ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, KAREN CARPENTER
Saturday, August 18th, 2012
“Dear God, don’t let New Jersey be too horrible!” prays eleven-year-old Margaret Simon, brand new to the Garden State and worried—like any girl her age finding herself in a new city—about fitting in, making new friends, and the particular challenges of being on the cusp of young womanhood. Easing Margaret’s adjustment to Jersey life are her new best friends Nancy, Gretchen, and Janie, aka the PTSes (Preteen Sensations). As for those love dreams any preteen is likely to have at night, who better to inspire them than neighborhood heartthrob Moose Freed, the first glimpse of whom makes Margaret hear, not bells, but the intro to “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” so that before you know it, Margaret and Moose are duetting the Carpenters classic, mikes in hand?
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SPRING AWAKENING IN CONCERT
Sunday, July 22nd, 2012
Spring Awakening fans have new reason to rejoice. Just three months after an intimate staging of the 2006 Broadway smash ended its sold-out six-week Hollywood run, the Steven Sater-Duncan Sheik musical returns to Los Angeles for an all-too-brief two weekends a mere six miles away from its Hollywood venue, an all-around sensational “Spring Awakening In Concert” that easily rivals the best of Spring Awakenings before it.
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THE NEW ELECTRIC BALLROOM
Tuesday, June 19th, 2012NOT RECOMMENDED
When deciding whether to spend an hour and a half with a trio of loony Irish sisters in Enda Walsh’s The New Electric Ballroom, the latest production of the multiple award-winning Rogue Machine, you might want to ask yourself how important it is for you to understand what’s happening onstage when watching a play. How important is it for you that a story should unfold in some kind of recognizable reality? How willing are you to suspend disbelief, ignore confusion, and simply go with the flow?
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LANGUAGE ROOMS
Friday, June 15th, 2012
In his dramatic, suspenseful Back Of The Throat, Egyptian-American playwright Yussef El Guindi explored the plight of an Americanized young Arab who finds himself caught in the Hitchockean dilemma of being pursued for a crime he did not commit—in this case, of plotting terrorist acts in a post-9/11 world. By making Khaled an entirely likeable boy-next-door type with an American girlfriend and nary the trace of an Arabic accent, El Guindi got his audience firmly on the side of the accused before starting to plant seeds of doubt in our minds. Might Khaled actually be the terrorist he’s accused of being?
Language Rooms, El Guindi’s latest, takes a more comedic approach to the same post-9/11 world, but one no less powerful for the laughter it provokes, and has been brought down to Los Angeles lock, stock, director, cast, designers, and barrel by San Francisco’s Golden Thread Productions.
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WHERE THE GREAT ONES RUN
Tuesday, May 29th, 2012
Mark Roberts writes plays about abuse, adultery, addiction, illness, incest, and suicide in the American Midwest, or at least that’s the terrain he covered in Parasite Drag, reviewed here a couple years back. Rogue Machine Theatre produces dark, edgy dramas like Small Engine Repair and Blackbird, which swept virtually every major theater award in town this past year. That’s why Roberts’ and Rogue Machine’s maiden collaboration, Where The Great Ones Run, comes as such a surprise. Though alcoholism, domestic violence, homosexuality, and a rather long bit of full-frontal male nudity would doubtless make this Mark Roberts play rather too daring for, say, Actors Co-op, coming from Rogue Machine, Where The Great Ones Run seems downright sunny, more Horton Foote than Sam Shepard, and if you’re anything like this reviewer you’ll love every minute of Roberts’ only slightly acidic valentine to small-town Indiana life. (read more)
A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
Friday, May 18th, 2012
East West Players continues its love affair with Stephen Sondheim with a fresh, new Asian-Pacific Islander take on A Little Night Music, one which follows in the footsteps of past EWP-SS collaborations begun back in 1979 with Pacific Overtures. Company, Follies, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, Into The Woods, Marry Me A Little, Merrily We Roll Along, Passion, and Sweeney Todd have all gotten East West Players makeovers since then, and now Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s 1973 adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night at last makes its East West debut.
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THE GIRL MOST LIKELY TO
Friday, April 27th, 2012
By day, he is a schoolteacher in the Philippines. By night, he becomes the gowned and bejeweled drag entertainer known to all Luzon as Mama Cid.
Across the world, an American high schooler dons girls’ clothes too, but for a very different reason. “This is how I have to be,” he tells his mother. “Otherwise I die.”
Playwright Michael Premsrirat takes these two characters—separated by an ocean and several decades—and ties their stories together quite extraordinarily in The Girl Most Likely To, now getting its World Premiere production under the truly inspired direction of Jon Lawrence Rivera.
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THE BEWILDERED HERD
Saturday, April 21st, 2012
Among political commentator Walter Lippmann’s best known quotes is the following: “The public must be put in its place…so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.” In other words, if you want democracy to work, you’ve got to control the minds of the masses, something which political consultant Charlie “Bingo” Bingham, the (anti)hero of Cody Henderson’s World Premiere The Bewildered Herd knows only too well. You might even call it Bingo’s mission in life to keep the bewildered herd (i.e. the people in his life—and you and me) in line.
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