ALL MY SONS
Sunday, October 23rd, 2011
It’s been nearly sixty-five years since Broadway audiences first thrilled to Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, decades during which countless actors have put their stamp on the now iconic roles of factory owner Joe Keller, Joe’s son Chris, Chris’s fiancée Ann Deever, and Ann’s brother George. It’s a sure bet, however, that few if any of them have ever looked like Alex Morris, A.K. Murtadha, Linda Park, and James Hiroyuki Liao—and for obvious reasons. The Kellers and Deevers are Caucasian. Morris, Murtadha, Park, and Liao are not.
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MONKEY ADORED
Monday, October 17th, 2011RECOMMENDED
In his 2009 post-apocalyptic nightmare fairy tale Treefall, playwright Henry Murray, director John Perrin Flynn, a superb quartet of actors, and an extraordinary design team joined forces at Rogue Machine for one of the year’s most moving, thought-provoking, absorbing pieces of theater.
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tick, tick … BOOM!
Monday, October 10th, 2011
With its twelve years and 5,124 performances on Broadway, a major motion picture, countless recent Southern California productions large and small, and an ongoing off-Broadway revival, it seems hard to believe there was ever a time before Jonathan Larson’s Rent.
But there was.
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CarnEvil
Saturday, October 8th, 2011NOT RECOMMENDED
Sacred Fools Theatre Company, the troupe that brought Los Angeles such delightful oddities as Hamlet Shut Up, Land Of The Tigers, and BeaverQuest! The Musical, now gives us CarnEvil: A Gothic Horror Rock Musical, a show which makes its predecessors seem positively tame by comparison and one that David Cronenberg fans may well drink up like Dracula at a victim’s neck. Still, despite considerable talent onstage and off, CarnEvil ended up being not this reviewer’s cup of tea, or goblet of blood as the case may be.
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GUIDED CONSIDERATION OF A LAMENTABLE DEED
Saturday, September 24th, 2011
The play may well be the thing, but sometimes “the thing” adds up to considerably more than just the play. Such is the case with needtheater’s World Premiere production of Frank Basloe’s Guided Consideration Of A Lamentable Deed. Though Basloe’s dark comedy is intelligent, entertaining, and thought-provoking enough to stand on its own, when you add a pre-show “kegger” (more about that later), a one-of-a-kind venue, and live music after the show for those who wish to stick around, this brand new play by a relative unknown becomes a “thing” well worth taking a chance on.
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A WIDOW OF NO IMPORTANCE
Friday, September 23rd, 2011
East West Players open their 46th Anniversary Season with the World Premiere of Shane Sakhrani’s infectiously funny and utterly charming A Widow Of No Importance, a generation gap comedy set in Mumbai, India that theatergoers from any ethnic background are likely to embrace as warmly as its core South Asian audience.
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LIFE ON THIS COUCH
Friday, August 26th, 2011
ec•cen•tric ([ik-sen-trik, ek-)—adjective: (of a person or behavior) Unconventional and slightly strange, as in “No one writes eccentric characters quite like Laura Richardson.”
For proof of the above, head on over to Open Fist Theatre where Richardson’s latest, Life On This Couch, is delighting audiences with the playwright’s unique, quirky, and thoroughly entertaining take on life. Like the eccentrics in Richardson’s Do Do Love and Come Back Little Horny, the people who live on and around Cece Taylor’s sofa are folks you might not want to live with 24/7, but it sure is fun to spend a couple hours observing the habits, mating and otherwise, of this wild and crazy bunch.
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PASSING PROPER/PASSION AND PRECISION
Sunday, August 7th, 2011
A would-be screenwriter attempts to navigate the shark-ridden Hollywood waters in Passion And Precision, the second of a matched set of one-acts by Joe Davis Massingill. That the first of the two, Passing Proper, just happens to be a staged version of the very screenplay the writer is hoping to sell is just one of several reasons to check out the two plays running on a single bill at Theatre 68.
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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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