POSING STRAP PIRATES

posted on November 19th, 2011 at 12:31 AM by Steven Stanley

RECOMMENDED
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 Stanley

NOT 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 Stanley

NOT 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.

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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!

THE LANGUAGE ARCHIVE

posted on November 10th, 2011 at 6:40 PM by Steven Stanley


“It’s estimated that every two weeks, a language dies. I don’t know about you, but this statistic moves me far more than any statistic on how many animals die or people die in a given time, in a given place. Because when we say a language dies, we are talking about a whole world, a whole way of life.”
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posted in Comedy-Drama, Los Angeles, WOW!

BLUES FOR AN ALABAMA SKY

posted on November 10th, 2011 at 12:47 PM by Steven Stanley


That thrilling period in African American history known as the Harlem Renaissance has only recently been cut short by the onset of the Great Depression when first we meet the fascinating characters created by Pearl Cleage in Blues For An Alabama Sky, the Atlanta-based playwright’s meaty period drama which Sheldon Epps has brought to the Pasadena Playhouse in a richly exciting production under his own inspired direction.
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posted in Drama, Pasadena, WOW!

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