THE BEDROOM WINDOW
Thursday, September 2nd, 2010
REVIEW UPDATE:
There’s a reason why Broadway musicals have out-of-town tryouts and weeks of previews before opening to the New York press. Creating a new musical requires the kind of tweaking that only performances in front of live audiences can suggest. Scenes may need to be cut or rewritten, old songs may have to make way for new ones, and cast changes may need to be made.
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TITUS REDUX
Sunday, August 29th, 2010
John Farmanesh-Bocca’s Titus Redux is William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus like you’ve never seen it before. Yes, there’s still rape, mutilation, and two boys cooked in a pie, and much of Shakespeare’s original dialog remains intact. Still, from the moment Tamora responds to Titus’s “I give him you, the noblest that survives, the eldest son of this distressed queen,” with a very contemporary “Fuck you! You stubborn pigheaded asshole,” you know you’re in for something different.
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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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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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