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Lost Moon Radio is three fringe shows in one: • A rock band doing comedy songs and parodies; • A crack five-person comedy troupe; • A touching yet comedic relationship drama between this live series’ recurring character Jupiter Jack and—huh?—rock legend Ann Wilson of Heart. In two years, the Lost Moon Radio troupe which writes and [...]
Larry Blum seems like a very likeable guy. He’s carved out a unique career in Hollywood and New York, chronicled in this autobiographical one-man show. Every one of Blum’s brushes with fame is accompanied by a photo or video, but these is not your silly uncle’s vacation slideshow. Among the highlights: Blum auditioned for Bob [...]
Hey, Slim (Justin O’Neill): if you want to nail this proto-punk mad-love classic by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith, don’t look down at your hands while you’re playing guitar. Take more lessons before you attempt to portray a rarified rocker. And learn to pronounce “Grammercy” like a New Yorker; it’s not “Grah-MERCY.” Oh, Cavale (Claire [...]
About a dozen people learned more about sleep apnea, narcolepsy and cataplexy than they might have reasonably expected on a Friday night at a Hollywood Boulevard bar/improv comedy club. They also gleaned insights into the joys and sorrows of American health care, the Los Angeles metro bus system and the precariousness of low-wage jobs. All [...]
Orson Welles in 1937. Photo: Carl Van Vechten, courtesy Library of Congress How do you make Shakespeare edgy enough for the Hollywood Fringe? You resurrect a 75-year-old script edited by a brash, young Orson Welles. Listen to the review here: JuliuscastFinalCloud by Engine28 Julius Caesar: The Death of a Dictator, through Sunday, June 26, [...]
A friend was recently at the playground with her children when a stranger began to explain in detail about how the end of the world was fast approaching. Talk about an uncomfortable conversation to have in front of your children: “Mommy, does the Mayan calendar include my birthday? Or just the end of the world [...]
Given Julie Taymor‘s appearances at the Theatre Communications Group conference, Engine28 is going bicoastal, with impressions from some of us who’ve spent time with Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, both 1.0 and 2.0. From JENNY LAWTON: Spidey 1.0. Everyone needs an editor. I walked away from the theater feeling disoriented – the show was so disjointed, so [...]
A stiff but stylish drama inspired by the philosophical musings of Octavio Paz, the Latino Theater Company’s Solitude attempts to imagine a Mexican-American existentialism but achieves only everyday, generalized angst. The action, such as it is, begins at a funeral where Gabriel (Geoffrey Rivas) mourns the loss of both his mother and the 20 years [...]
The memories in the Robert Anderson’s 1968 memory play I Never Sang for My Father belong to Gene Garrison, a widower with both parents in declining health. Mother Margaret, survivor of cancer and a series of heart attacks, increasingly turns to him for emotional support and companionship while his father, the frustrating, blustering and occasionally charming [...]
Tight combos rocking hour-long sets late at night in small spaces, on a street where you can quickly dash from one venue to the next, with booze always near at hand. For years, that was my accustomed Friday night — but as a local band columnist, not a theater critic. Fringe festival programming has a [...]
It’s West Side Story meets The Karate Kid in the East West Players crowd-pleasing original musical, Krunk Fu Battle Battle. The Asian American theater company closes out its 45th season with this playfully derivative piece, its deft blend of rap, hip-hop and poetry slam neatly refreshing the genre. KFBB features a book by Qui Nguyen, [...]
Anyone who’s ever worked in a cubicle will recognize the fluorescent-cool pecking order of corporate culture in Chelfitsch’s Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and The Fairwell Speech. The Japanese company opened its dance theater piece which runs through Sunday at LATC as part of the RADAR L.A. festival. It’s lunchtime and three temp workers listlessly shuffle into [...]
You walk down a hallway at Los Angeles Theatre Center and into a large, brightly lit room. But where do you sit? Painted black wooden boxes line a wall and row on row of metal bunk beds with thin, tightly tucked blankets confront you. You file in with others and some climb to a top [...]
