CAMINO REAL
Thursday, February 24th, 2011RECOMMENDED
Imagine you could get inside Tennessee Williams’ head. More specifically, imagine you could witness one of his nightmares—a nearly three-hour-long one after an ingestion of LSD. What you’d see would likely resemble the playwright’s Camino Real, or at least Camino Real as envisioned by director extraordinaire Jessica Kubzansky at Pasadena’s Theatre @ Boston Court.
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DANGEROUS BEAUTY
Sunday, February 13th, 2011
If career options for women were limited in the decades before women’s lib, they were even fewer in the mid-16th Century when Veronica Franco was born, particularly if your mother had at one time been a courtesan, something Veronica found out the hard way when her dreams of marrying her life’s true love were dashed by the realities of Venetian society. For Veronica Franco, there was but one option—to follow in her mother’s footsteps, and if she couldn’t be Marco Venier’s wife, then his mistress she would be.
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AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS
Thursday, December 16th, 2010
No child growing up in the 1950s or 1960s’ could consider his or her Christmas complete without an annual viewing of Gian Carlo Monotti’s Amahl And The Night Visitors, the first opera specifically composed for American television. This fifteen year tradition ended in 1966, when the rights to a 1963 taping reverted to Menotti, who refused to allow this version (one which he disapproved of) ever to be shown again, thereby depriving later generations of one of the most extraordinary of holiday memories. An imperfect VHS-to-DVD transfer of a 1955 black-and-white kinescope is currently the only in-print version available to parents wanting to share the Amahl experience with their children, or boomers wishing to relive childhood memories.
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UPTOWN DOWNTOWN
Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010
Not quite two years ago, the legendary Leslie Uggams electrified audiences at the Pasadena Playhouse as the legendary Lena Horne in the award-winning bio-musical Stormy Weather. Sadly, less than a year later, the Pasadena Playhouse announced that it was closing its doors. Fast forward to November of 2010 and both Leslie and the Playhouse are back—reunited (and it feels so good) in Uptown Downtown, a two-hour nightclub act-like musical bio of Miss Uggams herself—and a fabulous evening of song it is!
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FDR
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010NOT RECOMMENDED
The Pasadena Playhouse has reopened only nine months after the sad announcement that it was closing its doors for good, news worth celebrating in the streets with fireworks to light up the sky. If only FDR, the production chosen to welcome back Playhouse subscribers and friends, were equally deserving of a celebration.
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FUTURA
Sunday, October 10th, 2010
What do you call a play that starts with a 35-minute university lecture on “From Pen To Pixel: A History Of Typography,” turns in an instant into an edge-of-your-seat thriller, and finally becomes something quite lyrical which leaves you breathless?
You call it brilliant.
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THE GOOD BOOK OF PEDANTRY AND WONDER
Sunday, August 1st, 2010
In 1879, British lexicographer James Murray was hired by Oxford University Press to edit a new dictionary of the English language, a task expected to take about ten years and result in a 7,000-page tome. Holed up in a corrugated-iron garden shed on the grounds of Mill Hill School, Murray began the monumental undertaking with the help of a small team of assistants. Neither the linguist nor the dons of Oxford could have imagined that it would take until 1928 for the dictionary to be completed (nearly a decade after Murray’s death) and that the final product would end up a twelve-volume tome instead of the initially planned four volumes.
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SKYLIGHT
Sunday, June 6th, 2010
30-year-old schoolteacher Kyra Hollis has scarcely gotten back to her East London flat, the evening’s groceries in tow, when recent high school grad Edward Sargeant arrives on her doorstep with a question and a request. Kyra, a former employee of Edward’s restaurateur father, had been living with the Sargeants for half a dozen years until suddenly vanishing from their lives a couple years back. Not long after, Edward’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, her death last year leaving Edward without the two most important women in his life, his real life Mum and the “older sister” Kyra had become to him. Edward wants to know why Kyra abandoned them. He also wants her to do something to help his father, Tom, who’s not been doing all that well since his wife’s death.
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