THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

posted on April 3rd, 2009 at 6:31 PM by Steven Stanley


Transforming The Manchurian Candidate, one of the most lauded suspense films of the 1960s, into a live stage production is no easy feat.  John Frankenheimer’s 1962 tale of a Korean War vet brainwashed into becoming a political assassin was not only brilliant film making but tapped into the Red Scare hysteria that brought about the McCarthy hearings and a bunch of anti-communist films like The Red Menace and I Married A Communist. (Frankenheimer’s film was based on Richard Condon’s 1959 novel.) Though John Lahr’s 1994 stage adaptation ends up closer to Jonathan Demme’s 2004 remake than to the original, what’s important to playgoers is that Lahr’s suspense drama accomplishes the rare task of keeping a live theater audience on the edge of their seats from its first scene to its shattering conclusion.  Even more noteworthy than the success of the adaptation is the fact that August Viverito and T L Kolman’s The Production Company has managed to squeeze a widescreen movie onto a “matchbook”-sized set with truly impressive results.
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posted in Drama, North Hollywood, WOW!

GHOSTS

posted on April 2nd, 2009 at 6:34 PM by Steven Stanley


The world hasn’t changed all that much in the 127 years since Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts was first performed. As the recent election proved, there are still people who point the finger of condemnation at those who break what they call God’s rules and those with a more humanistic point of view.
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posted in Burbank/Glendale, Drama

THE MANOR

posted on April 1st, 2009 at 6:38 PM by Steven Stanley


Decades before Watergate began an endless and ongoing series of political scandals bearing the suffix -gate (Irangate, Katrinagate, Monicagate, Nannygate, and the recent Troopergate, to name just a few), the biggest and most shocking scandal of its time was the 1920s’ Teapot Dome scandal.  (Teapotgate? Domegate?  Teapotdomegate?)  The scandal began with oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny’s interest-free $100,000 loan to U.S. Secretary Of The Interior Albert B. Fall (the equivalent of over $1,000,000 in today’s currency!).  Not long after that transaction, Fall leased (without competitive bidding) 32,000 acres of oil-rich government-owned land to Doheny.
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posted in Drama, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

42nd STREET

posted on March 29th, 2009 at 11:05 PM by Steven Stanley


Fill in the blank: “Come and meet those dancing feet, on the avenue I’m taking you to, _____.” If you come up with any answer other than “42nd Street,” the time has come for you to acquaint yourself with “naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty” 42nd Street (the musical)—and there’s no better place to do so than at Cabrillo Musical Theatre and no better time than now.
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posted in Musical, Ventura County, WOW!

ITALIAN AMERICAN RECONCILIATION

posted on March 29th, 2009 at 8:13 PM by Steven Stanley


68 Cent Crew Theatre Company continues its epic 13 By Shanley festival with probably the most out-and-out romantic double bill of the fest, John Patrick Shanley’s brief but unforgettable teens-in-love romantic comedy The Red Coat, followed by the two-act romcom Italian American Reconciliation.  The 1989 two-acter could just as easily have been titled the less cumbersome Moonstruck, but Shanley had already used that title two years before in the Oscar-winning Cher-Nicolas Cage film which it resembles. Together, the playlet and the play, both of them directed with grace and panache by Ronnie Marmo and assistant director Katy Jacoby, make for the most quirkily romantic (or romantically quirky) evening of theater around.
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posted in Comedy, Hollywood/West Hollywood, WOW!

THE PRODIGAL FATHER

posted on March 27th, 2009 at 8:24 PM by Steven Stanley


In Larry Dean Harris’s world premiere dramedy The Prodigal Father, the Celebration Theatre offers its LGBT audience its best production since last Fall’s Porcelain, not coincidentally directed by Porcelain’s Michael Matthews, fresh off the much lauded The Jazz Age.
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posted in Drama, Hollywood/West Hollywood, WOW!

MISALLIANCE

posted on March 26th, 2009 at 8:28 PM by Steven Stanley


George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance comes sparklingly alive in Rosalind Productions’ smashing revival of his 1910 comedy.  

Unlike the recently reviewed “all-talk, no-action” Candida, Misalliance has enough unexpected plot twists to perk up even the most easily bored theatergoer and enough couplings and un-couplings to make this a precursor of the contemporary “romantic comedy.”  It’s not every Shaw play that has eight wedding proposals, a handsome young gun-toting anarchist hiding in a portable Turkish bath, and an airplane crash-landing into the garden of an English country mansion.
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posted in Comedy, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

EVERYBODY SAY “CHEESE!”

posted on March 25th, 2009 at 8:34 PM by Steven Stanley


In his funny and touching World Premiere comedy Everybody Say “Cheese!”, Garry Marshall takes an affectionate look back at the mid-1960s, a time of discovery for women and confusion for men, a time when the “fairer sex” discovered as if overnight that no, a woman’s place wasn’t always in the home. Feminists like Betty Friedan were spreading the message that women could be anything they wanted to be, and housewives like Harriet Keenan were listening.
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posted in Burbank/Glendale, Comedy, WOW!

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