ORPHEUS DESCENDING
Friday, January 15th, 2010
Frantic Redhead Productions’ presentation of Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending is a prime example of Los Angeles theater at its finest. A big-name trio of leading players with serious theatrical credits and training, a gifted director with an inspired concept, and one of the finest design teams in town have combined forces to make one of Williams’ lesser known dramas not only a surefire hit but the first major artistic success of 2010 as well.
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ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD
Sunday, January 10th, 2010RECOMMENDED
After staging ten Shakespeare productions over the past three years, The Porters Of Hellsgate are for the first time paying royalties. Not that they really had to leave the public domain, there still being a few dozen more Shakespeare plays left for the talented young troupe of Bard-o-philes to produce and perform. On the other hand, having chosen Hamlet as production number ten, their decision to run Shakespeare’s Greatest Play in rotating rep with Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead (with the same casts no less) was an inspired one.
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HAMLET
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
Just a little over three years ago, a trio of young PaliHi grads with a love of the Bard debuted a new theater company, The Porters Of Hellsgate, with a mission to make Shakespeare come alive for their generation. Their tenth production, Hamlet, once again proves them a force to be reckoned with in Los Angeles classical theater.
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THE GLASS MENDACITY
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010
It’s a summer weekend in the Deep South, and the DuBois offspring have returned to Belle Reve, the plantation home of their dysfunctional childhood, to welcome back patriarch Big Daddy DuBois from his stay at the local hospital. There’s eldest daughter (and family loony) Blanche, married to the uncouth but undeniably sexy Stanley Kowalski. Middle child Brick, a cipher of a man if there ever was one, is wedded to the sultry Maggie, appropriately nicknamed “The Cat.” Youngest child Laura suffers from a bad limp (and bad hair.) Along with family matriarch Big Amanda DuBois and narrator/gentleman caller Mitch O’Connor, the DuBois children have assembled to await Big Daddy’s doctor’s verdict. Does the master of Belle Reve have cancer, or is it merely a spastic colon?
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BOB’S HOLIDAY OFFICE PARTY
Friday, December 11th, 2009
Bob’s Holiday Office Party is back for its fourteenth year, wilder and crazier than ever!
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ARIAS WITH A TWIST
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
The proscenium of the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater has been reduced to about one-sixth its normal size, your second clue that you’re in for something completely different tonight. (The first clue was the young, trendy, a tad pansexual audience milling around the theater’s lobby, bar, and art gallery pre-performance.) Then, as music from another time, another place fills the auditorium, one reduced-size curtain rises only to reveal another, which opens to reveal yet another and another and another … until finally, you see before you a lifelike tuxedoed marionette coaxing out notes on the trumpet, a sensual, dreamlike tune with a 1940s Latin sound. Stars spin around the scrim which separates the audience from the mini-trumpeteer, colored lights flashing and galaxies exploding. We are told that we’re about to meet “an astrologer, a time-traveler, a polymorph.”
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DAVID BURNHAM CABARET
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
From Fontana farm boy to CLO favorite to Broadway star. That’s the journey David Burnham has been on since his growing-up years spent halfway between San Bernardino and Rancho Cucamonga, and quite a journey it has been. A little less than six years ago, Burnham was starring down in Long Beach in Musical Theatre West’s production of Hot Mikado, following appearances in MTW’s La Cage Aux Folles and Children Of Eden. He then strutted his dramatic stuff in The Woman In Black at NoHo’s The Road Theatre, one of a long list of pre-Broadway credits. The Great White Way came calling in 2005 when Burnham appeared in the original cast of the multiple-Tony-winning The Light In The Piazza, and when the National Tour played the Ahmanson with Burnham as Fabrizio, it was a fanfare-worthy homecoming for the local boy turned Broadway star. Then came Burnham’s year as Fiyero in the Broadway production of Wicked, all of the above adding up to more than enough reason for Fontana’s favorite son to headline his very own cabaret show at L.A.’s Upright Cabaret.
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HAMLET, SHUT UP
Friday, November 20th, 2009
For everyone who’s ever said, “Wouldn’t it be great if Shakespeare didn’t have all that Elizabethan English and iambic pentameter?”, Sacred Fools has concocted the perfect solution. Hamlet Shut Up is the world famous action/ghost/lust/revenge/murder-packed tale of the Prince Of Denmark unsullied by the spoken word—and what a brilliantly conceived and executed concoction it is!
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