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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LA RONDE DE LUNCH
Friday, November 13th, 2009
Peter Lefcourt skewers Hollywood deal-making—brilliantly—in La Ronde De Lunch, the funniest show you’re likely to see this fall and one of the most terrifically performed comedies of this or any season.
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PO BOY TANGO
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009RECOMMENDED
East meets West in Kenneth Lin’s Po Boy Tango, a culture-clash dramedy now getting its West Coast premiere at Little Tokyo’s East West Players.
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HAMLET
Friday, October 30th, 2009RECOMMENDED
Since William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is considered by many to be the greatest play ever written, with just about every major stage actor having at one time or other tackled its title role, it’s noteworthy to say the least whenever a theater company takes on the challenge of staging it. John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, Ralph Fiennes, and Broadway’s latest Hamlet, Jude Law, are hard acts to follow. Nevertheless, on a shoestring budget and without a single “name” in their cast, the Knightsbridge Theatre’s National American Shakespeare Company has staged a highly commendable Hamlet featuring excellent work by a young actor named Joshua Hayden as the Prince Of Denmark.
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NEVER LAND
Thursday, October 8th, 2009NOT RECOMMENDED
Take some of L.A.’s finest actors, including the extraordinary Shannon Holt, the ever reliable William Dennis Hunt, and Lisa Pelikan, so memorable as Amanda Wingfield in the Colony Theatre production of The Glass Menagerie a few years back. Surround them with a design team made up of some of our city’s most gifted artists, Jared A. Sayeg on lighting and Cricket S. Myers on sound, to name just two. Then, saddle them with one of the longest and most perplexing plays you’re likely to see this or any year and the result is Phyllis Nagy’s Never Land, a production that seemed to me as if it would Never End.
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ART
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
“How do you like my new haircut?”
“Don’t you just love my new outfit?”
“What do you think about my new sunglasses?”
How many of us have not been asked one of these questions and been faced with the age-old dilemma—to tell the truth, i.e. the whole unpleasant truth, or to avoid trouble by telling a little white lie. “It looks marvelous on you! You’ve never looked better. I’m going right out to get some too!” How much easier it is to avoid hurting a friend’s feelings, and at the same time how frustrating and annoying, when what you really want is to tell your friend what an enormous mistake he or she has made.
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THE GOLDEN GAYS
Thursday, September 10th, 2009RECOMMENDED
John Patrick Trapper’s The Golden Gays has just opened at Casita Del Campo in Silverlake, and though this men-in-drag Golden Girls spoof runs about half an hour too long (and would do better with a stronger focus on the “girls” themselves), it provides laugh after unsophisticated laugh and is a likely crowd pleaser.
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LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS
Saturday, September 5th, 2009
In my July review of Musical Theatre West’s big-stage, big-budget production of Little Shop Of Horrors, I wrote, “Little Shop Of Horrors is that rarity in musical theater—a show which works equally well in a tiny space and on a Broadway-sized stage, one which can delight and entertain whether performed by teenagers, amateurs, or … A-List professionals,” a comment proved spot-on by the intimate theater revival just opened at the Knightsbridge. Though it doesn’t have the big bucks behind it that MTW’s did, and though its leads haven’t yet starred on Broadway or been TV regulars, under Jaz Davison’s nothing-short-of-inspired direction, this may well be the most exciting Little Shop I’ve seen.
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