SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS
Sunday, April 14th, 2013
Glenn Casale and Patti Colombo dust the cobwebs off Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, the stage adaptation of the 1954 MGM musical movie classic, offering audiences at the La Mirada Theatre For The Performing Arts far more than simply two hours of old-fashioned G-rated family entertainment. With Casale and Colombo in the driver’s seat, this ‘50s chestnut seems fresh and new, honest and real, and thrillingly grown-up.
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GREASE
Saturday, April 13th, 2013
Danny Zuko and Sandy Dumbrowski fall in summer love all over again—with the movie’s Doody and Putzie in charge of the whole nostalgic shebang—as Cabrillo Music Theatre revives the 3,388-performance Broadway megahit Grease to the delight of teen and adult audiences alike.
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AMERICAN BUFFALO
Friday, April 12th, 2013
The four-letter words fly fast and furious in the Geffen Playhouse’s latest, American Buffalo, and though David Mamet’s 1977 Broadway debut remains unlikely to be a traditional theatergoer’s cup of tea, it’s hard to imagine a better cast, acted, directed, or designed revival of this 1977 groundbreaker than the one at the Geffen.
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SMOKEFALL
Wednesday, April 10th, 2013
Man, woman, birth, death, infinity.
The spirit of Thornton Wilder is alive and well and living inside playwright Noah Haidle, whose remarkable Smokefall, now getting its World Premiere at South Coast Repertory, bears comparison with Wilder’s Our Town and The Skin Of Our Teeth.
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SWEET CHARITY
Tuesday, April 9th, 2013
Director Neil Dale and choreographer Janet Renslow make a triumphant return to Candlelight Dinner Theatre for the Neil Simon-Cy Coleman-Dorothy Field musical comedy classic Sweet Charity, giving San Gabriel Valley-Inland Empire audiences the best Candlelight show I’ve seen since the duo’s innovative, multiple-Scenie-winning Miss Saigon.
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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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BILLY & RAY
Sunday, April 7th, 2013
Back in 1944, Hollywood’s “Hays Code” made it perfectly clear. If you wanted to make a movie, your film had better not show any of the following: “brutality and possible gruesomeness, technique of committing murder by whatever method, sympathy for criminals, …“ The list of no-nos went on and on.
So how, then, did Paramount Pictures manage in 1944 to make a movie out of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, a film in which insurance salesman Fred MacMurray and housewife Barbara Stanwyck plot and execute the murder of her husband—and make it look like an accident so as to cash in on hubby’s insurance policy’s “double indemnity” clause, one which guarantees double the payout in case of accidental death?
Mike Bencivenga’s World Premiere play Billy & Ray not only explains how co-screenwriters Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler found ingenious ways to hoodwink Hays Code czar Joseph Breen into letting them include all of the abovementioned taboos in their movie, under Garry Marshall’s pitch-perfect direction, it does so in the most entertaining of ways.
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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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