THE DEVIL WITH BOOBS
Friday, April 17th, 2009RECOMMENDED
Open Fist Theatre Company’s West Coast Premiere of Dario Fo’s The Devil With Boobs is the kind of show that most people will either love or hate. I ended up pretty much in the middle. While I absolutely loved the performances, and found the show gorgeous to look at, I must confess to not having “gotten” Fo’s mishmash of styles, his nonstop use of vulgarity, and what seems often to be the antithesis of sophistication.
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SAVAGE IN LIMBO
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
No one writes about New Yorkers, particularly those who reside in the Bronx, quite like John Patrick Shanley … and nowhere is this more true than in his “Concert Play” Savage In Limbo. Fortunately for Shanley fans, the actors who make up the 68 Cent Crew have just the right look, attitude, and voice to bring the Oscar-Pulitzer-Tony-winning playwright’s quirky, entirely original characters to life. It’s hard to imagine an L.A. troupe more suited to stage Shanley’s 1986 tale of a quintet of 32-year-old bar denizens in search of love.
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LAND OF THE TIGERS
Sunday, April 5th, 2009
Land Of The Tigers is a realm where tigers walk on two legs, wear wigs (some of them powdered), hats (some of them three-cornered) and assorted 18th Century garb—and speak English. It is a land where the only enemy is the dreaded swan, and because “the ‘Swan Alert’ remains as high as ever,” guards are thankfully keeping watch day and night. In Land Of The Tigers, reproduction is strictly controlled, and mating rituals keep bloodlines strong. Thus, when one of the elite, Fang Stalkington, complains to the Tigressional Congress that his sister Sheba is not doing her duty by mating with him, it is serious business indeed. Though Fang has peed on Sheba to demonstrate in no uncertain terms that she belongs to him and him alone, the beauteous Sheba is having none of this. ‘You cannot spray our troubles away,” she growls at him.
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WOMEN OF MANHATTAN
Saturday, April 4th, 2009
30ish best friends Billie, Rhonda Louise, and Judy have gotten together at Rhonda Louise’s beautiful Manhattan apartment for girls’ night. When Billie wonders out loud where the men are, Rhonda reminds her that Billie had said precisely not to invite any men, the whole point of the evening being that “the three of us would just deck out and look great for each other and fuck the men.” “But don’t you feel we’re wasting our gorgeousness on each other?” asks Billie.
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ITALIAN AMERICAN RECONCILIATION
Sunday, March 29th, 2009
68 Cent Crew Theatre Company continues its epic 13 By Shanley festival with probably the most out-and-out romantic double bill of the fest, John Patrick Shanley’s brief but unforgettable teens-in-love romantic comedy The Red Coat, followed by the two-act romcom Italian American Reconciliation. The 1989 two-acter could just as easily have been titled the less cumbersome Moonstruck, but Shanley had already used that title two years before in the Oscar-winning Cher-Nicolas Cage film which it resembles. Together, the playlet and the play, both of them directed with grace and panache by Ronnie Marmo and assistant director Katy Jacoby, make for the most quirkily romantic (or romantically quirky) evening of theater around.
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THE PRODIGAL FATHER
Friday, March 27th, 2009
In Larry Dean Harris’s world premiere dramedy The Prodigal Father, the Celebration Theatre offers its LGBT audience its best production since last Fall’s Porcelain, not coincidentally directed by Porcelain’s Michael Matthews, fresh off the much lauded The Jazz Age.
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TENNESSEE WILLIAMS UNSCRIPTED
Friday, March 20th, 2009
The improv geniuses who brought us Jane Austen UnScripted make a welcome return with their latest concoction—Tennessee Williams UnScripted. Like its predecessors, which spoofed Austen, Shakespeare, and Sondheim, Tennessee Williams UnScripted is a two-act comedy completely improvised in the style of its titular writer. Because this is Williams, author of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Glass Menagerie, the director’s note promises that the only thing the cast knows in advance is that “some poetic sensitivity…will be crushed by brutal forces from the outside world.” The rest is up to the imagination of the oh-so-creative improvisers.
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THE BIG FUNK
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
If ever there was a stage/film writer whose work defies easy categorization, it’s John Patrick Shanley. Films like Moonstruck and Joe And The Volcano are fanciful, quirky romances. Recent Shanley plays like Doubt and Defiance are straight-forward albeit complex looks at the “closed societies” of the convent and the military. Earlier theatrical works run the gamut from the dark romantic eroticism of Danny And The Deep Blue Sea to the bizarre surrealism of The Dreamer Examines His Pillow and Beggars In The House Of Plenty.
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