AMADEUS
Friday, June 18th, 2010
For the past several years, August Viverito and T L Kolman have been stripping down big stage, big budget Broadway productions to their brilliant essentials on the matchbox stage of the Chandler Studio Theatre in North Hollywood. Now, to the ranks of their superb downscalings of M Butterfly, Equus, and Sweeney Todd can be added The Production Company’s equally outstanding re-envisioning of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus.
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ALL MY SONS
Sunday, June 6th, 2010
There’s no greater work of 20th Century American theater than Arthur Miller’s now classic All My Sons. Debuting on Broadway less than two years after World War II ended with Japan’s surrender, Miller’s examination of personal responsibility in time of war remains every bit as powerful—and relevant—sixty-three years after its New York premiere.
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USS PINAFORE
Sunday, May 30th, 2010
From its title, you might guess that Crown City Theatre’s USS Pinafore was simply an Americanized version of Gilbert & Sullivan’s classic comic opera H.M.S. Pinafore—but you’d be wrong. What adapter/director Jon Mullich has up his sleeve is something considerably more outer spacey than that—a cleverly written transformation of the British warship Pinafore into the Starship Pinafore. Yes, that’s Starship, à la Star Trek’s Starship Enterprise.
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MADAGASCAR
Saturday, May 22nd, 2010
A young man disappears, and five years later remains missing with nary a clue of his possible whereabouts.
JT Rogers’ Madagascar looks at the effect of this disappearance on three of the people closest to him. Densely written, told almost entirely through monologs, Madagascar is a smart play that requires smarts from its audience.
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COPENHAGEN
Friday, May 7th, 2010
There’s a moment early on in Michael Frayn’s Tony Award-winning Copenhagen when Margrethe Bohr says reassuringly to her physicist husband Niels, “I don’t think anyone has yet discovered a way you can use theoretical physics to kill people.” Ironic words indeed when spoken to one of the theoretical physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, weapons which led to the immediate or eventual deaths of 200,000 human beings.
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THE DIVINERS
Saturday, March 6th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Don’t go expecting a happy ending in Jim Leonard, Jr.’s The Diviners. The play’s prologue reveals Buddy Layman’s fate from the get-go. “He’s dead now for certain. He’s passed on beyond us. The idiot boy is dead. Buddy Layman’s gone.”
BROADS THE MUSICAL
Sunday, February 21st, 2010
Life begins at 65 for Elaine, Louise, Myra and Nilda, aka The Broads, and for those of you out there who’ve never heard of them, just ask any of their fellow residents at South Florida’s Millennium Manor. They’ll tell that you the Broads are the next best thing to Metamucil, and that when the time rolls around for Millennium Manor’s annual variety show, it’s by far the Senior Citizen event of the year.
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COUSIN BETTE
Saturday, February 20th, 2010
Who would ever have thought that a 164-year-old French novel would provide the basis for the juiciest, funniest, most twisted 3-act, 3-hour family saga since Tracy Letts’ August Osage County? But that’s precisely what Jeffrey Hatcher’s delicious adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s Cousin Bette has turned out to be, particularly under the brilliant direction of Jeanie Hackett and as performed by the superb troupe of actors who make up the Antaeus Company, “L.A.’s Classical Theater Ensemble.”
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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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