actors Co-op that simply could not be better.
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THE UNEXPECTED MAN
Saturday, February 27th, 2010NOT RECOMMENDED
A middle-aged man and woman are strangers seated across the aisle from each other on a train. The man is Paul Parsky, famed novelist and author of a The Unexpected Man, among numerous other titles. The woman is Martha, a Parsky admirer who just happens to be halfway through reading The Unexpected Man, a copy of which she carries in her purse. For the next ninety minutes or so, Paul and Martha reveal their thoughts in a series of inner monologs before finally engaging in brief conversation.
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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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