BE A GOOD LITTLE WIDOW
Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013
25-year-old Melody is still struggling with the demands of being a newlywed wife when she is faced with the even greater challenge of being a newlywed widow in Bekah Brunstetter’s singular new comedy Be A Good Little Widow, now getting a splendid West Coast Premiere at San Diego’s The Old Globe.
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OTHER DESERT CITIES
Tuesday, May 21st, 2013
The continental divide that has polarized America into mud-slinging camps of liberals vs. conservatives over the past few decades takes on a personal, familial note in Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, one of the best written, most thought-provoking, and ultimately most moving plays of the last decade, now getting a superb San Diego premiere at The Old Globe.
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THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF HEDDA GABLER
Monday, April 8th, 2013
In a case of serendipitous cross-programming, two of Henrik Ibsen’s most iconic heroines are currently alive and well and onstage in San Diego, Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House at The Old Globe and Hedda Gabler in The Further Adventures Of Hedda Gabler at Diversionary Theatre.
No, you didn’t read that last title wrong. Though The Old Globe is featuring Ibsen’s Doll House in its original, albeit freshly translated, form, Diversionary is offering San Diegans Jeff Whitty’s surrealistic comedy The Further Adventures Of Hedda Gabler, and if Whitty’s play runs about twenty minutes longer than it ought to, in all other ways it makes for a heady, laugh-out-loud, thought-provoking evening of absurdist theater.
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A DOLL’S HOUSE
Sunday, April 7th, 2013
Eight and a half decades before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique set off what’s known as the Second-Wave Feminist Movement in the U.S., Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen created a heroine whose frustration at being “just a housewife” could well have inspired Friedan and her fellow women’s libbers.
Her name, as you may have guessed, was Nora, and if playwright Ibsen steadfastly asserted that he had not consciously “worked for the women’s rights movement,” A Doll’s House must certainly have inspired generation after generation of women in the years since its 1879 debut.
Ibsen’s masterpiece, incidentally the world’s most performed play, now arrives at San Diego’s The Old Globe Theatre in a World Premiere adaptation by translator Anne-Charlotte Hanes Harvey and director Kirsten Brandt that makes Nora, the Norwegians surrounding her, and Ibsen’s play itself seem considerably younger than their one hundred thirty-four years of age.
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CHICAGO
Sunday, March 24th, 2013
It’s taken a good long while—over sixteen years to be precise—for the longest-running American musical in Broadway history to make it to our Southern California regional theaters. Then again, considering that Chicago is currently closing in on 7000 performances on The Great White Way, it’s a wonder theaters like Escondido’s Lawrence Welk don’t find themselves on a mile-long waiting list to get their hands on the Kander & Ebb mega-revival, all the more reason to head down south a ways and catch Chicago, smashingly up-close-and-personal at the Welk.
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A GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO LOVE AND MURDER
Sunday, March 24th, 2013
Imagine how it might have played out had Downton Abbey’s distant cousin Mattthew Crawley actually wanted to inherit the Grantham estate, not just wanted it but wanted it so badly that to get it, he needed to dispose of more than half a dozen Granthams standing in the path of his succession.
I realize this is a lot to imagine, but if I ask you to do so, it’s simply to give you an idea of the world inhabited by the characters of the delicious new period musical A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder, a world of manners and money and Edwardian morality, a world in which a poor relation might have no other recourse than to bump off the competition one by one if he wanted to go from rags to riches.
BIRDS OF A FEATHER
Monday, February 11th, 2013
What do a couple of gay male penguins immortalized in a controversial children’s book, an opposite-gender pair of red-tailed hawks nesting on a top-story ledge of a pricey Upper Manhattan co-op, and the marital woes of a former ABC/CBS/Fox/CNN news anchor have in common?
The answer is that all of the above take center stage in Birds Of A Feather, Marc Acito’s sweet, funny, topical, and ultimately quite moving one-act comedy now making its West Coast debut in a something-to-squawk-about production at San Diego’s Diversionary Theatre.
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CLYBOURNE PARK
Monday, January 21st, 2013
The 19th Century axiom that “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”* could have been thought up to describe race relations in the United States, or at least race relations as Bruce Norris writes about them in his Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning play Clybourne Park, now getting its first San Diego production—and a splendid one at that—at San Diego REPertory Theatre.
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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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