Posts Tagged ‘Los Angeles Theater Review’

ROUNDING THIRD


Playwright Richard Dresser pits Little League Coach Don (“Winning is everything”) against Assistant Coach Michael (“It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game”) in his hilarious two-hander Rounding Third, now being given a crowd-pleasing intimate-stage production at San Pedro’s Little Fish Theatre.
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OPEN HOUSE


You’d think that a real estate agent’s attempts to close a deal with a house-for-sale’s sole prospective buyer would be slight stuff for a ninety-minute two-character play. Not so, if the play in question is Shem Bitterman’s Open House and the dueling protagonists brought to life by L.A. stage stars Robert Cicchini and Eve Gordon.
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NIGHT HAWKS


A pair of aging partners in murder-for-pay meet in a rundown diner for breakfast (and playwrights-only-know what else) in Dennis A. Pratt & Robert Vincent O’Neil’s crackerjack comedy-mystery-suspense thriller Night Hawks, now getting a much deserved extension at North Hollywood’s Crown City Theatre.
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A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM


Take a superb cast and an inspired pair of directors and have them put on one of William Shakespeare’s most audience-friendly plays in the woodsy Topanga hills on a dreamy midsummer Thursday night … and you’ve got Theatricum Botanicum’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
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BRENDAN


A young Irish immigrant adjusts to life in contemporary New York City in Ronan Noone’s Brendan, one of the best—and most entertaining and emotionally resonant—plays I’ve seen this past year, now getting an absolutely superb intimate West Coast Premiere at Theatre Banshee.
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TANGLIN’ HEARTS


Ten singin’, dancin’ Texans get their hearts all tangled up romantically in Tanglin’ Hearts, a tuneful new musical “loosely based” on Shakespeare’s As You Like It, now getting a promising World Premiere production at Beverly Hills’ Theatre 40.
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KIMBERLY AKIMBO


Kimberly Levaco is not your average, everyday teenager. After all, how many teens do you know who are saddled with an alcoholic dad, a hypochondriac mom, and a con artist of an aunt? And how many of them suffer from all of the above, plus a body that’s aging at supersonic speed? Sixteen-year-old Kimberly lives her life in the body of someone more than four times her age, someone with a life expectancy of sixteen, give or take a year or so. How many teens do you know who are saddled with that?

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire makes Kimberly the heroine of his funny, touching 2000 dramedy Kimberly Akimbo, the latest offering from The Theatricians, a company of actors whose youth turns out to be the only major strike going against an otherwise excellent production.
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THE ISLAND

RECOMMENDED
It’s one thing (and an admirable one at that) for Skypilot Theatre to have as its slogan “New Plays, Written, Developed, and Performed In Los Angeles.” It’s something even more noteworthy for the company to undertake that most difficult genre of all, the musical. After all, it’s hardly uncommon for a new musical to be “in development” for half a dozen years or more.

I don’t know where The Island is on its trajectory from inspiration to final form. There are certainly aspects of this World Premiere’s book and songs that could, as they say, “use some work.” Notwithstanding, I quite enjoyed this “musical re-imagining of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, flaws and all.
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