DOCTOR CERBERUS

posted on April 11th, 2010 at 5:22 PM by Steven Stanley


It’s the mid-1980s and Franklin Robertson is a “husky” 13-year-old geek with a passion for late night scary movies. If horror host Doctor Cerberus is on the air, you can be sure that young Franklin will be in front of his TV set, enraptured.  Tonight, the Transylvanian-accented Doctor (“with a Ph.D in Fear”) is screening “an American classic in the tradition of Citizen Kane and Gone With The Wind,” 1984’s Firestarter, starring Drew Barrymore and George C. Scott “just before he fired his agent.”
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posted in Comedy-Drama, Orange County, WOW!

THE BLUE ROOM

posted on April 11th, 2010 at 10:06 AM by Steven Stanley

RECOMMENDED
Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler’s 1900 play La Ronde so shocked the early 20th Century European theatrical world that it didn’t get its first public performance until 1920, and even then the play (and Schnitzler) were roundly attacked by critics and theatergoers alike.  Hardly surprising, considering  its plot—a sequence of not two or three, but ten sexual encounters.  No matter that the most the play showed was a bit of foreplay, the actual sex taking place entirely in the audience’s imagination during brief blackouts. It was too much for Europe, let alone America, to take.
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posted in Drama, Recommended, West Side/Beverly HIlls

ACTING: THE FIRST SIX LESSONS

posted on April 9th, 2010 at 9:59 AM by Steven Stanley


There’s an old black-and-white fan magazine snapshot of TV star Lloyd Bridges and his then teenage son Beau circa Sea Hunt. In the shot, Bridges Sr. and Bridges Jr. are reading a copy of Richard Boleslavsky’s 1933 guide to Acting: The First Six Lessons. Now, some fifty or so years later, 68-year-old Beau and his 23-year-old daughter Emily are staging Boleslavky’s classic text at Theatre West, and the result is an often enthralling and edifying hour and a half of theater, brought to life by a multi-award-winning actor at the peak of his gifts and a exciting young actress just beginning her journey.
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posted in Comedy-Drama, Hollywood/West Hollywood, WOW!

LASCIVIOUS SOMETHING

posted on April 8th, 2010 at 9:55 AM by Steven Stanley


Liza is August’s Lascivious Something in Sheila Callaghan’s provocative, adventurous, stimulating, surprising new play of the same name.  Better put, she was his lascivious something back in the 1960s when the two were fighting the good fight against the Vietnam War and all things rigid, boring, and traditional.
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posted in Drama, Hollywood/West Hollywood, WOW!

THE DRAWER BOY

posted on April 7th, 2010 at 9:51 AM by Steven Stanley


In the early 1970s, a group of Canadian actors traveled to rural South Ontario to interview local farmers and their families about their lives, and the result was a theatrical event called The Farm Show. Twenty-five years later, one of those actors, Michael Healey, wrote a play about what this experience had meant to him. His resulting 1999 dramedy The Drawer Boy has since become a regional theater favorite, and the nigh-on perfect production now playing at Beverly Hills’ Theatre 40 makes it clear just why The Drawer Boy has tickled so many fancies and touched so many hearts.
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posted in Comedy-Drama, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

HAIRSPRAY

posted on April 6th, 2010 at 11:38 PM by Steven Stanley


It’s been five years since Hairspray has been anywhere near L.A., so the arrival of the long-running National Tour at Costa Mesa’s Orange County Performing Arts Center is exciting news indeed.  This fabulous touring production features lead and supporting actors who create memorable characters and a team of young triple-threats who sing and dance Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman’s tuneful songs to deserved audience cheers.
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posted in Musical, National Tour, Orange County, WOW!

LESLI MARGHERITA

posted on April 5th, 2010 at 11:29 AM by Steven Stanley

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posted in Interview

THE LANGUAGE ARCHIVE

posted on April 4th, 2010 at 11:33 PM by Steven Stanley

RECOMMENDED
George is a linguist, and he’ll be the first to explain that this doesn’t mean that he speaks a whole bunch of languages fluently, but rather that his field is linguistics, the scientific study of language and languages as a whole.  George’s particular field of interest and expertise is the study of dying languages such as Elloway, whose two remaining speakers are facing their twilight years.  If George doesn’t probe their knowledge asap, it will be too late to for a recorded/written record of the language, and Elloway will be lost forever.
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posted in Drama, Orange County, Recommended

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