ANNE OF GREEN GABLES
posted on November 20th, 2011 at 10:26 PM by Steven StanleyRECOMMENDED
The thousands of angry Orange Countians who picketed or emailed the Chance Theater in outraged protest over Jerry Springer: The Opera, the company’s recently Ovation Awarded Best Intimate Theatre Musical, will have to look elsewhere this holiday season for a show to get their knickers in a twist over, or at least not on the nights or afternoons that Anne Of Green Gables is being performed.
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posted in Musical, Orange County, Recommended
AS IS
posted on November 19th, 2011 at 3:22 PM by Steven Stanley
The year was 1985 and New York City’s gay male population was gripped by a fear akin to that which the citizens of London must have felt in 1665 at the outbreak of the Great Plague. Only four years had passed since a New York Native news article headlined “Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded” had reassured its readers not to worry about grapevine tales of a so-called “gay cancer.” By 1985, that disease, or more accurately put, that syndrome had its very own acronym, though it was not until that very year that President Ronald Reagan finally said the word AIDS in public. There were 5636 known AIDS-related deaths in the United States in 1985.
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posted in Drama, Hollywood/West Hollywood, WOW!
POSING STRAP PIRATES
posted on November 19th, 2011 at 12:31 AM by Steven StanleyRECOMMENDED
Imagine a Harlequin romance about a nubile young thing kidnapped by a band of dastardly pirates and desired by their villainous captain, who then catches the eye of a studly cabin boy, thereby inspiring a triangle of love and lust. Make all three characters strappingly virile males whose britches hide not panties, boxers, or jockey shorts but rather that flimsy bit of male lingerie known as the “posing strap” and give the whole affair a campy gay sensibility. Do all this and you come up with Posing Strap Pirates, an hour or so of late night weekend (or Thursday night prime time) entertainment now playing at North Hollywood’s Eclectic Theatre.
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posted in Comedy, North Hollywood, Recommended
DAVID DEAN BOTTRELL MAKES LOVE: A ONE-MAN SHOW
posted on November 17th, 2011 at 11:24 PM by Steven Stanley
As a boy growing up in a state whose motto is “If you can catch it, you can fuck it,” young David Dean Bottrell probably never dreamed that he would one day become a successful actor, comedian and screenwriter, pen a monthly column for MetroSource Magazine and write for the Huffington Post, win seventeen awards for his short film Available Men, be one of the stars of the L.A. stage smash Streep Tease, or direct the current Colony Theatre hit Travels With My Aunt. And even if he had dreamed this impossible dream, he probably never would have imagined that just talking about his life on a nearly bare stage would turn into one of Summer 2011’s hottest tickets.
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posted in Comedy, Los Angeles, Solo Performance, WOW!
JERKER
posted on November 14th, 2011 at 12:16 PM by Steven StanleyNOT RECOMMENDED
Robert Chesley’s 1986 two-character drama Jerker has been called “one of the most important pieces of gay theater ever created,” though you’d be hard-pressed to determine why this is so based only on the 25th Anniversary production now on stage at Space 916 in West Hollywood.
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posted in Drama, Hollywood/West Hollywood, Not Recommended
TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT
posted on November 14th, 2011 at 12:01 PM by Steven Stanley
Imagine for a moment that Patrick Dennis had met his Auntie Mame when he was well into middle age rather than as a child. Imagine too that this meeting had occurred in the swinging ‘60s instead of the Roaring ‘20s, and that aunt and nephew had been British and not American. Imagine all this and what you’d come up with would be Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt, the famed author’s 1969 novel which playwright Giles Havergal adapted for the stage in 1989. It is this oh-so-clever stage adaptation that Burbank’s Colony Theatre now brings to vivid, imaginative life under the truly inspired direction of David Dean Bottrell.
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posted in Burbank/Glendale, Comedy, WOW!
BABY DOLL
posted on November 13th, 2011 at 4:27 PM by Steven StanleyNOT RECOMMENDED
Joel Daavid’s production of Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll starts off strikingly as elderly Aunt Rose Comfort enters her nephew’s ramshackle Mississippi cotton gin and frees the play’s ensemble/Greek chorus one by one from the clothesline where they have been hanging for the last twenty minutes as the audience has been entering the Lillian Theatre and taking their seats.
posted in Drama, Hollywood/West Hollywood, Not Recommended
THE GOD OF ISAAC
posted on November 11th, 2011 at 2:42 PM by Steven Stanley
The neo-Nazi National Socialist Party Of America’s planned march through the heavily Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois, sends Isaac Adams on a quest to discover what it means to be a Jew in James Sherman’s hilariously original comedy The God Of Isaac, now playing at West Los Angeles’s Pico Playhouse.
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posted in Comedy, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!
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