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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A SHAYNA MAIDEL
Thursday, June 17th, 2010
On the surface, Rose White would appear to be the quintessential All American New Yorker circa 1946. She has her own West Side apartment, a good job, a fashionable wardrobe, and an independent lifestyle. Scratch a little deeper, however, and you’ll discover that Rose White is European-born Rayzel Weiss, the daughter of Polish Jews born just a decade before Hitler’s rise to power. Papa Mordechai and four-year-old Rose emigrated to America in the mid-1920s, but older sister Lusia came down with scarlet fever shortly before the family’s planned departure, so Mama and Lusia stayed behind. Then came the Nazis, and mother and daughter were shipped off to Auschwitz along with everyone else in their extended family. Only Lusia survived. Now, a year after the declaration of peace in Europe, older sister has come to America at last.
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HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES
Friday, April 30th, 2010
In the musical theater classic Gypsy, strippers Mazeppa, Electra, and Tessie Tura sing, “You gotta have a gimmick if you wanna get ahead.” No playwright would seem to have taken this advice more seriously than prolific British comedy scribe Alan Ayckbourn, whose hit plays almost always have a gimmick.
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