OKLAHOMO!

posted on November 27th, 2009 at 12:02 PM by Steven Stanley

RECOMMENDED
No one in Los Angeles makes theater quite like Justin Tanner.  His one-act comedies are the theatrical equivalent of a midnight cult movie, blending the zany, the edgy, the gay, and occasionally the downright bizarre with a charm very much their own. The best of Justin Tanner’s plays, like last year’s marvelously manic Voice Lessons (which won Laurie Metcalf StageSceneLA’s award for Comedic Performance Of The Year) or Teen Girl, Tanner’s salute to the John Hughes oeuvre, are a sure bet to garner critical raves and audience cheers.  Even minor Tanner, like the current revival of 2004’s Oklahomo! (not a spelling error), is guaranteed fun.
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posted in Comedy, Hollywood/West Hollywood, Recommended

ARIAS WITH A TWIST

posted on November 25th, 2009 at 12:06 PM by Steven Stanley


The proscenium of the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater has been reduced to about one-sixth its normal size, your second clue that you’re in for something completely different tonight.  (The first clue was the young, trendy, a tad pansexual audience milling around the theater’s lobby, bar, and art gallery pre-performance.) Then, as music from another time, another place fills the auditorium, one reduced-size curtain rises only to reveal another, which opens to reveal yet another and another and another … until finally, you see before you a lifelike tuxedoed marionette coaxing out notes on the trumpet, a sensual, dreamlike tune with a 1940s Latin sound. Stars spin around the scrim which separates the audience from the mini-trumpeteer, colored lights flashing and galaxies exploding.  We are told that we’re about to meet “an astrologer, a time-traveler, a polymorph.” 
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posted in Los Angeles, Performance Art, WOW!

THE VILLAGE VARIETY PACK

posted on November 24th, 2009 at 12:16 PM by Steven Stanley

RECOMMENDED
In the 1950s and 60s, TV variety shows like The Hollywood Palace and The Ed Sullivan Show brought pop singers, standup comedians, comedy sketch artists, and other assorted talents into living rooms across the country. Co-hosts Dennis Hensley and Michael Anthony have updated this format to the 21st Century and given it a decidedly gay twist in their popular twice-a-month variety show, The Village Variety Pack, delighting audiences of every sexual persuasion on alternate Mondays at The Davidson/Valentini Blackbox Theatre @ The Village.
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posted in Cabaret/Concert/Variety, Hollywood/West Hollywood, Recommended

EQUIVOCATION

posted on November 24th, 2009 at 12:13 PM by Steven Stanley


Imagine if you will that on or about the one-year anniversary of 9/11, an emissary from the President Of The United States visited the most popular contemporary American filmmaker (insert whatever name you wish here) with an order—that a movie be made about the events leading up to the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, a movie which would place the blame on Saddam Hussein and his “weapons of mass destruction.”   The President, continues his envoy, has himself written a draft of the screenplay, and our filmmaker needs only spice it up with some dialog—and with witches thrown in for good measure.   (Oh, and the President can’t be in the flick.)  The filmmaker knows that if he makes the movie the President is demanding, he will be telling a deliberate lie, as well as demonizing “enemies” who just may be blameless. On the other hand, to refuse the President’s demands will mean being accused of treason, and punished accordingly. 
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posted in Drama, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

NOISES OFF

posted on November 22nd, 2009 at 12:24 PM by Steven Stanley


As noted last week, A Noise Within’s current production of Shakespeare’s Richard III proves once again that nobody does the Bard better than  “California’s Home For The Classics.” A Noise Within now proves itself equally adept at contemporary British farce in their concurrently running revival of Michael Frayn’s 1982’s Noises Off, the latest (and most recent) of the modern classics ANW intersperses amongst its productions of Shakespeare, Shaw, and The Greeks.
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posted in Burbank/Glendale, Comedy, WOW!

DAVID BURNHAM CABARET

posted on November 22nd, 2009 at 12:19 PM by Steven Stanley


From Fontana farm boy to CLO favorite to Broadway star.  That’s the journey David Burnham has been on since his growing-up years spent halfway between San Bernardino and Rancho Cucamonga, and quite a journey it has been.  A little less than six years ago, Burnham was starring down in Long Beach in Musical Theatre West’s production of Hot Mikado, following appearances in MTW’s La Cage Aux Folles and Children Of Eden.  He then strutted his dramatic stuff in The Woman In Black at NoHo’s The Road Theatre, one of a long list of pre-Broadway credits. The Great White Way came calling in 2005 when Burnham appeared in the original cast of the multiple-Tony-winning The Light In The Piazza, and when the National Tour played the Ahmanson with Burnham as Fabrizio, it was a fanfare-worthy homecoming for the local boy turned Broadway star.  Then came Burnham’s year as Fiyero in the Broadway production of Wicked, all of the above adding up to more than enough reason for Fontana’s favorite son to headline his very own cabaret show at L.A.’s Upright Cabaret.
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posted in Cabaret/Concert/Variety, Los Angeles, WOW!

LITTLE WOMEN THE BROADWAY MUSICAL

posted on November 21st, 2009 at 1:31 PM by Steven Stanley


Little Women The Broadway Musical has been a favorite of mine since I first heard its tuneful score (music by Jason Howland and lyrics by Mindi Dickstein) and later saw a performance of the National Tour.  Book writer Allan Knee somehow managed to compact Alcott’s 400-plus-word novel into a two-and-a-half hour musical which retains the book’s most memorable moments (Jo’s stealing a Christmas tree from the neighboring Laurence family’s property, jealous Amy burning Jo’s manuscript, Jo’s shame at finding a scorch mark on her gown the night of the big party, etc.) while adding songs which run the gamut from Jo’s feisty “Better” to the bouncy “I’d Be Delighted,” to the rousing Act 1 closer “Astonishing.”    
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posted in Musical, Orange County, WOW!

HAMLET, SHUT UP

posted on November 20th, 2009 at 1:34 PM by Steven Stanley


For everyone who’s ever said, “Wouldn’t it be great if Shakespeare didn’t have all that Elizabethan English and iambic pentameter?”, Sacred Fools has concocted the perfect solution.  Hamlet Shut Up is the world famous action/ghost/lust/revenge/murder-packed tale of the Prince Of Denmark unsullied by the spoken word—and what a brilliantly conceived and executed concoction it is!
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posted in Comedy, Los Angeles, WOW!

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