Actors Alliance Festival 2007 - Special Program
Lyceum Space

Let the plays begin. Actors Alliance of San Diego have begun their run of short plays, and what a festive beginning this year. The Space at the Lyceum is the location of this grand event. Over thirty plays and over 100 actors and directors in five programs play the Special Program and Youthfest. Each program runs two nights. You are sure to find many plays you like with a host of excellent actors and actresses.

The festival opens with Easy Targets written and performed by Burglars of Hamm.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2007
Actors Alliance Festival 2007 - Program 3
Lyceum Space

Program Three of the Actors Festival is a truly mixed bag; a wee bit of something for just about every taste. So let's get started.

Amici's: another of festival artistic director George Soete's pennings. Eric Poppick directs Paul Bourque, Bebe Brodie, Jill Drexler, Christine Huddle, Duane Weekly, and himself in a bit of truth-telling, anger-provoking and just-plain-nasty attitudes. It never ceases to amaze me what spills out of the mouths of alleged friends when they over-imbibe in high octane sauce.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2007
Actors Alliance Festival 2007 - Program 4
Lyceum Space

Program Four of the Actors Alliance Festival is an interesting mix of local writers and the likes of Harold Pinter and Stephen Sondheim. Let's take a quick look at the five pieces.

Matt Thompson is a quadruple threat as playwright, producer, director, and talent in A Short History of Dating. The description says it all, "Will Cleopatra choose Bachelor #1 or . . .?" The cast includes Sunny Smith, Matt Warburton, Dallas McLaughlin, and Matt Thompson. Will her choice be Julius Caesar, a gruff conqueror who prefers a special salad dressing?

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2007
Actors Alliance Festival 2007 - Program 5
Lyceum Space

All good things, I fear, do come to an end. Actors Alliance of San Diego's Actors Festival 2007 has but a very few more events.

Tall Tale , produced and directed by George Soete, begins Program Five. Steve Koppman penned this tale of two princes from Queens who discover the truth. One, played by Dave Rich, is overly impressed with his prowess with the opposite sex, while the other, Rob Conway, tries to cut through the thick layer of obfuscation. Amusing study of young men in action -- or is that inaction?

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2007
After the Quake
La Jolla Playhouse - Mandell Weiss Forum

After the Quake, currently at the Mandell Weiss Forum of the La Jolla Playhouse theaters, is a co-production with Berkeley Repertory Theater. Director Frank Galati has adapted two of the stories from Haruki Murakami's six-story collection of the same title. The two stories, "Super-frog Saves Tokyo" and "Honey Pie," intertwined in this telling.

Set on a simple stage enhanced only by a table and a few chairs, in black, with horizontal, light-colored bars as a background, the action moves from one tale to the other with ease.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2007
Agnes of God
Poway Performing Arts Company

I'm sometimes asked who is my favorite actor. My standard answer is that if, at the end of the performance (stage or film), I say, "Oh my God, I didn't realize that was so and so!" then realize it was an actor totally immersed into their role. Yes, it's the actor so good, you forget who they are. In our small arena of community theater, that is almost impossible. But last night, at PowPAC, I watched three actresses, two of whom I've seen many times and one I've never seen. They were directed by an actress/director whose work I've seen many times.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2007
Avenue Q
Spreckels Theater

We left the restaurant for the theater. First we were trapped in the Horton Plaza elevator with a guy in his bathrobe; then, upon exiting the elevator, there were other strange visions: sparsely dressed young ladies, weirdly costumed males, possible vampires, and other totally indescribable beings, possibly homo sapiens, assaulted our eyes. It is always a bit disconcerting to go downtown during Comic-Con.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2007
Break Up Notebook, The: The Lesbian Musical
Diversionary Theater

Breakups are difficult. Almost all of us have experienced the collapse of a relationship, and the hurt has no relationship to our sexual orientation. Pain is pain.

In Diversionary Theater and Rose Marcario's great production of The Break Up Notebook: The Lesbian Musical, it is Helen (Beth Malone) who is suffering.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2007
Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged), The
OnStage Playhouse

The Compleat Wrks of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged) is not the only work by the prolific Reduced Shakespeare Company. Their pieces include, The Complete History of America (abridged), All the Great Books (abridged), The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged), The Complete Western Civilization: Millennium Musical (abridged), and Reduced Shakespeare Company Christmas. We are fortunate to have the opportunity to see one of their works in a small, intimate theater.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2007
Deception, The
La Jolla Playhouse - Mandell Weiss Forum

In 2005 I raved about Steven Epps' and Dominique Serrand's interpretation of Moliere's The Miser. Their current collaboration, The Deception, is based on 18th century writer Pierre Marivaux's La Fausse Suivante, which has been freely translated as, The False Servant or Companion or Follower or Confidante. All are equally fitting. However, their choice of "The Deception" is certainly most appropriate.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2007
Gypsy
City Center

Thank God Patti LuPone decided not to spend the summer at her South Carolina beach house. She's right here in New York City at City Center, and wow!, does she entertain.

