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Archive for June 2014

THE CURSE OF OEDIPUS at the Antaeus Company

oedMyron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter

If you feel that the Oedipus myth starts with the riddle and ends with the cathartic revelation, that’s just the beginning: here Oedipus (Ramon de Ocampo) blinds himself with Jocasta’s (Rhonda Aldrich) earrings barely an hour into a nearly three-hour evening. Read more…

Terry Morgan  -  Stage Raw

One of the great things about the Antaeus Company is that its deep talent pool and expertise in classical theater allow the group to tackle ambitious projects. The new production of Kenneth Cavander’s The Curse of Oedipus is one such project, a play that uses Sophocles’ famed trilogy and other historical sources to reform the story anew. Casey Stangl’s vibrant staging of the 22-person ensemble results in a brilliant, must-see show.

Neal Weaver  – Arts In LA

The dark and bloody legend of King Oedipus inspired the ancient Greek dramatists to create many plays recounting his fate. In Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus the King, we learn how he fled his home city, Corinth, to escape a terrible prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother. But instead of evading his fate, he runs headlong into it, unwittingly fulfilling the prophecy. Read more…

the_curse_of_oedipus_a_pNow running through  August 10.

ABBAMEMNON at the Falcon Theatre

Photo by Chelsea Stton

Photo by Chelsea Sutton

David C. Nichols – LA Times

Aeschylus meets Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid in “ABBAMEMNON,” the latest deconstruction from Troubadour Theater Company. The classic Greek playwright, Swedish pop group and incomparable troupe may never be quite the same again, and neither will audiences. Read more…

Steven Leigh Morris  – LA Weekly

There are no sly topical winks in Kenneth Cavander’s problematic adaptation of the Oedipus trilogy. Cavander’s new play, The Curse of Oedipus, which just opened at Antaeus Company, is pure classical gas.

Nor are there any modern-day army fatigues or national insignias worn on shoulders in Casey Stangl’s beautiful, skillful staging — performed confidently and clearly —, accompanied throughout by Geno Monteiro’s drumming on an array of percussive instruments. Read more…

Now running through July 13.

LAND LINE at the Atwater Village Theatre

 

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Photo by Kevin Riggin

Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw

Land Line, a world premiere play by Stephen Dierkes, is about a dying man and his efforts to marshal his courage and his sanity through a relationship with his life-long friend. Read more…

Now running through July 21.

THE HUMAN SPIRIT at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble

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Terry Morgan  -  Talkin’ Broadway

Theatre has many functions, and sometimes its job is to remind or teach people about history. The trick, of course, is to do it in such a way that the piece still works as theatre, so it isn’t essentially a PowerPoint presentation with actors instead of graphics. Playwright has an interesting and worthy story to tell in her apartheid drama The Human Spirit, but, unfortunately, her well-intentioned play doesn’t work as well as it might. Read more…

Dany Margolies  -  Arts In LA

Carole Eglash-Kosoff’s world premiere embodies the best and worst of storytelling. A fascinating, inspiring, informative slice of history is told with too-often ungainly craft, by the playwright and occasionally by director Donald Squires. Ultimately, though, because the audience cares for the characters, the result is uplifting. Read more…

 

Now running through June 29.

PENELOPE at the Rogue Machine Theatre

Photo by John Flynn

Photo by John Flynn

Neal Weaver  – Arts In LA

This grimly hilarious dark comedy by Irish playwright Enda Walsh (The New Electric Ballroom, The Walworth Farce) puts a snarky, post-modern spin on the Greek myth of Penelope, faithful wife of Odysseus. Odysseus sailed away to fight in the Trojan War and hasn’t been heard from since. Read more…

Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter

If Nietzsche could announce the death of God in the late 19th century, it was certainly old news by the time of Sartre and Beckett. Similarly, the power of the absurdity of the modern condition has withered under the persistent shadow of theatrical giants. Our contemporary quandary may be not so much the struggle over a meaningless existence but what to do and where to go after raging about the dying of the light has itself lost its heroic dimension. Read more…

Now running through August 10.

 

The Wake – a Hollywood Fringe production at Theatre Asylum

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Pauline Adamek  – ArtsBeatLA

At the beginning of his one-person play The Wake, Ben Moroski — posing as ‘Pete Harrisburg’ — rushes in, introduces himself with a self-deprecating “I’m the asshole doing this play,” and then hands audience members flyers for this show. Moroski thus places an important distance between him — the writer and performer — and the character’s tale that unfolds. Read more…

Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw

In Ben Moroski’s mesmerizing solo show, it’s not so much the story he spins as the manner in which he spins it that grips your attention. Moroski’s mercurial narrator Peter is a novice actor, whose workshop performance under the tutelage of a therapeutic instructor recounts an ego-shattering breakup with a woman he adored and depended on. Read more…

THE COUNTRY HOUSE at the Geffen Playhouse

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Photo by Michael Lamont

Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter

Given the omnipresent influence of Anton Chekhov on the theater of the past century, it seems surprisingly irresistible for playwrights to frankly filch his templates and spin their own variations. After Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, and mere weeks before the opening of Stupid Fucking Bird! at the Boston Court, Pulitzer Prize winning Donald Margulies (Dinner with Friends, Collected Stories, Sight Unseen) tries his hand at rotoscoping characters and situations, cutting and pasting from Uncle Vanya and The Seagull with an offhanded dexterity………Read more…

 

STONEFACE at the Pasadena Playhouse

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Photo by Jim Cox

Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter

If one cares about the movies, and about comedy (and what can life be without them?), the soul of Buster Keaton (played here by French Stewart) needs must be spliced into one’s DNA. One cannot help but feel proprietary about one’s personal relationship to the bottomlessly expressive, impassive Keaton, so one can readily anticipate trepidation at the temerity of representing his art and life onstage.  Read more…

