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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THE QUESTION
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
Productions like Susan Stroman’s Tony-winning Contact and Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man have shown how powerfully and effectively contemporary dance can tell dramatic stories without a single spoken word being uttered. To that list can now be added JT Horenstein’s The Question, an Alfred Hitchcock-esque romantic thriller told through dance.
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TENNESSEE IN THE SUMMER
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009
Tennessee Williams was a complicated man, to say the least. Not the nicest person to be around. Putting it mildly, he was a screwed-up mess, or at least that’s how he comes across in Joe Besecker’s Tennessee In The Summer. Still, there are far less interesting people to spend an hour and a half with than the multi-award-winning playwright, especially as brought to vivid and complex life by Dan Alemshah in the ”member-initiated production” currently playing Tuesdays through Thursdays at West Coast Ensemble under Justin French’s assured direction.
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MAKIN’ HAY
Friday, February 27th, 2009RECOMMENDED
There’s no 99-seat theater company with a better track record for musicals than Actor’s Co-op. Past productions of She Loves Me, Damn Yankees, Into The Woods, The Most Happy Fella, and last season’s brilliant 1776 are textbook examples of how to shrink a big stage, big cast Broadway show down to intimate theater dimensions without losing any of the original’s magic and allure. This season, the Co-op has taken on the challenge of presenting a world premiere musical.
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THE JAZZ AGE
Sunday, February 15th, 2009
Anyone needing ammunition against those who claim that there is no theater (i.e. great theater) in Los Angeles have only to invite the naysayers to The Blank’s production of The Jazz Age and lo and behold—crow will be eaten. Everything about this West Coast premiere of Allan Knee’s biodrama is first-class grade-A brilliant, from its direction (by Michael Matthews) to its superb trio of actors (Jeremy Gabriel, Luke Macfarlane, and Heather Prete) to its exquisite design to the above-stage band led by Ian Whitcomb.
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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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