THE WEDDING SINGER
Thursday, July 14th, 2011
The Wedding Singer may well be the most underrated Broadway musical of the last five years, and anyone wishing proof of the above has only to check out its regional professional premiere at Long Beach’s Musical Theatre West. An adroitly concocted blend of music, comedy, and 1980s nostalgia, The Wedding Singer is also one of the most unabashedly romantic musicals ever, and an utter delight from start to finish.
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SUMMER OF LOVE
Sunday, April 3rd, 2011
I’ve no idea what the weather was like in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district the summer of 1967, but America’s political climate was hot indeed. The total number of U.S. troops in Vietnam had reached 475,000 with the number and size of anti-war demonstrations increasing in equal proportion on our home turf. Cleveland and Newark saw race rioting and looting in the streets and 7000 National Guard were brought in to restore law and order to a riot-ravaged Detroit. As for the San Francisco district known as The Haight, its streets and parks were full of “tribes” of pro-peace “flower children,” whose use of recreational drugs gave Haight-Ashbury the affectionately stoned nickname of “Hashbury.”
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SHE LOVES ME
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011
Civic Light Opera Of South Bay Cities opens the Southland’s most exciting 2011 CLO season with about as perfect a musical (and as exquisite a production) as you’re likely to see all year, Jerry Bock & Sheldon Harnick’s She Loves Me.
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KISS ME KATE
Sunday, February 20th, 2011RECOMMENDED
Cole Porter’s 1948 Broadway smash has opened at San Pedro’s historic Warner Grand, the latest offering of The Relevant Stage theater company. Dedicated to the memory of Kathryn Grayson (who played Kate in the 1953 MGM Technicolor movie classic), the production stars none other than her granddaughter Kristen Towers-Rowles.
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LOVING REPEATING
Thursday, January 27th, 2011
If you’d asked me a few days ago what I knew about Gertrude Stein, my answer would have been “Not that much,” aside from her oft-quoted “A rose is a rose is a rose,” her relationship with longtime lesbian companion Alice B. Toklas, and some sense that she’d lived a good deal of her life in Europe. Though there are doubtless many theatergoers my age considerably better informed than I, I’d venture to guess an even greater number, particularly those under forty, know not even that much. For this reason alone, “A Musical Of Gertrude Stein” would seem to have at least one strike against it from the get-go. Add to that the fact that the musical in question has little or no storyline, that its relatively few spoken words come from a lecture delivered by Stein at the University of Chicago in 1934, and that the lyrics of this mostly sung-through musical are taken from Stein’s idiosyncratic poems (“Each one of them of the three of them meant something by being such a one”) and you have rather a hard-sell of a show—particularly if your audience of subscribers is accustomed to more traditional, linear fare.
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ANNIE
Sunday, October 31st, 2010
Broadway’s original Annie is back—thirty-three years after the show’s opening night—in the multiple Tony Award-winning musical’s latest revival, exciting news indeed for those who recall Andrea McCardle’s Tony-nominated star turn in the title role. McCardle has graduated terrifically to the role of Miss Hannigan, originated in 1977 by Dorothy Loudon—who beat the pint-sized thirteen-year old for the Best Leading Actress Tony. How’s that for Broadway trivia…and an L.A. musical theater event!
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WHEN GARBO TALKS
Friday, October 15th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Screen legend Greta Garbo’s voice remained as mysterious as the star herself until the release of Anna Christie, her first talking picture. “Garbo Talks!” proclaimed ads for the 1930 flick, and talk the Swedish superstar did, her “Gif me a vhisky, ginger ale on the side, and don’t be stingy, baby!” soon becoming almost as synonymous with the reclusive screen idol as her much quoted “I vant to be alone!”
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THE CLEAN HOUSE
Friday, August 27th, 2010
How’s this for a cast of characters? Lane, a doctor (and doctor’s wife) who wants nothing more than to live in a clean house. Matilde, Lane’s Brazilian cleaning lady, who loves jokes almost as much as life itself but doesn’t like cleaning house—not one bit. Lane’s sister Virginia, who loves to clean house so much that simply cleaning her own is not enough for her. Lane’s surgeon husband Charles, who wants to leave Lane for Ana. Ana, Charles’ Argentinean patient and paramour, who has breast cancer. Characters who meet and interact in what playwright Sarah Ruhl describes as “a metaphysical Connecticut,” in “a house that is not far from the city and not far from the sea.”
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