David C. Nichols

More than one legend gets their due in “Stoneface,” which is only as it should be. In a felicitous transfer from the Sacred Fools Theater Company, Vanessa Claire Stewart’s surreal smash about the rise and fall and rise of Buster Keaton moves to the Pasadena Playhouse — and scores an absorbing coup. Read more…   stn

Jonas Schwartz -  TheaterMania

It takes chutzpah to play actual footage of the genius Buster Keaton for audiences entering thePasadena Playhouse before actors take the stage to perform those pratfalls and stunts. But this technique pays off when you have the stupendous, heartbreaking, and hysterical actor French Stewart starring as “the great stone face” himself.  Read more…

Pauline Adamek  – ArtsBeatLA

Stoneface is a truly brilliant play about Buster Keaton, renowned star of the silent movie screen, and this production is not to be missed! Vanessa Claire Stewart’s marvelous comedy/drama has been handsomely adapted for the spacious Pasadena Playhouse stage, and newly remounted with almost its entire original cast as well as the addition of several gorgeous new sets. Read more…

Neal Weaver  – Stage Raw

This homage to silent comedian Buster Keaton began as a birthday present from actress-playwright Vanessa Claire Stewart to her husband French Stewart, who is a long-time Keaton fan and she thought, the perfect actor to play him. They took the script to director Jaime Robledo over at Sacred Fools Theatre Company, which mounted a modest 99-seat theatre production, with French Stewart as its star. Read more…

Photo by Jim Cox

Photo by Jim Cox

 

Now running through June 29.

THE LAST CONFESSION at the Ahmanson Theatre

Photo by Craig Schwartz

Photo by Craig Schwartz

Dany Margolies  -  Arts In LA

Most Westerners of a certain age, certainly most Catholics, recall the startling day in 1978 when we learned that Pope John Paul I had died 33 days after the puff of white smoke announced his election to the papacy. Very few people, if anyone, knew the exact cause of death. Whether the Curia, the Vatican’s governmental cabinet, considered it unseemly to probe or the answers didn’t favor a perfectly innocent explanation, any investigations into his death seemed likewise to die swiftly. Read more…

Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter

Organized around the star wattage of David Suchet, the celebrated and prolific British theater actor best known worldwide for his 74 television films as Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poiret, The Last Confession makes for a rather wan touring vehicle for his talents. Read more…

Bob Verini -   Stage Raw

The current tenant at the Ahmanson, Roger Craig’s The Last Confession, made me think about Charlton Heston and Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

The Heston musings may be the more surprising. But however you may feel about his stature as an actor, or his latter-year turn to the right and NRA leadership, Heston and the Ahmanson were prominently associated in the public’s mind in the 1970s and 1980s, thanks to his rarely letting a year go by without appearing there in a play of substance. Read more…

Terry Morgan  -  Talkin’ Broadway

Roger Crane’s The Last Confession has a doozy of an opening statement: “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. I have killed the emissary of God.” The speaker refers to Pope John Paul I, who died under mysterious circumstances in 1978. It sounds compelling in theory—somebody murdered a pope in recent history? Read more…

Now running through July 6.

FLOWER DUET at the NoHo Senior Arts Colony

Photo by Ed Krieger

Photo by Ed Krieger

David C. Nichols – LA Times

The title of “Flower Duet,” in its West Coast premiere at the Road Theatre on Magnolia, refers to Leo Delibes’ celebrated “Lakmé” air for soprano and mezzo.

It is being rehearsed by two Vermont-based frenemies, for a mutual friends’ wedding, though the musical component is at best a device. What playwright Maura Campbell is really writing about is the transient nature of marital fidelity and friendship. Read more…

Neal Weaver  – Stage Raw

Playwright Maura Campbell did use the word flower in the title of her 2010 play, here in its West Coast premiere at the Road Theatre Company, but one wonders if she’d really approve of the fanatical insistence of director  and his designers in pursuing the flower imagery: There are flowers everywhere. Read more…

Now running through July 26.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST at the Let Live Theatre

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Photo By Teena Pugliese

 

Les Spindle –  Frontiers L.A.

A new theatre company called Queer Classics lives up to its name with its unabashedly gay adaptation of the classic Oscar Wilde farce The Importance of Being Earnest, premiering at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. As with most of Wilde’s plays, there is something intrinsically queer about the sensibility of the original 1895 script, even though the characters were heterosexual. Read more…

THE BROTHERS SIZE at the Fountain Theatre and DROP DEAD at NoHo Arts Center

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Steven Leigh Morris  – LA Weekly

Tarell Alvin McCraney’s tender, poetical drama The Brothers Size (Fountain Theatre) and Billy Van Zandt & Jane Milmore’s meta-theatrical farce Drop Dead! (presented by Theatre 68, at North Hollywood’s NoHo Arts Center) share one salient commonality: Each production has moments when the actors recite stage directions about their own characters. Tarell Alvin McCraney’s tender, poetical drama The Brothers Size (Fountain Theatre) and Billy Van Zandt & Jane Milmore’s meta-theatrical farce Drop Dead! (presented by Theatre 68, at North Hollywood’s NoHo Arts Center) share one salient commonality: Each production has moments when the actors recite stage directions about their own characters. Read more…

Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter

Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney boasts a rare talent: an utterly distinctive voice. He sounds like no one else, his cadences hearty and beautiful. I am in love with his voice, and in all likelihood you will feel the same way. For better, and sometimes less so, so be he. Read more…

Margaret Gray – LA Times

The Fountain Theatre follows up its award-winning 2012 production of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “In the Red and Brown Water” with a vibrant incarnation of “The Brothers Size,” the second installment in McCraney’s acclaimed trilogy.      Read more…

 

Now running through July 27.