70, GIRLS, 70
Monday, September 20th, 2010NOT RECOMMENDED
John Kander and Fred Ebb had already had considerable success with Flora The Red Menace, Cabaret, The Happy Time, and Zorba when 70, Girls, 70 made its Broadway debut in 1971. Still, not even the renown of their four previous musicals could save their latest show from a quick 35 performance demise. In fact, 70, Girls, 70 vanished so quickly into obscurity that probably only the most avid Broadway buffs are even aware of its existence—Broadway buffs and the Musical Theatre Guild, which has as one of its missions to rescue flops like 70, Girls, 70 from obscurity.
FIVE WOMEN WEARING THE SAME DRESS
Friday, September 10th, 2010NOT RECOMMENDED
Five Women Wearing The Same dress spend a couple of hours doing what women often do; they talk—about men, about life, about love, about relationships, about sex, in Alan Ball’s Five Women Wearing The Same Dress, now playing in Hollywood’s Theater Row at the Ruby. Not much happens during the course of the play’s two acts. Marriages and relationships don’t come apart, though one of the latter does start to blossom. No great new friendships are forged, nor do any fall to pieces. Sort of like real life, when you come to think of it.
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IRMA LA DOUCE
Monday, April 19th, 2010NOT RECOMMENDED
For the past fourteen years, Los Angeles theatergoers have been thanking their lucky stars for Musical Theatre Guild and its prodigiously talented members. If it weren’t for MTG, Southland musical theater lovers would have missed out on seeing such forgotten Broadway gems as Fade Out – Fade In, High Spirits, Seesaw, As Thousands Cheer, It’s A Bird … It’s A Plane … It’s Superman, and Street Scene, and that’s just in the last four seasons. Even when the show being revived is perhaps best left forgotten, like September’s Stop The World – I Want To Get Off, MTG subscribers are guaranteed sensational performances by Broadway and regional theater vets at the top of their game.
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HARAM IRAN
Thursday, March 11th, 2010NOT RECOMMENDED
In 2005, the Western world recoiled in horror at photos of Iranian teenagers Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, hangman’s nooses around their necks, about to be put to death for, it was reported at the time, the crime of consensual homosexual acts.
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THE UNEXPECTED MAN
Saturday, February 27th, 2010NOT RECOMMENDED
A middle-aged man and woman are strangers seated across the aisle from each other on a train. The man is Paul Parsky, famed novelist and author of a The Unexpected Man, among numerous other titles. The woman is Martha, a Parsky admirer who just happens to be halfway through reading The Unexpected Man, a copy of which she carries in her purse. For the next ninety minutes or so, Paul and Martha reveal their thoughts in a series of inner monologs before finally engaging in brief conversation.
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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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STOP THE WORLD I WANT TO GET OFF
Monday, September 14th, 2009NOT RECOMMENDED
Musical Theatre Guild takes rarely performed Broadway gems, casts them with L.A.’s finest musical theater triple-threats, rehearses them in a mere twenty-five hours, and performs them once or twice—almost fully staged though book-in-hand. The resulting “concert staged readings” have ended up being some of the most exciting shows I’ve reviewed over the past two years, most notably last year’s Kiss Of A Spider Woman and Violet, the latter of which featured Shannon Warne’s (one-night-only) Musical Theater Performance Of The Year. Even “problematic” shows like Seesaw have been worth a look-see, thanks to MTG’s superb casts, directors, choreographers, and musicians.
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TERMINUS AMERICANA
Saturday, July 25th, 2009NOT RECOMMENDED
Publicity materials for Terminus Americana provide the following synopsis for Matt Pelfrey’s play: “After barely surviving an office rampage, Mac Winchell is thrust into a nightmare landscape populated by lost Marlboro Men, psychotic vagabonds, sinister corporate thugs and a strange cult known as a ‘The Church of Christ, Office Shooter’. Mac attempts to escape this twisted reality by undertaking a quest that ultimately leads him into the darkest corners of the American Dream. Terminus Americana is a surreal, visceral and challenging examination of our violence-saturated culture.”
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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