Posts Tagged ‘Los Angeles Theater Review’
DOCTOR ANONYMOUS
Tuesday, April 1st, 2014NOT RECOMMENDED
The gay liberation movement may have started in earnest with the 1969 Stonewall riots, but homosexuality was still deemed a “curable” mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association in 1972 when a masked Dr. John E. Fryer addressed the annual APA conference as “Dr. H. Anonymous,” beginning his speech with the simple words “I am a homosexual. I am a psychiatrist.”
A year later homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Inspired by Fryer’s speech, psychiatrist/playwright Guy Fredrick Glass has written Doctor Anonymous, now getting its World Premiere at the Zephyr Theatre, and though several of its actors rise above the material, neither their performances nor a topnotch production design can mask Doctor Anonymous’s many serious flaws.
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FLOYD COLLINS
Monday, March 31st, 2014
In the early days of 1925, decades before Baby Jessica and O.J. and Monica Lewinsky and Nancy & Tonya and Watergate and Laci Peterson and Patty Hearst and Jon Benet and Octomom and Iran Contra and countless other 20th Century media circuses, a young Kentucky cave explorer named Floyd Collins became trapped in a narrow crawlway over fifty feet underground. Efforts to rescue him ignited a media frenzy, aided and abetted by the recent advent of broadcast radio that helped spread the news across the country.
Inspired by the two-week-long efforts to save Collins from a subterranean grave (and the carnival atmosphere that surrounded the rescue mission), Adam Guettel and Tina Landau wrote the 1996 Lucille Lortel/Obie Award-winning Floyd Collins, one of the most powerful musicals of the past two decades and one which La Mirada Theatre For The Performing Arts has now given an intimate “ONSTAGE” production that proves a brilliant follow-up to last year’s smash Spring Awakening.
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A STEADY RAIN
Friday, March 28th, 2014
Two superb actors stand in for the proverbial “cast of thousands” to make for as thrillingly visual a ninety minutes of edge-of-your-seat theater as you’d get in any big-screen blockbuster, as the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble presents the Los Angeles Premiere of Keith Huff’s A Steady Rain under Jeff Perry’s electric direction.
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A SONG AT TWILIGHT
Thursday, March 27th, 2014
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
21st Century society may have progressed considerably since the mid-1960s when Noël Coward wrote and starred in A Song At Twilight, but a cursory glance at today’s Hollywood makes it clear that even a half-century-old play can express contemporary truths, particularly when revived as splendidly as is the case this month and next at the Pasadena Playhouse.
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CRAZY FOR YOU
Monday, March 24th, 2014
The songs are all Gershwin, the dancing is virtually non-stop, and the entertainment value is sky-high in the Tony-winning Best Musical of 1992 Crazy For You, which Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre is now reviving to justified audience cheers.
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A MAN OF NO IMPORTANCE
Monday, March 24th, 2014
The lives of couple dozen “unimportant” Dubliners are bestowed the significance they deserve in Torrance Theatre Company’s beautifully performed intimate-stage production of Terrence McNally, Lynn Aherns, and Stephen Flaherty’s 2002 off-Broadway musical A Man Of No Importance.
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LEND ME A TENOR
Saturday, March 22nd, 2014
Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me A Tenor may not be the funniest play ever written, but if it isn’t, it certainly comes darned close, as Actors Co-op’s pitch-perfect revival makes abundantly, hilariously clear.
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THE WHIPPING MAN
Saturday, March 22nd, 2014
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House, at long last ending what is still the deadliest war in United States history. Five days later, President Abraham Lincoln was dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullet. And during this fateful week in our country’s history, Jews in both North and South observed Pesach, the festival of Passover, celebrating the freeing of the Israelites from centuries of slavery in Egypt.
Inspired by this bit of historical coincidence, and armed with the knowledge that there were indeed Jewish slaveholders (and Jewish slaves) in the pre-Civil War Deep South, playwright Matthew Lopez sat down to write The Whipping Man, a gripping, eye-opening look at three Jews—two black, one white—in the days just following Appomattox, now getting its Los Angeles Premiere at the Pico Playhouse.
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