CYMBELINE
Friday, December 14th, 2012
William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline has the reputation of being one of the Bard’s “problem” plays, but you’d never guess that from Fiasco Theater’s astonishingly accessible, amazingly inventive six-actor production, now arriving intact at Santa Monica’s The Broad Stage from an off-Broadway run that won over even the toughest New York critics.
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THE LAST ROMANCE
Wednesday, December 5th, 2012RECOMMENDED
There’s no age limit on love in Joe DiPietro’s charming, funny, and very romantic The Last Romance, now getting a rather good Los Angeles Premiere at Beverly Hills’ Theatre 40.
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CONEY ISLAND CHRISTMAS
Friday, November 30th, 2012
The Geffen Playhouse has begun what could well turn into an annual holiday event with their World Premiere staging of Donald Margulies’ Coney Island Christmas, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s heartwarming, crowd-pleasing look back at a Brooklyn December circa 1935, directed with flair and heart by Bart DeLorenzo.
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MRS. MANNERLY
Wednesday, November 28th, 2012
Playwright Jeffery Hatcher takes a delightful trip down memory lane in Mrs. Mannerly, his staged memoir of an etiquette class he once took under the tutelage of Mrs. Helen Anderson Kirk, aka the Emily Post of Steubenville, Ohio.
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CHEKHOV UNSCRIPTED
Friday, October 19th, 2012
Here’s a question for all you Anton Chekhov fans out there. Which among these plays ran only one performance: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, The Lake, or The Cherry Orchard? Need a hint? Its one and only performance took place on Wednesday, October 17, at the Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles.
The answer should be obvious to anyone who’s caught a Tennessee Williams, William Shakespeare, Stephen Sondheim, or Jane Austen opus as improvised entirely from scratch by the ad-lib geniuses who call themselves Impro Theatre, currently presenting Chekhov Unscripted (and the previously reviewed Twilight Zone Unscripted) in glorious repertory.
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TWILIGHT ZONE UNSCRIPTED
Thursday, October 11th, 2012
“There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.”
Anyone around in the early 1960s can surely recall these words, and the voice of the man speaking them, the legendary Rod Serling, creator of the iconic TV series The Twilight Zone, one which spawned a feature film, a radio series, a comic book, a magazine, and various other spin-offs over the next five decades, including two revival television series and now, in 2012, an evening of hilariously improvised theater which the masters of improvisation known as Impro Theatre have entitled—what else?—Twilight Zone Unscripted.
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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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BY THE WAY, MEET VERA STARK
Saturday, September 29th, 2012
The Motion Picture Production Code changed more than the sexual content of films made between 1934 and 1968. Not only did the Hays Code, as it was better known, ban “every profane and vulgar expression, any licentious or suggestive nudity, the illegal traffic in drugs, any inference of sex perversion,” and other cinematic sins which pre-1933 movies might have felt free to feature, it also restricted the ways blacks and whites could interrelate.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage looks back at the last pre-Code year and the effects the Code had on the life of Hollywood’s first (albeit fictional) African-American film star in her fascinating, funny, thought-provoking—though not entirely satisfying—By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, now getting its West Coast Premiere at the Geffen Playhouse.
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