Ellis Nassour
Date Reviewed:
July 2007
Cyrano
Nova Southeastern University - Black Box Theater

The Promethean Theater opened a new, localized adaptation of Edmond Rostand's French classic of 1897, Cyrano de Bergerac - changing the sword-wielding poet/soldier to a modern day Miami-based plastic surgeon - on the weekend of Bastille Day, but the result lacks the sharpness of sword or scalpel.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
July 2007
Gone Missing
Barrow Street Theater

I'm proud to say I came very well prepared to experience Gone Missing at the Barrow Street Theater. Two days before I saw the show, which deals with people misplacing and losing all sorts of items, I'd left a box of minidisks and a calendar book at a radio station. Plus, the week before, my wife accidentally left her keys (later returned) at a bed and breakfast in Philadelphia.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
July 2007
Arcadia
Cygnet Theater

Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, spanning 180 years, encompasses drama, romance, poetry, and science. The two time periods, 1809 and 1989, occupy an English country house in Sidley Park.

First we meet an almost 14-year-old daughter, Thomasina Coverly (Rachael VanWormer), and her tutor, Septimus Hodge (Matt Biedel), in the year 1809. We soon learn that the young lady's talents include complex mathematics that neither she nor her tutor totally comprehend. During the tutoring session we meet the rather snoopy servant, Jellaby (Jim Chovick), who always has a tale to tell.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2007
Carmen
La Jolla Playhouse - Mandell Weiss Forum

Bizet's 1875 opera Carmen, one of the most popular operas of all times, has had many iterations. Among them are the 1954 film, "Carmen Jones," starring Dorothy Dandridge; a 1983 flamenco-based version, the 2000 dance version, "Car Man: An Auto-Erotic Thriller," the 2001 "Carmen: A Hip Hopera," and many more. If you are a purist and prefer Bizet's music, read no more, but please remember that his opera was, in fact, an iteration of Prosper Merimee's 1845 novella. Director Franco Dragone's uniquely staged Carmen retains the storyline in a period setting.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2007
Cymbeline
New Theater

Pity poor Cymbeline, the late Shakespeare play without a single memorable speech to bolster it through the centuries. Oh, there are some good lines; "Falsehood is worse in kings than beggars" travels well, even though the story's set in pre-Christian Britain. Some situations and scenes evoke earlier, better plays: Romeo and Juliet (a secret potion and a parentally forbidden love), Macbeth (the scheming wife of a title character), Richard III (the last-act visitation of ghosts).

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
June 2007
Old Acquaintance
American Airlines Theater

The Roundabout is now presenting John van Druten's 1940 romantic comedy Old Acquaintance on Broadway, directed by Michael Wilson, and it's mostly lots of fun. 

Harriet Harris is a great farceur (farceuse?), and her over-the-top portrayal of an idiotic, narcissistic pop writer lifts the entertainment level of the play and drives the show. Her literary-writing closest friend, in love with a younger man, is played by the beautiful Margaret Colin in a solid performance. Corey Stoll is fine as the young man. 

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
June 2007
Devil Dog Six
Lyceum Space

Devon Tramore (Jo Anne Glover) is one of the first female jockeys, a winning jockey, but horse owners think she's just a fluke. She has won on Devil Dog Six, but when the big race comes, it is a male jockey in the saddle – even though the previous Preakness had been won with a female astride.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2007
Baby
North Coast Repertory Theater

Procreation, that's what it's all about, procreation, in this charming musical tribute to the complexities of having a baby.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2007
Book of Liz, The
Bathhouse Cultural Center

Bootstraps Comedy Theater opened The Book of Liz by the Sedaris siblings, David and Amy, on May 11, 2007. If this were a TV show, I would tell you to settle down in front of the tube with a big bag of popcorn, hit the mute button, and enjoy 90 minutes of some outlandish mugging by five very talented actors. If the drama teacher in Acting 101 told the students to come up with a script that would showcase their versatility, the result would be The Book of Liz, some of the most inane drivel I've witnessed in several years.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
May 2007
Bunbury
Diversionary Theater

At least two years of college English Literature should be a requirement for seeing Tom Jacobson's recent work, Bunbury. However, were that true, many of us would miss one of the funniest shows of the season. Arrive a few minutes early, open the program to the page headed, "Referenced Works of Literature," and refresh your memory. It would help to reread Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and the Bard's Romeo and Juliet, but not much!

