WOMEN BEHIND BARS
Sunday, December 13th, 2009
Women In Cages, Caged, Caged Fury, Caged Heat, Chained Heat, Slammer Girls, and the unforgettable Ilsa – The Wicked Warden are just seven of the Women-In-Jail movies spoofed in Tom Eyen’s hilariously campy Women Behind Bars, now going into its homestretch at West Hollywood’s Celebration Theater. Prepare yourself for one prison hell of a good time.
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THE SANTALAND DIARIES
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
For any December theatergoer who’s ever said, “Not another Christmas Carol!”, The Blank Theatre offers the perfect holiday solution—Nicholas Brendon in David Sedaris’s The SantaLand Diaries, the true story of Sedaris’s humiliating but hilarious-in-retrospect stint as a Christmas elf at New York City Macy’s “SantaLand.”
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EXTINCTION
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
In Gabe McKinley’s deep-dark world premiere comedic drama Extinction, now playing at the Elephant Space in Hollywood, it is not an endangered species that faces the end of its days but rather the longtime friendship of Max and Finn, best buds since college. These two 30ish compadres have been spending their vacations together in Atlantic City since their undergrad days, drinking, drugging, and girl-hunting, but as Bob Dylan once put it, “The times they are a-changin.’” What happens when best friends’ paths in life diverge, one leaving the other in the lurch? Ask yourself this question: How would you react if your closest friend told you that he’d moved on? How far would you go to save this friendship, or failing that, to destroy it forever?
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KIDNAPPED BY CRAIGSLIST
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
A gorgeous barker/ringmaster/dominatrix rises out of wooden box and asks the assembled audience: Do you want to find a date? Sell your couch? Engage in sexual fantasies? Expose unspeakable secrets? She is soon surrounded by a band of loonies, including a woman wearing a saucepan as a hat—“It keeps the aliens out.” “Where are we?” you ask yourself, before realizing the obvious truth. We’re in the wacky world of Craigslist, as seen by Katie Goan and Nitra Gutierrez in their outrageously funny one-act, Kidnapped By Craigslist, now getting its West Coast Premiere in a snazzy production by the illustrious TheSpyAnts.
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OKLAHOMO!
Friday, November 27th, 2009RECOMMENDED
No one in Los Angeles makes theater quite like Justin Tanner. His one-act comedies are the theatrical equivalent of a midnight cult movie, blending the zany, the edgy, the gay, and occasionally the downright bizarre with a charm very much their own. The best of Justin Tanner’s plays, like last year’s marvelously manic Voice Lessons (which won Laurie Metcalf StageSceneLA’s award for Comedic Performance Of The Year) or Teen Girl, Tanner’s salute to the John Hughes oeuvre, are a sure bet to garner critical raves and audience cheers. Even minor Tanner, like the current revival of 2004’s Oklahomo! (not a spelling error), is guaranteed fun.
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THE HOUSE OF BESARAB
Sunday, November 15th, 2009
Fans of those 1960s Hammer Films horror classics like Dracula: Prince Of Darkness, Dracula Has Risen From The Grave, and Taste The Blood Of Dracula, all starring Christopher Lee as the blood-sucking Count, will be in Hammer Horror Heaven at The House Of Besarab, now playing at the historic Hollywood American Legion Post 43. Though Terance Duddy and Theodore Ott’s adaptation of the classic Bram Stoker tale does not set out to be Shakespeare, then again, neither did those Hammer screenplays by Jimmy Sangster and John Elder. What lifted the Technicolor/Techniscope extravaganzas out of the ordinary were their stellar casts (Christopher Lee later became SirChristopher Lee, thank you very much) and their lush settings.
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TREE
Thursday, November 12th, 2009
The last thing Louisianan Didi Marcantel expects to find soon after the death of her father is a bunch of letters written to him over forty-years ago … love letters addressed to a woman he knew while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps. Even more surprising is the discovery that her Caucasian father’s one-time lover was African American—back in the days when Jim Crow laws made interracial relationships not only “improper” but illegal as well. Tripling the effect of this surprise is the news that the union between Ray Marcantel and his beloved Jessalyn produced a child, Didi’s now 46-year-old half-brother Leo Price, father of Didi’s 20ish half-niece JJ.
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