THE ODD COUPLE
Friday, February 4th, 2011
How many plays can you think of that have generated a film adaptation (and a 30-years-later sequel), a long-running sitcom, a short-running African American-cast sitcom, an animated children’s series, an alternate version with the male and female roles reversed, and an updated version with an all new title?
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THE BREAK OF NOON
Thursday, February 3rd, 2011
An embittered pink-slipped employee enters his former workplace and, automatic weapon in hand, murders thirty-seven of his ex-coworkers yet spares number thirty-eight, leaving the massacre’s sole survivor to wonder why. Why was he alone shown mercy? To whom does he owe this inexplicable stroke of salvation?
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A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
Monday, January 31st, 2011
From the moment the lights come up on Theseus, Duke Of Athens (Elijah Alexander), and Hippolyta, Queen Of The Amazons (Susannah Schulman) posing in glamorous 1950s garb to the flash of paparazzi light bulbs, you know this will not be your grandfather’s, your father’s, or even your older brother’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Clearly director Mark Rucker has tricks up his sleeve, the revelation of which make South Coast Repertory’s production of William Shakespeare’s classic romantic comedy something very special indeed.
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PLAY DATES
Saturday, January 29th, 2011
The war between the sexes has never been funnier than it is in Play Dates, Sam Wolfson’s hilarious new comedy now playing at Theatre Asylum under the sparkling direction of Jennifer Chambers.
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MLLE. GOD
Friday, January 28th, 2011
Though Frank Wedekind’s name may not be as well-known as Bertolt Brecht’s, the German playwright is making a comeback nearly a hundred years after his death, first with the Broadway smash Spring Awakening and now with Nicholas Kazan’s Mlle. God, a contemporary stage adaptation of Wedekind’s Lulu Plays, perhaps best known as the basis for silent film star Louise Brooks’ most famous flick, Pandora’s Box.
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LOVING REPEATING
Thursday, January 27th, 2011
If you’d asked me a few days ago what I knew about Gertrude Stein, my answer would have been “Not that much,” aside from her oft-quoted “A rose is a rose is a rose,” her relationship with longtime lesbian companion Alice B. Toklas, and some sense that she’d lived a good deal of her life in Europe. Though there are doubtless many theatergoers my age considerably better informed than I, I’d venture to guess an even greater number, particularly those under forty, know not even that much. For this reason alone, “A Musical Of Gertrude Stein” would seem to have at least one strike against it from the get-go. Add to that the fact that the musical in question has little or no storyline, that its relatively few spoken words come from a lecture delivered by Stein at the University of Chicago in 1934, and that the lyrics of this mostly sung-through musical are taken from Stein’s idiosyncratic poems (“Each one of them of the three of them meant something by being such a one”) and you have rather a hard-sell of a show—particularly if your audience of subscribers is accustomed to more traditional, linear fare.
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HAIR
Tuesday, January 25th, 2011
It was mid-1968. LBJ was still President, with Richard Nixon’s election and seven more years of war in Vietnam yet to come. Already, though, there were “tribes” of young people in their teens and twenties whose dissatisfaction with an America riddled with racism, poverty, sexism, sexual repression, and political corruption led them to create the hippie movement of the 60s. More than anything else, though, these “new American patriots,” as they saw themselves, were in revolt against a war they believed to be unjust, unnecessary, and un-American.
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JANE AUSTEN’S EMMA
Sunday, January 23rd, 2011
183 years before Hate At First Sight turned into Happily Ever After for Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in You’ve Got Mail, a bickering Emma Woodhouse and George Knightley finally realized they were Made For Each Other in Jane Austen’s Emma. As fans of the 1996 movie adaptation (starring a very British Gwyneth Paltrow) or the more recent Pride And Prejudice (with Keira Knightley—no relation to George—as Emma’s literary cousin Elizabeth Bennet) are well aware, contemporary romantic comedies owe more than a minor debt of gratitude to Miss Austen.
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