HERSHEY FELDER IN ABE LINCOLN’S PIANO
Friday, January 10th, 2014NOT RECOMMENDED
Hershey Felder is back at the Geffen with his latest one-man show, Hershey Felder In Abe Lincoln’s Piano, and though Felder does treat the audience to a bit of Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue, unlike the smash hit Hershey Felder As George Gershwin Alone, the maestro’s latest may prove a hard sell to all but Felder fanatics.
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BARRYMORE
Sunday, November 17th, 2013
Southern California musical theater star Gordon Goodman brings to life stage-and-screen legend John Barrymore in William Luce’s Barrymore, the virtual one-man-show that won its originator Christopher Plummer the Tony and could well earn Goodman equivalent recognition when L.A. award season comes around.
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DAVID DEAN BOTTRELL IS WORKING
Thursday, March 7th, 2013
You’ve undoubtedly heard it said that “Everyone has at least one good book in them.” Substitute “solo performance” for book and you’re in Hollywood, and if you should happen to doubt my words, you’ve only to check out how many One-Man or One-Woman Shows there are every summer at the Fringe Festival.
Still, despite this solo performance glut, there aren’t that many you’d actually pay good money to see, all the more reason to celebrate the return of story-telling master David Dean Bottrell, who not only has a Scenie-winning Solo Performance in him, he’s got a wingdinger of a follow-up to it, entitled simply David Dean Bottrell Is Working.
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THE SANTALAND DIARIES (UNDERSTUDY PERFORMANCE)
Wednesday, December 5th, 2012
That practice makes perfect was proven on Wednesday by the multitalented Matt Crabtree in the last of his Guaranteed Understudy Performances in David Sedaris’s The SantaLand Diaries, the true story of the writer’s humiliating (but hilarious-in-retrospect) stint as a Christmas elf at New York City Macy’s “SantaLand.” With two performances under his belt last year, and another two this holiday season (including a last-minute step-in for Paulo Andino the previous Thursday), this fifth and (possibly) final understudy performance turned out just about as fabulous as fabulous can be.
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SMOKE AND MIRRORS
Tuesday, October 9th, 2012
Autobiographical solo performances may sometimes seem to be a dime a dozen in L.A. (or at the very least during Fringe Festival season), but when was the last time you saw an autobiographical magic show by one of the finest actors in town?
Unless you’ve caught Albie Selznick’s Smoke And Mirrors, the answer is probably “No”—all the more reason not to miss this hour-and-a-half of mysterious card tricks, furniture and humans levitated without a cord in sight, and handkerchiefs turned into birds of many colors, birds, birds, and more birds, enough to fill a mini-aviary, or at least a very large cage. Add to that an otherworldly Oracle (who’d make a terrific stand up comedienne if only she had legs to stand up on instead of just a gigantic, balloon-shaped head), a human-sized bunny rabbit, and a poignant coming-of-age story and you’ve got one uniquely entertaining show, directed with panache by Paul Millet.
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AMERICAN FIESTA
Sunday, September 30th, 2012
When a self-penned solo performance, the kind that Fringe Festival participants seem ever so fond of, proves so popular that actors other than the original writer get hired to perform it, that’s pretty much a guarantee of something special, or at least this is the case with the Colony Theatre’s latest, Steven Tomlinson’s autobiographical American Fiesta.
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FRUIT FLY
Monday, January 9th, 2012
Leslie Jordan answers the age-old question—“Do gay men really become their mothers?”—in his latest autobiographical one-man show, Fruit Fly, and as anyone who’s ever seen the Chattanooga native in Sordid Lives or on Will And Grace can well imagine, there’s not likely to be a more delightful autobiographical one-man show in any foreseeable future.
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BANANAS! A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JOSEPHINE BAKER
Friday, December 23rd, 2011
When Halle Berry became the first African American to win a Best Actress Academy Award in 2002, she dedicated her golden statuette to a trio of pioneering black performers—Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, and Diahann Carroll—for opening the door to Berry’s Oscar win. In retrospect, Berry could just have easily added a fourth name to the list, that of Josephine Baker, the first African-American female to star in a major motion picture, the first to perform before an integrated audience in an American concert hall, and the first to see her fame spread throughout the world.
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