THE BROWNING VERSION
Saturday, January 9th, 2010
By 2010 standards, not much happens over the course of The Browning Version’s seventy-five minutes, an hour and a quarter which unrolls in real time one evening in the sitting room of an English schoolteacher’s flat.
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SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION
Friday, January 8th, 2010
I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation. Between us and everybody else on this planet. I am bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people. It’s a profound thought.”
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HAMLET
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
Just a little over three years ago, a trio of young PaliHi grads with a love of the Bard debuted a new theater company, The Porters Of Hellsgate, with a mission to make Shakespeare come alive for their generation. Their tenth production, Hamlet, once again proves them a force to be reckoned with in Los Angeles classical theater.
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AN OAK TREE
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
A grieving father confronting the driver responsible for his 12-year-old daughter’s death is a premise almost certain to create gripping theater. It’s hard to imagine a loss greater than a parent’s of a child, or a greater feeling of culpability than that of a person who has caused a child’s death. It’s not surprising, therefore, that Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree proves gripping theater. What makes it quite out of the ordinary is its unusual format, one absolutely deserving to be called “unique.”
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THE GLASS MENDACITY
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010
It’s a summer weekend in the Deep South, and the DuBois offspring have returned to Belle Reve, the plantation home of their dysfunctional childhood, to welcome back patriarch Big Daddy DuBois from his stay at the local hospital. There’s eldest daughter (and family loony) Blanche, married to the uncouth but undeniably sexy Stanley Kowalski. Middle child Brick, a cipher of a man if there ever was one, is wedded to the sultry Maggie, appropriately nicknamed “The Cat.” Youngest child Laura suffers from a bad limp (and bad hair.) Along with family matriarch Big Amanda DuBois and narrator/gentleman caller Mitch O’Connor, the DuBois children have assembled to await Big Daddy’s doctor’s verdict. Does the master of Belle Reve have cancer, or is it merely a spastic colon?
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THAT PERFECT MOMENT
Friday, January 1st, 2010
It was 1969, aka the Summer Of Love, and an aspiring San Fernando Valley rock band was about to get its first big break as opening act for The Buckinghams, whose “Kind Of A Drag” had hit #1 two years before. Ultimately, however, fame escaped The Weeds, and even now, twenty-five years later, that one summer remains the high point in the lives of its four members. True, all four 50something friends have gone on to varying degrees of career success, but as the years have passed, that summer a quarter century ago has acquired a golden glow for “the greatest rock band that nobody’s ever heard of.” It was a summer filled with “cheap dope and easy women,” a time when the four friends gave themselves “permission to dream.” If only they could go back in time, or somehow bring back that perfect moment in each of their lives.
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SEE HOW THEY RUN
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
What would regional and community theaters do without British farce? It’s hard indeed to imagine a theater season without a Ray Cooney comedy like Run For Your Wife, a Joe Orton confection, Michael Frayne’s Noises Off, or a laugh-getter by the almost impossibly prolific Alan Ayckbourn. The granddaddy of all contemporary British farces may well be Philip King’s 1945 gem See How They Run, and those wanting to experience British humor at its funniest are hereby advised to catch the King classic’s spiffy new production at Glendale Centre Theatre.
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WHITE CHRISTMAS
Saturday, December 26th, 2009
Cabrillo Music Theatre’s December gamble—a four-day, seven-performance post-Christmas staging of Irving Berlin’s White Christmas—has paid off in a terrific production, directed with imagination and flair by Todd Nielsen and starring some of the Southland’s finest triple-threat talents.
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