Bunbury is directed with panache by Esther Emery.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2007
Coram Boy
Imperial Theater

Coram Boy, adapted by Helen Edmundson from the novel by Jamila Gavin, is a Dickensian melodrama, a tale of brutal murder in the 18th Century told with a great deal of mournfully grotesque style punctuated with the magnificent music of Handel and Handelesque music by Adrian Sutton. We get lively schoolboys in chorus, dark pageantry and a totally predictable story: rich boy and poor boy want to be musicians (rich boy's aristocratic father objects).

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2007
Caught in the Net
Poway Performing Arts Company

Suddenly London playwright and farce master Ray Cooney is rediscovered and playing at both Patio and PowPAC. Patio's It Runs in the Family was reviewed two weeks ago, and now we have the equally humorous Caught in the Net, which is the sequel to his Run For Your Wife. Be prepared for two hours of almost constant laughter. This is farce at its very best as the cast delivers Mr. Cooney's lines with almost perfect timing.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2007
Cirkus Inferno
New Victory Theater

Cirkus Inferno, the loudest and quietest show in town, gives us Jonah Logan, a super physical comedian, as a dead-pan Buster Keaton in conflict with everything in his environment and Amy Gordon, the supplest rubberband on skates, who is a Chaplinesque mime and a dancer/acrobat with a bit of Imogene Coca and Lily Tomlin in her.

May 2007
Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

There's not much to cheer about regarding the new musical, Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life. Once you get past Rivera's relatively brief incarnations as her best characters from years past (such as Anita, the role she created in West Side Story, the original Velma in the musical Chicago, or the title role in Kiss of the Spider Woman) there's not much left to say. If those tidbits are enough to hold your attention for almost two hours, then by all means see Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2007
Darwin in Malibu
FSU Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Except for huge sounds of waves, the flowery bamboo-furniture-filled beach house in Darwin in Malibu has the peaceful solitude conducive to Charles Darwin's reading. It's a novel as sexy as the young girl, Sarah, in cut-offs, serving him banana milk shakes. She (a langorous Leigh Ann Wolf) herself has been reading what he calls a "dangerous thing," a diary that makes her recall a boyfriend having a hot night with a "bitch" not far away in Bakersfield. Darwin (way-too-detached Stephen Temperley) would rather she didn't obsess about the "truth" in the diary.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2007
Desire Under the Elms
Cygnet Theater

Desire under the Elms is definitely not for the weak of heart. Eugene O'Neill's story is placed in a remote New England farm. Ephraim Cabot (Jim Chovick), 70-something, brings his much younger bride, Abbie (Jessica John), home to meet his family of three boys. Youngest son, Eben (Francis Gercke), steals Ephraim's rainy-day money to stake older brothers Peter and Simon (John Garcia and Craig Huisenga) for their quest to California. Eben is determined to hate Abbie, but the young man ends up lusting for her.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2007
Deuce
Music Box Theater

In Terrence McNally's Deuce, we have two old Acting Monuments, Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes, playing two old Tennis Monuments watching a tennis match. Early in the play, when these two are on, it doesn't matter what they say; it's interesting as these wonderful antiques watch the game. When we cut to the booth where the commentators are, it goes banal. Direction of the commentators by Michael Blakemore is poor, without a believable word from them. Also, a strange, odd-looking autograph hunter is introduced, I can't figure out for what.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2007
Evening of Intimate Magic, An (with Eric deCamps)
Rockefeller Center - Lincoln Room

I saw the performance of a charming Close-Up Magician, Eric DeCamps. He takes top-level magic pieces, and performs them perfectly: coins appear and disappear; his card work seems actual magic; he does cups and balls, the disappearing egg, uses a spirit box with ropes, and one I haven't seen before that is surely actual magic: bread chips and a cup.

DeCamps, an ingratiating persona, is a master of sleight-of-hand, and his show, one of the best you'll see of this kind of magic, is entertaining from start to finish.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2007
Legally Blonde
Palace Theater

There is more youthful exuberance and bounce in Legally Blonde (book by Heather Hach, music and lyrics by Laurence O'Keefe and Nell Benjamin) than in a Beverly Hills High School pool party. As directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell, it's nothing but fun.

