SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD
Saturday, August 28th, 2010
PCPA Theaterfest concludes its Summer 2010 season with Jason Robert Brown’s Songs For A New World, a magical change-of-pace evening of music starring three sensational PCPA favorites (and one terrific “newcomer”) and directed with consummate imagination and flair by PCPA’s multi-talented Erik Stein.
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THE CLEAN HOUSE
Friday, August 27th, 2010
How’s this for a cast of characters? Lane, a doctor (and doctor’s wife) who wants nothing more than to live in a clean house. Matilde, Lane’s Brazilian cleaning lady, who loves jokes almost as much as life itself but doesn’t like cleaning house—not one bit. Lane’s sister Virginia, who loves to clean house so much that simply cleaning her own is not enough for her. Lane’s surgeon husband Charles, who wants to leave Lane for Ana. Ana, Charles’ Argentinean patient and paramour, who has breast cancer. Characters who meet and interact in what playwright Sarah Ruhl describes as “a metaphysical Connecticut,” in “a house that is not far from the city and not far from the sea.”
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A WITHER’S TALE
Thursday, August 26th, 2010
William Shakespeare’s darkest comedy A Winter’s Tale and the soulful Seventies sound of Bill “Ain’t No Sunshine” Withers make for a perfect match in A Wither’s Tale, the latest offering by the multi-award-winning Troubadour Theater Company and one of the Troubies’ richest and best productions yet.
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EAT THE RUNT
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
A candidate for a high-level fund-raising position in a major big city art museum is interviewed by various museum higher-ups in Avery Crozier’s Eat The Runt, now getting its Los Angeles Premiere at Theatre Of NOTE.
If the above mini-synopsis seems hardly the stuff of great drama, let alone the laugh-out-loud comedy that Eat The Runt is, then wait till you hear the gimmick that makes it a truly unparalleled theatrical experience.
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ALL MY SONS
Saturday, August 21st, 2010
Arthur Miller’s All My Sons is my very favorite 20th Century play, one I have now had the good fortune of seeing staged a half-dozen times. Debuting on Broadway less than two years after World War II ended with Japan’s surrender, Miller’s examination of personal responsibility in time of war remains every bit as powerful—and relevant— today, sixty-three years after its New York premiere.
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CHESS IN CONCERT
Thursday, August 19th, 2010
While watching a recording of the 2008 London production of Chess In Concert at Royal Albert Hall, Musical Theatre Of Los Angeles’s Eduardo Enrikez and Bonnie McMahon were struck with a flash of divine inspiration (or out-and-out insanity)—to stage their own Chess In Concert with a 10-piece orchestra and 20-member cast in a 99-seat theater. A daunting task to say the very least, but then again so were MTLA’s revivals of Ragtime and West Side Story, just two of the Broadway mega-musicals which the creative duo had scaled down to 99-seat dimensions to critical acclaim and audience cheers.
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FREE MAN OF COLOR
Saturday, August 14th, 2010
“Thirty-four years before the end of slavery, I stood before my graduating class and wondered about my soul.”
The speaker is John Newton Templeton, a young ex-slave and the first man of color to attend Ohio University—over three decades before the Emancipation Proclamation.
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PARASITE DRAG
Friday, August 13th, 2010
The storm clouds on the Central Illinois horizon pale beside the shadows of abuse, adultery, addiction, illness, incest, and suicide in Parasite Drag, Mark Roberts’ slice of Midwest life now getting its Southern California Premiere at the Elephant Theatre Company. Electrically directed by David Fofi in association with Don Foster and powerfully performed by a quartet of topnotch actors, Parasite Drag mixes dramatic confrontations with biting dollops of humor to gripping effect.
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