Terry Morgan – Stage Raw
Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, first produced in 1938, has always been a popular play, from frequent star-studded revivals (featuring the likes of Paul Newman, Michael Shannon, Spalding Gray, Margaret Hamilton and Henry Fonda) to ubiquitous community theater and high school productions. It’s been adapted into radio, film, ballet and musical versions (one of which included Frank Sinatra as the Stage Manager and gave us Married… With Children’s later theme song, “Love and Marriage”). But to the best of my knowledge, it hasn’t been combined with Euripedes’ 431 BC Medea until now. Tony Foster’s clever romp through the history of Western theater, Medea Comes to Our Town, gets a funny and well-acted world premiere by Lightning Rod Theater, but at 2.5 hours, it outstays its welcome a bit. Read more…
Travis Michael Holder – TicketHoldersLA
Welcome to the cunningly skewed Wonkaworld of Tony Foster, whose work traditionally morphs from the linear to the nonlinear and this one is hardly an exception. Starting with Thornton Wilder’s wildly popular Pulitzer Prize-winning 1938 classic play, he takes it somewhere no one else could ever have imagined: aboard a time-traveling chariot dropped in the middle of 1909 Grover’s Corners by none other than the title character in Euripides’ classic-classic first performed in the 5th-century BC. Read more…