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You know that dream where you’re standing naked in front of an audience? For author/actor Summer “Rain” Sinclair, it’s a reality that’s happened three times this week. Sinclair strips herself bare in her one-woman show, Born Again Bohemian, part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival. OK, she’s not physically naked. But emotionally, Sinclair hides little as [...]
Remixing New York’s Under the Radar Festival for the West Coast, the RADAR L.A. Festival reflects a shift in contemporary theater, colliding international work with the Los Angeles theater scene. Under the leadership of Mark Murphy of Redcat, Diane Rodriguez of Center Theatre Group and Mark Russell of Under the Radar and New York’s Public [...]
Jon Armstrong, a fixture at Hollywood Fringe headquarters, was getting some lip from a fellow magician. “All he could do was prattle on about everything he was a master of. About how he could do this, he could read minds, he was a great stage magician, he was the most incredible thing since sliced bread.” [...]
If you’ve never hated the family that you also love, stand up. Now sit down, preferably in some water, because your pants are probably on fire. Almost all of us have, well, complicated relationships with our families. And ever since Shakespeare wrote Hamlet’s bloody tale of extreme familial dysfunction, playwrights have counted on family drama [...]
Hallie Gordon, a Chicago theater professional who helped found and now oversees Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s program promoting theater among youth, delivered what might become the most urgent message to emerge from Theatre Communication Group‘s 50th annual conference, which ended Saturday, June 18, in Los Angeles. “We hear a lot of talk about attracting ‘the [...]
The tired question “Is L.A. a theater town?” was quickly dismissed at a panel discussion hosted by the L.A. Times’ Culture Monster last week. (Of course it is.) The harder question was about theater actors in Los Angeles. After all, the conventional thinking goes, don’t West Coast theaters benefit from having a huge pool of local [...]
Supertitles are introducing American audiences new worlds of theater but remain far from perfect. The future of American theater may be as much read as watched. Presenting organizations, following the lead of their counterparts in the dance world, are bringing growing numbers of international ensembles to festivals such as this week’s RADAR LA. American companies, [...]
It’s 8 p.m. on Thursday, the opening night of the Theatre Communications Group (TCG) National Conference, and downtown Los Angeles’ Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is packed with stage professionals celebrating TCG’s 50th anniversary. But the conference’s closing keynote speaker—the big draw, The Get—director Julie Taymor is several blocks away in a sparsely filled, off-the-beaten-path movie theater [...]
Ninety minutes until curtain. The queue of ticketholders extends halfway down the block, three-deep. Most shows at the Hollywood Fringe performance festival just up the street would kill for a line like this. They’re here for a premiere that’s had buzz all over the blogs, but has yet to reach the mainstream media. For most [...]
It turns out that it’s not that hard to get car-dependent Angelenos to sacrifice their vehicles for a few evenings. “There’s a lot of enticement, because if we use your car, you’re going to get the best parking spot,” said Steve Lozier, producer of Moving Arts’ “The Car Plays: LA Stories,” a series of one-acts [...]
In early 2010, Lars Jan, a Los Angeles-based playwright and director, was commissioned by the Whitney Museum in New York to create a performance in one of its galleries. What he delivered was as much prank as play, a theater happening in the spirit of Abbie Hoffman: attendees entered the room under the gaze of an earnest [...]
Ronnie Walker barely moves. He faces a corner of the prison yard, relaxed, swaying gently. When a fight breaks out, the correctional officers bark, “Yard down!” and then begin screaming at him. Why hasn’t he dropped to the ground as ordered? Walker is a tall man with regal bearing, but he now looks around [...]
Among the many benefits of a consolidated festival like Hollywood Fringe is the ability to cram attendance at several shows into one night. Even if you have a specific subgenre you are interested in — say, one-woman shows — the scheduling gods often align to facilitate an evening full to overflowing with theater. Below is [...]
One of the most anticipated sessions taking place at the TCG conference was today’s playwriting workshop led by Marsha Norman. Last week in New York Norman helped celebrate the second-annual Lilly Awards, which she co-founded in 2010 with a group of theater professionals that included Julie Crosby, Julia Jordan and Theresa Rebeck to address the persistent [...]
Playwrights, artistic directors and other stage pros were not only moved by the opening-night performance of Neva at Radar LA, Guillermo Calderón‘s latest work being produced by Teatro en el Blanco at the Radar LA theater festival, they walked into the REDCAT lounge asking questions prompted by the work. Among them: “Are we just here [...]
We just can’t get over the Bard. Even at RADAR L.A. and the Hollywood Fringe, dueling festivals devoted to the theatrical cutting edge, the ultimate warhorses are still running strong – though they are, of course, all dressed up in postmodern garb. Leading the buzz meter is Titus Redux, which premiered to accolades last year [...]
Right in the middle of a presentation of manifestos at RADAR L.A. on the Future of Theater, Shawn Sides from Austin’s Rude Mechs subverted the whole idea of the panel discussion. In the future, she said, there would be no manifestos. She then went on to give the most concise definition of the festival’s most confounding [...]
As Willie, the amiably angst-ridden protagonist and agonist of Brewsie and Willie might say, “How is it, fellows, that you could make yourself a theater show out of a book by that Gertrude Stein. How is it? How is it, I say?” In the original 1946 Brewsie and Willie, which turned out to be [...]
Presenting your art to an audience doesn’t make it theater. Only when Fleur Elise Noble’s puppets have stripped down their setting — the artist’s messy studio — to the blank white walls of a gallery, do they begin to burn the place down. The actual walls of the historic Alexandria Hotel, where Noble’s work is [...]
What is RADAR L.A.?. June 14 – June 19, 2011 When Theatre Communications Group announced its 50th anniversary conference would take place in 2011 in Los Angeles, Ca., a festival in the works for nearly five years set a date. RADAR L.A., an international festival of contemporary theater, launched on Tuesday. The five-day event features [...]
Is Los Angeles a Theater Town? A resounding “maybe.” The Los Angeles Times roundtable began with a contentious question portending more than its share of blood in the water: “Is Los Angeles a Theater Town?” But the sharks of LA’s theater community couldn’t — or wouldn’t — rise to the bait at Tuesday night’s panel [...]
The tired question "Is L.A. a theater town?" was quickly dismissed at a panel discussion hosted by the L.A. Times' Culture Monster last week. (Of course it is.) The harder question was about … [Read More...]
Ninety minutes until curtain. The queue of ticketholders extends halfway down the block, three-deep. Most shows at the Hollywood Fringe performance festival just up the street would kill for a line … [Read More...]
If you’ve never hated the family that you also love, stand up. Now sit down, preferably in some water, because your pants are probably on fire. Almost all of us have, well, complicated … [Read More...]
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