PLAY DATES
posted on January 29th, 2011 at 9:11 PM by Steven Stanley
The war between the sexes has never been funnier than it is in Play Dates, Sam Wolfson’s hilarious new comedy now playing at Theatre Asylum under the sparkling direction of Jennifer Chambers.
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posted in Comedy, Hollywood/West Hollywood, WOW!
MLLE. GOD
posted on January 28th, 2011 at 9:06 PM by Steven Stanley
Though Frank Wedekind’s name may not be as well-known as Bertolt Brecht’s, the German playwright is making a comeback nearly a hundred years after his death, first with the Broadway smash Spring Awakening and now with Nicholas Kazan’s Mlle. God, a contemporary stage adaptation of Wedekind’s Lulu Plays, perhaps best known as the basis for silent film star Louise Brooks’ most famous flick, Pandora’s Box.
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posted in Comedy-Drama, Los Angeles, WOW!
LOVING REPEATING
posted on January 27th, 2011 at 11:32 AM by Steven Stanley
If you’d asked me a few days ago what I knew about Gertrude Stein, my answer would have been “Not that much,” aside from her oft-quoted “A rose is a rose is a rose,” her relationship with longtime lesbian companion Alice B. Toklas, and some sense that she’d lived a good deal of her life in Europe. Though there are doubtless many theatergoers my age considerably better informed than I, I’d venture to guess an even greater number, particularly those under forty, know not even that much. For this reason alone, “A Musical Of Gertrude Stein” would seem to have at least one strike against it from the get-go. Add to that the fact that the musical in question has little or no storyline, that its relatively few spoken words come from a lecture delivered by Stein at the University of Chicago in 1934, and that the lyrics of this mostly sung-through musical are taken from Stein’s idiosyncratic poems (“Each one of them of the three of them meant something by being such a one”) and you have rather a hard-sell of a show—particularly if your audience of subscribers is accustomed to more traditional, linear fare.
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posted in Long Beach/San Pedro, Musical, WOW!
HAIR
posted on January 25th, 2011 at 8:42 PM by Steven Stanley
It was mid-1968. LBJ was still President, with Richard Nixon’s election and seven more years of war in Vietnam yet to come. Already, though, there were “tribes” of young people in their teens and twenties whose dissatisfaction with an America riddled with racism, poverty, sexism, sexual repression, and political corruption led them to create the hippie movement of the 60s. More than anything else, though, these “new American patriots,” as they saw themselves, were in revolt against a war they believed to be unjust, unnecessary, and un-American.
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posted in Musical, National Tour, Orange County, WOW!
JANE AUSTEN’S EMMA
posted on January 23rd, 2011 at 7:12 PM by Steven Stanley
183 years before Hate At First Sight turned into Happily Ever After for Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in You’ve Got Mail, a bickering Emma Woodhouse and George Knightley finally realized they were Made For Each Other in Jane Austen’s Emma. As fans of the 1996 movie adaptation (starring a very British Gwyneth Paltrow) or the more recent Pride And Prejudice (with Keira Knightley—no relation to George—as Emma’s literary cousin Elizabeth Bennet) are well aware, contemporary romantic comedies owe more than a minor debt of gratitude to Miss Austen.
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posted in Musical, San Diego County, WOW!
THE BUSY WORLD IS HUSHED
posted on January 22nd, 2011 at 6:53 PM by Steven Stanley
As an antidote to the strident, demonizing voices of the “Christian” Right, Keith Bunin’s The Busy World Is Hushed comes as manna from playwriting heaven. Bunin’s 2006 off-Broadway hit not only spotlights a gay-affirming branch of Christianity, it also features a lead character who is both a refreshingly open-minded member of the clergy and a mother so accepting of her son’s sexual orientation that she actively encourages his quest for Mr. Right.
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posted in Drama, Orange County, WOW!
ROOM SERVICE
posted on January 21st, 2011 at 9:16 PM by Steven Stanley
When a baseball pitcher launches the ball with a reverse spin, sending it curving toward the side of the plate from which it was thrown, it’s called a screwball. (Trust me. I looked it up.) Not surprisingly, the comedy genre that bears its name follows its namesake’s example by taking surprising turns and behaving in entirely unexpected ways. As a result, a screwball comedy guarantees more laughs per minute than just about any other theater or film genre, precisely what 1930s audiences needed in the Depression years which followed the Stock Market Crash.
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posted in Comedy, Hollywood/West Hollywood, WOW!
A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
posted on January 20th, 2011 at 8:47 PM by Steven StanleyRECOMMENDED
In the time-honored tradition of “The Show Must Go On,” the gifted students of USC’s justifiably-lauded Musical Theatre Repertory have overcome a major setback (being assigned an unfriendly-to-musicals off-campus venue for their current production) in this entirely student produced, directed, choreographed, and performed revival of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s A Little Night Music.
posted in Los Angeles, Musical, Recommended
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