Stage Raw

POSSUM CARCASS at Theatre of Note

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Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly As in Aaron Posner’s beguiling Stupid Fucking Bird, which played at Boston Court earlier this year, David Bucci’s Possum Carcass riffs on The Seagull, transporting Chekhov’s story into the 21st century while holding on to the fundamentals of character, theme and plot. While nowhere near as brilliant or textured as Posner’s play, Bucci’s parody is … Read more

THE MAGNIFICENT DUNBAR HOTEL at the Los Angeles Theatre Center

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Neal Weaver  – Stage Raw Levy Lee Simon’s play celebrates the life and times of The Dunbar Hotel, on Los Angeles’s Central Avenue. As a luxury hotel serving the African-American community at a time when poverty and discrimination made most black-oriented hotels shabby and lacking in even basic amenities, it soon became a revered institution … Read more

The Artist-With-Kids Conundrum — 150 Years Ago

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Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw Most people familiar with theater history have heard of Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. Fewer recognize the name Gabrielle Réjane, a French actress and international megastar whose career spanned 1874 to 1920, during which time she toured Britain, Russia, North and South America, as well as her native France.  Ilana Turner’s … Read more

HERSHEY FELDER AS IRVING BERLIN at the Geffen Playhouse

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Bob Verini  –   Stage Raw Jerome Kern, no mean tunesmith, had a famous retort when asked about Irving Berlin’s place in American music. He has none, the Show Boat composer replied; “he is American music.” In a similar vein, one might say that Hershey Felder has no place among performers of musical biographical monologues. Read more… David C. Nichols – … Read more

FLARE PATH at Theatre 40

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Neal Weaver  – Stage Raw In the middle years of the 20th century, Terrence Rattigan (1911-1977) was perhaps England’s most important playwright. (Noel Coward was in a state of temporary eclipse, though he would experience a triumphant resurgence a few years later.) Rattigan specialized in genteel, conventional well-made plays, but his skill and his talent for … Read more

WHAT THE BUTLER SAW at the Mark Taper Forum

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Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly If ever there were a writer dedicated to society’s subversion it was Joe Orton.  Orton despised the status quo and made it his mission to wreak havoc on its precepts as thoroughly and flamboyantly as possible. In What the Butler Saw, he went after authority figures, psychoanalysis, which he regarded as … Read more

RONNIE BURKETT THEATRE OF MARIONETTES: THE DAISY THEATRE at the Actors’ Gang Theatre

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Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw Master marionettiste Ronnie Burkett pays homage to vaudeville and its indefatigable performers in his latest piece, which played all too briefly this past week as part of UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance Program. The name Daisy Theatre derives inspiration from the underground puppet cabarets that flourished in Prague … Read more

THE OLD WOMAN at Royce Hall, UCLA

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Myron Meisel – Stage Raw One of my seminal experiences in 40 years of Los Angeles theatergoing was the single performance in 1977 at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre of the first local exposure to the work of Robert Wilson, I was sitting on my patio this guy appeared I thought I was hallucinating, a collaboration with … Read more

THE PENIS CHRONICLES at the Coast Playhouse

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Neal Weaver  – Stage Raw Apparently playwright Tom Yewell wanted to provide a male variation on The Vagina Monologues. The title might suggest that the show is a bit of pornography or an exercise in sensationalism, but the play is neither, despite a brief interlude of male nudity. It is, rather, a series of eight engaging … Read more