REX PICKETT’S SIDEWAYS THE PLAY
Saturday, May 26th, 2012
Longtime best friends Miles and Jack set off on “the ultimate road trip, the last hurrah” in Rex Pickett’s Sideways The Play, now getting a terrific World Premiere staging by Santa Monica’s The Ruskin Group Theatre Co.
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THE CLOSENESS OF THE HORIZON
Saturday, May 19th, 2012
“I got my first real six-string, bought it at the five-and-dime, played it till my fingers bled, was the summer of ’69.”
What would contemporary fiction, drama, music, and art be had the summer of 1969 never happened? Bryan Adams would never have written “Summer Of 69,” nor would Robert Downey Jr. have starred in the movie 1969, nor would playwright Damon Chua have written his recent dramatic fantasy 1969: A Fantastical Odyssey Through The American Mindscape. Summer of ’69 brought us the Stonewall Riots, the release of The Who’s Tommy and Midnight Cowboy, Ted Kennedy’s car crash at Chappaquiddick, the three-day event that was Woodstock, the beginning of the trial of the Chicago 8, and most memorably, the night Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon.
For playwright Richard Martin Hirsch, Summer of ‘69 was the year he turned 19, the year his alma mater Palisades High School won the Los Angeles City High School Basketball Championship, and the year he and his two best friends from Pali High traveled across the country in a VW bus.
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LOVE STRUCK
Saturday, May 12th, 2012
Playwright Dale Griffiths Stamos follows her 2011 collection of family-based one-acts, Thicker Than Water, with an even bigger and better bunch for 2012, an octet of love-themed playlets aptly titled Love Struck.
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LAURA
Friday, April 6th, 2012
“Laura is the face in the misty light, footsteps that you hear down the hall, the laugh that floats on a summer night that you can never quite recall…”
Anyone familiar with the mid-20th Century Hit Parade will surely recall the David Raskin/Johnny Mercer song standard “Laura” and its many covers by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, and the majority of film buffs will likely have seen the 1944 Otto Preminger film noir classic of the same name, starring Dana Andrews as a detective investigating the murder of a beautiful, successful ad executive (portrayed in flashbacks by Gene Tierney) and based on a novel by Vera Caspary.
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THE BOOMERANG EFFECT
Saturday, March 31st, 2012
Paul suggests that Andrew’s life might be better if he had that talk with Renee about her incessant nagging during sex. Andrew recommends that David start playing an online Scrabble game called Words With Friends. David’s husband Nick offers his own helpful advice to Julie, who then passes on her own self-help tip to Janetta.
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SWEENEY TODD
Monday, March 12th, 2012
Santa Monica’s venerable Morgan-Wixson Theatre once again stretches the definition of “community theater” with their production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, proving that there are indeed exceptions to the rule (expressed to me just yesterday by the Artistic Director of one of our leading CLOs) that “community theaters should never do Sondheim.” The Morgan-Wixson not only can do Sondheim, they can do him quite excitingly indeed.
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THE INDIANS ARE COMING TO DINNER
Tuesday, March 6th, 2012
Imagine what might happen if you crossed a screwball comedy clan like the one George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart created in You Can’t Take It With You with the Greekly tragic family Arthur Miller wrote about in Death Of A Salesman. What you’d end up with would doubtless be something quite like Jennifer W. Rowland’s highly original and thoroughly entertaining tragicomedy The Indians Are Coming To Dinner, now getting its World Premiere at Venice’s Pacific Resident Theatre.
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THE FALL TO EARTH
Thursday, March 1st, 2012
There are times when a reviewer must decide that the less said, the better, and in this reviewer’s humble opinion, his colleagues have been giving away far too much about The Fall To Earth (recently opened at the Odyssey). Therefore, if this is the first time you’re reading about Joel Drake Johnson’s richly complex dramedy, read no further than this review. Trust me. This is one play you will want to be surprised by.
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