SWEENEY TODD
Sunday, March 14th, 2010
Anyone who’s seen only Tim Burton’s film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd or the “high-concept” production at the Ahmanson last year is hereby advised to head down (or up or over) to Torrance and catch the absolutely phenomenal revival being staged at El Camino College.
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SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM
Sunday, March 14th, 2010
Yes, Virginia, there was a Stephen Sondheim before Sweeney Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday In The Park with George, Into The Woods, Assassins, Dick Tracy, and Passion—as the 1976 musical revue Side By Side By Sondheim makes perfectly clear.
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TRYING
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
There are times when all it takes is two actors to fill a stage, to fill it with humor and drama and heart. Trying, Joanna McClelland Glass’s much-loved two-hander, provides a pair of actors with just such an opportunity to shine.
OEDIPUS EL REY
Sunday, March 7th, 2010
Where so-called “edgy” or “experimental” theater is concerned, the line between brilliant and pretentious is a fine one indeed, and in this reviewer’s experience at least, the latter is more often the case than the former. That’s why it’s such a pleasure to report that Theatre @ Boston Court’s production of Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus El Rey is out-and-out brilliant theater, even for playgoers whose tastes run, as mine do, more toward the traditional.
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MEN OF TORTUGA
Thursday, March 4th, 2010
In a stylish but sterile white office suite, three well-dressed men are discussing what appears to be an assassination plot with a rather scruffy, tattooed visitor whom one surmises to be the prospective assassin. The latter has qualms, not about the equipment he’ll be using, but about the pane of glass he’ll have to be shooting through. The window could affect the trajectory, he explains, adding that even humidity can affect a bullet’s course. “I’d have to say you have a low chance of success,” he informs the others. Since neither the time nor the place of the assassination can be changed, he concludes that a rifle is clearly not the answer. “If you want to do it, you’ll have to bomb the whole room,” he suggests. Maybe do it with a missile? The oldest of the three plotters has an even better idea—to put someone in the room who is willing to pay the price. He then volunteers to be that man.
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ESCANABA IN DA MOONLIGHT
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
Movie star/playwright Jeff Daniels affectionately skewers the natives of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (aka the Yoopers) in his hit comedy Escanaba In Da Moonlight, now making a return engagement at San Pedro’s Little Fish Theatre. As an authentic Yooper might put it, “Dis is some funny show, and dat’s da trute.”
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WIT
Sunday, February 28th, 2010
To paraphrase English poet John Donne, Death is not “too proud” to come knocking on 50-year-old Vivian Bearing’s door in Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit, now making a return visit to Los Angeles in a production by Actors Co-op that simply could not be better.
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BACKWARDS IN HIGH HEELS
Friday, February 26th, 2010
It’s been said that Ginger Rogers became a star doing everything her dance partner Fred Astaire could do … but backwards in high heels. The Oscar-winning actress-dancer now gets her very own tribute musical, Lynette Barkley and Charles McGovern’s Backwards In High Heels, and it’s hard to imagine a better production of “The Ginger Musical” than the one just opened at Long Beach’s International City Theatre.
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