GUIDED CONSIDERATION OF A LAMENTABLE DEED
Saturday, September 24th, 2011
The play may well be the thing, but sometimes “the thing” adds up to considerably more than just the play. Such is the case with needtheater’s World Premiere production of Frank Basloe’s Guided Consideration Of A Lamentable Deed. Though Basloe’s dark comedy is intelligent, entertaining, and thought-provoking enough to stand on its own, when you add a pre-show “kegger” (more about that later), a one-of-a-kind venue, and live music after the show for those who wish to stick around, this brand new play by a relative unknown becomes a “thing” well worth taking a chance on.
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A WIDOW OF NO IMPORTANCE
Friday, September 23rd, 2011
East West Players open their 46th Anniversary Season with the World Premiere of Shane Sakhrani’s infectiously funny and utterly charming A Widow Of No Importance, a generation gap comedy set in Mumbai, India that theatergoers from any ethnic background are likely to embrace as warmly as its core South Asian audience.
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PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011
Pride And Prejudice. Is there anyone who isn’t familiar with Jane Austen’s romantic classic in one form or another? True, not everyone has read the novel (and that includes this reviewer), but between the 1980 and ’95 TV adaptations, the 1940 and 2005 movie versions, and the innumerable romcoms (novels, plays, films, TV series, etc.) which have taken Austen’s tale as inspiration, there’s hardly one of us who won’t feel at least a spark of recognition while watching P&P’s latest adaptation at South Coast Repertory, all the way from Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy’s scrappy first meeting to the blissful happy ending we know awaits them.
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HIGH FIDELITY
Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
Musical Theatre Guild’s awesome one-night-only “concert staged reading” of the 2006 Broadway flop High Fidelity has confirmed what Hunger Artists’ West Coast Premiere first suggested in July. I am madly in love with HiFi, and if the cheers which greeted last night’s reading are any indication, I am not the only one who feels this way.
SHOOTING STAR
Sunday, September 18th, 2011
There’s something about airport terminal waiting areas that makes them ripe with dramatic possibilities. A few years back, Departures provided the writer-actors at the NoHo Arts Center with over half a dozen waiting area vignettes, and earlier this year, Having It All’s female fivesome met cute and bonded while stranded waiting for postponed flights. Now it’s former couple Reed and Elena who happen upon each other in a blizzard-bound Midwest airport twenty-five years post-love affair in Steven Dietz’s Shooting Star, getting its West Coast Premiere at Burbank’s Colony Theatre.
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THE LAST FIVE YEARS
Saturday, September 17th, 2011
One of the most exciting things about live theater is being able to see favorite plays and musicals revived with new actors tackling iconic roles, new directors putting their stamp on familiar material, and new design teams giving old shows new looks.
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CABARET
Friday, September 16th, 2011
It takes chutzpah to fiddle with a classic and heaps of talent to pull it off, both of which Tony-nominated director-choreographer Marcia Milgrom Dodge does to breathtaking effect in her brilliant revisal of Joe Masterhoff, John Kander, and Fred Ebb’s Cabaret for Reprise Theatre Company.
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FALSETTOS
Monday, September 12th, 2011
William Finn’s Falsettos has made a rare return visit to Los Angeles in an absolutely splendid production at the brand new Third Street Theatre. To paraphrase one of its songs, “What More Need I Say?”
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