NO EXIT
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008NOT RECOMMENDED
Matthew Hannon and two other grads of LACC’s prestigious Theatre Academy have mounted Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit as a tribute to their late teacher/director Brett Gandy. It is Gandy’s concept which director/star Hannon has remounted in a production of the French existentialist classic playing Tuesdays at the Lounge Theatre.
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I’D RATHER BE RIGHT
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
The folks who revived George and Ira Gerswhin’s 1925 Tip-Toes last year are back with another Broadway musical from days gone by, this time one by Rodgers and Hart. Is it Pal Joey? Babes In Arms? Think again. The Boys From Syracuse? A Connecticut Yankee? Wrong again.
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COFFEE WILL MAKE YOU BLACK
Friday, April 18th, 2008
Coffee Will Make You Black may seem at first an odd choice for the Celebration, L.A.’s professional theater representing the gay and lesbian community. None of its 18 characters are gay men, and of its many female characters, only a handful may (or then again may not) be lesbian. Hopefully this will not be a turnoff to the Celebration’s loyal core audience, for Coffee Will Make You Black is a joyous, engaging, and laugh-out-loud uproarious celebration of the birth of African American identity in the late 1960s.
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MAYFLOWER
Monday, April 14th, 2008The year is 1984 and the city of Baltimore is devastated. Its hometown football team, the Colts, has snuck away in the middle of the night, their entire belongings loaded into a fleet of Mayflower Transit trucks bound for Indianapolis. Reviled team owner Robert Isray’s name is less than mud in Baltimore on this snowy March morning, when its residents awaken to the news that the Baltimore Colts are no more.
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GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Saturday, April 12th, 2008RECOMMENDED
Transforming Charles Dickens’ 350-page/2 dozen-character novel Great Expectations into a musical is an ambitious task, but this is the challenge that book writers Brian VenDer Wilt and Steve Lozier, composer Richard Winzeler, and lyricist Steve Lane have dared to undertake. Even more challenging is staging it in a 99-seat venue like the Hudson Backstage Theatre.
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SNAKE IN THE GRASS
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
Alan Ayckbourn’s Snake In The Grass is a real change of pace for the “British Neil Simon.” Famed for his clever comedies (Absurd Person Singular, The Norman Conquests, Bedroom Farce), the prolific (at nearly 70 he still averages 2 to 3 plays a year) writer tries his hand at a dark comedy/thriller here and succeeds admirably at darkness, comedy, and thrills.
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INVASION OF THE MINNESOTA NORMALS
Saturday, March 15th, 2008
The L.A. based Minnesota expatriates who brought us the over-the-top
craziness of Maxwell Anderson’s Bad Seed are back, with a quite different yet
equally laugh-inducing original, Jen Ellison’s Invasion Of The Minnesota
Normals. Set in the “innocent” Eisenhower-era 1950s, Invasion makes it clear
that the sometimes idealized golden years before Viet Nam and women’s lib
and school shootings and gay marriage were not so perfect after all.
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1776
Saturday, February 16th, 2008
It’s always exciting for me to discover a new play or musical, and that’s exactly
how I felt experiencing 1776 at Actors Co-op. True, 1776 has been around for
nearly 30 years, and I believe that I just might have seen the first national tour
(though if so, obviously in my infancy). I think also that I may have rented the
movie version at some time or other since the advent of the VCR. Still,
whatever memories I have of any previous 1776s are vague to say the least.
That’s why seeing 1776 at last, especially in such a polished and class-act
production, filled me with a sense of discovery.
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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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