You know the plot: Bev. Hills supposed Ding Dong goes to Harvard Law School in pursuit of a Dumb Dumb. Beautiful Laura Bell Bundy is the girl, and the charm oozes, drips and splashes -- and she taps, too. This girl is hot!

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2007
Radio Golf
Cort Theater

Once again and with his final play, Radio Golf, August Wilson defines the term "wordsmith" and proves he is one of this country's greatest playwrights. This last of his brilliant, decade-by-decade explorations of the black experience in Pittsburgh is another powerful, moving experience. The five-member ensemble explore the ramifications of conscience in a contemporary economic and political situation, pitting the climber, James A. Williams, against the economically stable Harry Lennix, who is running for mayor.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2007
As If Body Loop, The
Actors Theater of Louisville

Strange title. Strange play. Strange experience being trapped in a full-length sitcom that strains credulity and make dismal stabs at profundity.

Ken Weitzman's The As If Body Loop, the fifth play in this year's 31st annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville, is a curdling amalgam of football guy-talk and a Hebrew legend about 36 people called the Lamed Vuv who are chosen at birth by God to carry all the pain of the world.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
April 2007
Coast of Utopia, The: Salvage (part 3)
Lincoln Center - Vivian Beaumont Theater

In part three of The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard continues exploring the hopes and naïvete of early Russian revolutionaries mid-1800's. Although the gorgeous pageantry designed by Bob Crowley and Scott Pask scattered throughout the play when there are short scenes with lots of people totally engage us with their beauty and flowing imagination, the conversations do not, except when there is a break in form about them, such as a section in lively sprichstimme - a kind of lively spoken operetta with music.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2007
Cabaret
Patio Playhouse

Cabaret burst onto the Broadway scene in 1966, winning multiple Tonys. It defied musical theater traditions with heavy drama and few laughs. The piece illustrates how a society allows itself to be overtaken. It is currently on the boards at Patio Playhouse Community Theater in Escondido.

Placed in a decadent Berlin in 1929 and 1930, Cabaret looks at the assent of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. Much of the action takes place in the Kit Kat Klub, a less than desirable joint where working girls and boys rent by the hour.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2007
Frost/Nixon
Bernard B. Jacobs

I was so enthralled by the play Frost/Nixon by Peter Morgan, now on Broadway, and by the performances of Frank Langella and Michael Sheen, that I could barely take notes.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2007
Tammy Grimes
Metropolitan Room

Tammy Grimes at the Metropolitan Room: it's a pleasure to visit with and spend time with one of our all-time great performers. Okay, she can't really sustain a note any more, but that doesn't matter; it's the real Tammy Grimes up there, and her long-acknowledged comic timing is still active. She still radiates, still entertains every corner of the room.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2007
Pirate Queen, The
Hilton Theater

The Pirate Queen by Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schonberg, Richard Maltby and John Dempsey -- What a show! Action! Beautiful women! Strong men! Great voices led by the magnetic Stephanie J. Block (who reminds me of Maureen O'Hara), and music from Les Miz -- well, almost, but I guess they can steal from themselves.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2007
Year of Magical Thinking, The
Booth Theater

Vanessa Redgrave, of The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, now on Broadway, is a great actress, but it's a tough show as a woman recounts the aftermath of her husband's death and then her daughter's. She doesn't sink into self-pity at all, but each of us grieves in our own way, and although "Magical Thinking," her attempt to change reality, is a valid one, it's not my way. There is just a bit of wallowing in recollections of the daughter, and, for me, the lack of tangents away from death and illness, make the piece a tad long.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2007
BE
Union Square Theater

BE [sic] now at the Union Square Theater, performed by Mayumana, is an amazing show. It's drumming and action, and is as tightly choreographed as a Busby Berkeley musical, with precise Mime exercises, precision drumming, planned wildness, and great contemporary/futuristic costumes by Neta Haker. It has a bit of Cirque, Stomp, Blue Man flavor, but it is its own thing and includes hamboning, black light, acrobatics, Flamenco and belly-dancing, all with great creativity, universality in movement and sound, order and chaos with order.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2007
Be
Union Square Theater

If you haven't seen Stomp, Blue Man Group, Blast!, Cirque du Soleil, Gumboots and/or Drumstruck, have I got a show for you! It's an Israeli import called Be, and it features a passel of young, awesomely agile and athletic performers mixing dance, physical slapstick, musical performance art and audience participation. It's got rhythmic trading of buckets, glow-in-the-dark flippy things, funky dancing, playful calisthenics, and pretty much anything to make an aspiring terpsichorean green with envy.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2007

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