EXTINCTION
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
In Gabe McKinley’s deep-dark world premiere comedic drama Extinction, now playing at the Elephant Space in Hollywood, it is not an endangered species that faces the end of its days but rather the longtime friendship of Max and Finn, best buds since college. These two 30ish compadres have been spending their vacations together in Atlantic City since their undergrad days, drinking, drugging, and girl-hunting, but as Bob Dylan once put it, “The times they are a-changin.’” What happens when best friends’ paths in life diverge, one leaving the other in the lurch? Ask yourself this question: How would you react if your closest friend told you that he’d moved on? How far would you go to save this friendship, or failing that, to destroy it forever?
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KIDNAPPED BY CRAIGSLIST
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
A gorgeous barker/ringmaster/dominatrix rises out of wooden box and asks the assembled audience: Do you want to find a date? Sell your couch? Engage in sexual fantasies? Expose unspeakable secrets? She is soon surrounded by a band of loonies, including a woman wearing a saucepan as a hat—“It keeps the aliens out.” “Where are we?” you ask yourself, before realizing the obvious truth. We’re in the wacky world of Craigslist, as seen by Katie Goan and Nitra Gutierrez in their outrageously funny one-act, Kidnapped By Craigslist, now getting its West Coast Premiere in a snazzy production by the illustrious TheSpyAnts.
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WINTER WONDERETTES
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
The marvelous foursome known as the Wonderettes are back in town just in time for the holidays, making this is the best kind of news for theatergoers in search of Christmas cheer. Like The Marvelous Wonderettes, the show that made them famous, Winter Wonderettes is two acts of comedy, harmony, and nostalgia, and a seasonal treat for old and young alike.
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ARIAS WITH A TWIST
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
The proscenium of the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater has been reduced to about one-sixth its normal size, your second clue that you’re in for something completely different tonight. (The first clue was the young, trendy, a tad pansexual audience milling around the theater’s lobby, bar, and art gallery pre-performance.) Then, as music from another time, another place fills the auditorium, one reduced-size curtain rises only to reveal another, which opens to reveal yet another and another and another … until finally, you see before you a lifelike tuxedoed marionette coaxing out notes on the trumpet, a sensual, dreamlike tune with a 1940s Latin sound. Stars spin around the scrim which separates the audience from the mini-trumpeteer, colored lights flashing and galaxies exploding. We are told that we’re about to meet “an astrologer, a time-traveler, a polymorph.”
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EQUIVOCATION
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
Imagine if you will that on or about the one-year anniversary of 9/11, an emissary from the President Of The United States visited the most popular contemporary American filmmaker (insert whatever name you wish here) with an order—that a movie be made about the events leading up to the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, a movie which would place the blame on Saddam Hussein and his “weapons of mass destruction.” The President, continues his envoy, has himself written a draft of the screenplay, and our filmmaker needs only spice it up with some dialog—and with witches thrown in for good measure. (Oh, and the President can’t be in the flick.) The filmmaker knows that if he makes the movie the President is demanding, he will be telling a deliberate lie, as well as demonizing “enemies” who just may be blameless. On the other hand, to refuse the President’s demands will mean being accused of treason, and punished accordingly.
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NOISES OFF
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
As noted last week, A Noise Within’s current production of Shakespeare’s Richard III proves once again that nobody does the Bard better than “California’s Home For The Classics.” A Noise Within now proves itself equally adept at contemporary British farce in their concurrently running revival of Michael Frayn’s 1982’s Noises Off, the latest (and most recent) of the modern classics ANW intersperses amongst its productions of Shakespeare, Shaw, and The Greeks.
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DAVID BURNHAM CABARET
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
From Fontana farm boy to CLO favorite to Broadway star. That’s the journey David Burnham has been on since his growing-up years spent halfway between San Bernardino and Rancho Cucamonga, and quite a journey it has been. A little less than six years ago, Burnham was starring down in Long Beach in Musical Theatre West’s production of Hot Mikado, following appearances in MTW’s La Cage Aux Folles and Children Of Eden. He then strutted his dramatic stuff in The Woman In Black at NoHo’s The Road Theatre, one of a long list of pre-Broadway credits. The Great White Way came calling in 2005 when Burnham appeared in the original cast of the multiple-Tony-winning The Light In The Piazza, and when the National Tour played the Ahmanson with Burnham as Fabrizio, it was a fanfare-worthy homecoming for the local boy turned Broadway star. Then came Burnham’s year as Fiyero in the Broadway production of Wicked, all of the above adding up to more than enough reason for Fontana’s favorite son to headline his very own cabaret show at L.A.’s Upright Cabaret.
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LITTLE WOMEN THE BROADWAY MUSICAL
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
Little Women The Broadway Musical has been a favorite of mine since I first heard its tuneful score (music by Jason Howland and lyrics by Mindi Dickstein) and later saw a performance of the National Tour. Book writer Allan Knee somehow managed to compact Alcott’s 400-plus-word novel into a two-and-a-half hour musical which retains the book’s most memorable moments (Jo’s stealing a Christmas tree from the neighboring Laurence family’s property, jealous Amy burning Jo’s manuscript, Jo’s shame at finding a scorch mark on her gown the night of the big party, etc.) while adding songs which run the gamut from Jo’s feisty “Better” to the bouncy “I’d Be Delighted,” to the rousing Act 1 closer “Astonishing.”
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