THE BLUE ROOM
Sunday, April 11th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler’s 1900 play La Ronde so shocked the early 20th Century European theatrical world that it didn’t get its first public performance until 1920, and even then the play (and Schnitzler) were roundly attacked by critics and theatergoers alike. Hardly surprising, considering its plot—a sequence of not two or three, but ten sexual encounters. No matter that the most the play showed was a bit of foreplay, the actual sex taking place entirely in the audience’s imagination during brief blackouts. It was too much for Europe, let alone America, to take.
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THE LANGUAGE ARCHIVE
Sunday, April 4th, 2010RECOMMENDED
George is a linguist, and he’ll be the first to explain that this doesn’t mean that he speaks a whole bunch of languages fluently, but rather that his field is linguistics, the scientific study of language and languages as a whole. George’s particular field of interest and expertise is the study of dying languages such as Elloway, whose two remaining speakers are facing their twilight years. If George doesn’t probe their knowledge asap, it will be too late to for a recorded/written record of the language, and Elloway will be lost forever.
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THE SECOND CITY: CAN YOU BE MORE PACIFIC?
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010RECOMMENDED
For the past fifty years, Chicago’s The Second City has been a launching pad for comedians, actors, and directors, including such luminaries as Bill Murray, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, and more recently Tina Fey, Steve Carell and Mike Myers. The Second City now brings its trademark brand of sketch and improvisational comedy to Orange County’s The Laguna Playhouse in a mostly fresh new concoction cleverly entitled The Second City: Can You Be More Pacific?
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CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Actors Co-op is attempting pretty much the impossible—a 90 minute version
of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime And Punishment, featuring a cast of three. The
adaptation, written by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus, debuted
several years ago in Chicago, where it won the Jefferson Award for “Best New
Adaptation.” The playwrights deserve high marks for condensing a mammoth
novel into a one-act play without sacrificing cohesion. Its message of
redemption is particularly appropriate for the Christian-based Co-op. Director
Ken Sawyer is a master of the visual, and the production looks great.
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THE WILD PARTY
Friday, March 12th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Just like the kids who pooled their talents to “put on a show” in 1939’s Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland flick Babes In Arms, so the young 21st Century performers of Still Hungry Theatre have banded together to stage Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party on a shoestring—with commendable results.
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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.”
ANOTHER VERMEER
Saturday, February 27th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Art forger Han van Meegeren has been imprisoned by the Dutch following the end of World War II for having allegedly sold a beloved national treasure—an original Vermeer—to Nazi Reich Marshall Hermann Goering. His defense? That he was in fact a patriot who saved many Dutch lives. The painting, he asserts, was one he had forged, and the fortune Goering paid for it ($7 million in today’s currency) was money that otherwise would have gone into the war effort. Criminal or patriot? Artist or swindler?
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WIREHEAD
Sunday, February 21st, 2010RECOMMENDED
Anyone thirty-five or older can remember a time in their teenage or adult lives when they functioned quite well without the Internet or a cell phone. Those days are long gone, prompting most of us of a certain age to wonder how we ever did without. Our lives have become so technology-dependent that that if a person’s cell phone doesn’t have Internet access (heaven forbid!), he or she is seriously behind the times. (I need to get with it on this!)
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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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