AMERICAN BUFFALO

posted on April 12th, 2013 at 4:55 PM by Steven Stanley


The four-letter words fly fast and furious in the Geffen Playhouse’s latest, American Buffalo, and though David Mamet’s 1977 Broadway debut remains unlikely to be a traditional theatergoer’s cup of tea, it’s hard to imagine a better cast, acted, directed, or designed revival of this 1977 groundbreaker than the one at the Geffen.
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posted in Comedy, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

SMOKEFALL

posted on April 10th, 2013 at 6:06 PM by Steven Stanley


Man, woman, birth, death, infinity.

The spirit of Thornton Wilder is alive and well and living inside playwright Noah Haidle, whose remarkable Smokefall, now getting its World Premiere at South Coast Repertory, bears comparison with Wilder’s Our Town and The Skin Of Our Teeth.
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posted in Comedy-Drama, Orange County, WOW!

SWEET CHARITY

posted on April 9th, 2013 at 10:14 PM by Steven Stanley


Director Neil Dale and choreographer Janet Renslow make a triumphant return to Candlelight Dinner Theatre for the Neil Simon-Cy Coleman-Dorothy Field musical comedy classic Sweet Charity, giving San Gabriel Valley-Inland Empire audiences the best Candlelight show I’ve seen since the duo’s innovative, multiple-Scenie-winning Miss Saigon.
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posted in Musical, San Gabriel Valley, WOW!

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF HEDDA GABLER

posted on April 8th, 2013 at 5:50 PM by Steven Stanley

In a case of serendipitous cross-programming, two of Henrik Ibsen’s most iconic heroines are currently alive and well and onstage in San Diego, Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House at The Old Globe and Hedda Gabler in The Further Adventures Of Hedda Gabler at Diversionary Theatre.

No, you didn’t read that last title wrong. Though The Old Globe is featuring Ibsen’s Doll House in its original, albeit freshly translated, form, Diversionary is offering San Diegans Jeff Whitty’s surrealistic comedy The Further Adventures Of Hedda Gabler, and if Whitty’s play runs about twenty minutes longer than it ought to, in all other ways it makes for a heady, laugh-out-loud, thought-provoking evening of absurdist theater.
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posted in Comedy, San Diego County, WOW!

A DOLL’S HOUSE

posted on April 7th, 2013 at 3:29 PM by Steven Stanley


Eight and a half decades before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique set off what’s known as the Second-Wave Feminist Movement in the U.S., Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen created a heroine whose frustration at being “just a housewife” could well have inspired Friedan and her fellow women’s libbers.

Her name, as you may have guessed, was Nora, and if playwright Ibsen steadfastly asserted that he had not consciously “worked for the women’s rights movement,” A Doll’s House must certainly have inspired generation after generation of women in the years since its 1879 debut.

Ibsen’s masterpiece, incidentally the world’s most performed play, now arrives at San Diego’s The Old Globe Theatre in a World Premiere adaptation by translator Anne-Charlotte Hanes Harvey and director Kirsten Brandt that makes Nora, the Norwegians surrounding her, and Ibsen’s play itself seem considerably younger than their one hundred thirty-four years of age.
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posted in Drama, San Diego County, WOW!

BILLY & RAY

posted on April 7th, 2013 at 1:02 PM by Steven Stanley


Back in 1944, Hollywood’s “Hays Code” made it perfectly clear. If you wanted to make a movie, your film had better not show any of the following: “brutality and possible gruesomeness, technique of committing murder by whatever method, sympathy for criminals, …“ The list of no-nos went on and on.

So how, then, did Paramount Pictures manage in 1944 to make a movie out of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, a film in which insurance salesman Fred MacMurray and housewife Barbara Stanwyck plot and execute the murder of her husband—and make it look like an accident so as to cash in on hubby’s insurance policy’s “double indemnity” clause, one which guarantees double the payout in case of accidental death?

Mike Bencivenga’s World Premiere play Billy & Ray not only explains how co-screenwriters Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler found ingenious ways to hoodwink Hays Code czar Joseph Breen into letting them include all of the abovementioned taboos in their movie, under Garry Marshall’s pitch-perfect direction, it does so in the most entertaining of ways.
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posted in Burbank/Glendale, Comedy, WOW!

THE MOST HAPPY FELLA

posted on April 5th, 2013 at 1:13 PM by Steven Stanley


Advisory to all musical theater lovers in Los Angeles and beyond: Run, don’t walk, to USC’s Bing Theatre this week and next to catch Frank Loesser’s 1956 Broadway musical drama The Most Happy Fella in a production the likes of which you are unlikely to see any time soon (or even not that soon).

Now before you say, “But I don’t see student productions,” allow me to point out that this is USC’s prestigious School Of Dramatic Arts, many of whose grads have gone on to star on Broadway and beyond. Not only that, but The Most Happy Fella has been impeccably directed by Tony winner John Rubinstein and choreographed with athleticism and panache by two-time Ovation Award nominee Lili Fuller (herself a recent USC grad), and it features a full pit orchestra under the baton of award-winning musical director Alby Potts. Talk about credentials!
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posted in Los Angeles, Musical, WOW!

REMEMBRANCE

posted on March 31st, 2013 at 3:56 PM by Steven Stanley


His Protestant son was murdered by an IRA hit squad in the driveway of his father’s Belfast home. Her Catholic son was tortured, then shot to death by a vigilante Protestant street gang. Their late-in-life romance is at the heart of Graham Reid’s powerful 1987 drama Remembrance, not only one of the finest plays to be part of a Theatre 40 season, but quite possibly the best overall production I have seen at Beverly Hills’ premier 99-seat theater.
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posted in Drama, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

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