A recent study found that women whose first relationship was marked by constant approval-seeking – asking, for example, “Do you love me?” again and again – are more likely to be depressed and have relationship problems for the rest of their lives. Darla, the bundle of insecurities at the heart of Feeling Feeling, an offering of [...]
June’s coming home for closure. She finds it, but not in the package she expects in Another Effing Family Drama, Catherine Pelonero’s Hollywood Fringe Festival production playing at ArtWorks Theatre. June, a pharmacologist, wants to confront her declining mother about serious childhood issues, including her father’s sexual abuse. But while June is grounded in reality, [...]
A man goes into the desert and dies … or dreams. Storywise, that’s it. But this spare scenario allows for kinetic visual imagery and a series of bilingual monologues to anchor Teatro Linea de Sombra’s Amarillo. The setup merely explains that people vanish — physically, spiritually, metaphorically — for all sorts of reasons. They could [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Here’s a parlor game for all your dramaturg friends: Prod them for their opinions of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. The aesthetes among them will point out that no less than T.S. Eliot called it ”one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written,” then back up their charge by citing scholars who doubt the Bard [...]
Puppets — and menace — in the ballroom 2 Dimensional Life of Her, the first production of the RADAR L.A. International Festival of Contemporary Theater, might better qualify as experimental film than any conventional idea of theater. The show emerged from the solitary drawing practice of Australian artist Fleur Elise Noble with the urgency [...]
Since its Tuesday premiere as part of the RADAR L.A. festival, Fleur Elise Noble’s enigmatic and captivating hybrid experience 2 Dimensional Life of Her — part film, part theater, and all art installation — has generated a lot of “you’ve got to see this!” conversation. A once grand, but long disused ballroom in downtown L.A.’s [...]
Five actors stand, facing downstage and smiling at the audience. One is in a brilliant orange jumpsuit. She holds an old, faded kitchen timer. On a whiteboard upstage, an overhead projector beams “Training Technique: CRYING PRACTICE.” She sets the timer. The actors look into the audience. One whimpers, another is all fluttering lower lip, and [...]
Read Mark Twain’s A Ghost Story and you’ll get a hybrid tale that teases readers with all the clichéd elements of suspense but ends with one of the author’s signature lessons on human folly. See the story adapted from page to stage in a 20-minute production by Los Angeles’ Wicked Lit theater company and you’ll [...]
The fighting has ended for the title characters in Brewsie and Willie, an adaptation of Gertrude Stein’s rumination on American World War II veterans that opened last night as part of the RADAR L.A. theater festival. But as they wait for their orders, the soldiers fret about the economic fallout of the war and their dim [...]
Despite its age, the term performance art remains a useful one, if only because no other phrase encompasses so many types of alternative theatrical expression in which you hear so much about “environments.” Whatever you choose to call it, a double bill ranging from the unfocused to the movingly lucid continues through Saturday at the [...]
Any parent of small children knows you can have more fun with a cardboard box than the most expensive toys, but The Company takes the concept beyond any three-year-old’s wildest imaginings. In As you are now so once were we, the Dublin theater company, under the direction of Chilean transplant José Miguel Jiménez, conjures intimate [...]
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 [...]
Words fly, and the audience laughs – then ducks A monochromatic white screen acts as a canvas, and stools, plugged-in microphones and not much more are the tools for Steve Connell’s and Sekou Andrews’ two-man assault on racism, politics, fear, religious strife and more. Instead of using paint to illustrate those canvases, they employ words: a [...]
A Chilean company finds the bitter side of humor The psychic whiplash inflicted by Teatro en el Blanco’s Neva, one of four plays to inaugurate the RADAR L.A. festival on Tuesday night, goes far beyond the race your eyes must make (if you do not speak fluent Spanish) between the flashing text of 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 … [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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