Don Grigware - Page 62

For many, Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie remains his finest play. Semi-autobiographical, the play takes place in St. Louis during the Depression and depicts the relationships between a restless alcoholic factory worker, wannabe writer, his overbearing mother and his psychologically deficient sister - all of which stems from Williams' actual background. Williams finds his voice in Tom. (Brian Foyster)

Tim Rice's & Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita has had a thirty-seven year international love affair with the public since it premiered in 1978 in London and in 1979 on Broadway. The latest local reincarnation currently at Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, Claremont until June 28 is lovingly directed by Chuck Ketter and excellently choreographed by Roger Castellano.

production of A Chorus Line, which garnered the Tony, Pulitzer Prize, Drama Desk, and Theatre World awards -among others.  Other credits include:  director/choreographer: 22%, Love Songs, Spelling Bee, Rose Bowl Queens, Bark! No Strings, Desperate Writers (Off-B'way/LA), Flunky, The Dining Room, Nuncrackers, Judy's Scary Little Christmas, Frog & Toad, A Chorus Line, choreographer: Hunger, Nightmare Alley, Atlanta, Great Expectations, Triumph of Love, Dancing at Lughnasa. Pasadena Playhouse: 110 in the Shade, Do I Hear A Waltz. Hollywood Bowl: Mame, Bernstein's Mass, My Fair Lady, Music Man, Camelot, Reprise!, Three Penny Opera, City of Angels, Company, 20th Century, Follies, Sweeney Todd, Most Happy Fella. Other Los Angeles: Atlanta, Paint Your Wagon (Geffen); Grave White Way (Hudson Theatre); Dogeaters, Gaytino (Kirk Douglas Theatre); Six Dance Lessons (Falcon, Geffen, B'way); Snoopy, Blockheads (London West End). Film/TV: Country Rules, Santa Clause 3, Six Dance Lessons…  Website: www.kaycole.net

Actress/producer/motivational speaker/champion of senior causes Jackie Goldberg, known more popularly as the Pink Lady and 'Pink' o her friends, has come up with yet another fantastic idea to help promote permanent senior entertainment in greater Los Angeles. The event is appropriately entitled Senior Star Search, a senior competition that will be held on Sunday July 12 at the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre at Barnsdall Park, Hollywood. Co-producing the event will be actress/singer/humanitarian Barbara Van Orden, known for her outrageous Las Vegas night club act as well as her close involvement in producing LA's Next Great Stage Star held annually at Sterling's Upstairs at the Federal in North Hollywood. Goldberg and Van Orden as co-producers of Senior Star Search wish to bring active, motivated seniors into local live entertainment. They are hopeful that more than 200 interested entertainers 55 or older will come forth to audition for the event on May 23rd and 24th.

It's been 50 years since Neil Simon wrote The Odd Couple, perhaps the most famous of his early plays. March, 1965. I was a freshman in college, and little did I know that one day I would play Felix Unger in a local production onstage. Needless to say, I was certainly smitten with the crazed character and his neurotic mannerisms and with Simon's terribly funny comedic lines, whenever I watched the film with Jack Lemmon and the TV series with Tony Randall. Not so easy to essay...this character - as I found out first hand - for this play with all its laugh.a.minute jokes is really a very serious drama about the frailty of relationships and how we suffer through them. Now onstage in a wonderfully grounded and real portrait, The Odd Couple still holds up; the Sierra Madre Playhouse production, under the meticulous direction of Alan Brooks, does the classic proud.

It is rich yet rare to find a new American play that is at once terribly funny, terribly real and utterly demanding of one's attention. Immediate Family is such a play; it's fiercely original way at looking at an American black dysfunctional family is both heartwarming and completely enjoyable. In fact, I found myself looking at this black family and listening to playwright Paul Oakley Stovall's jokes about being from a black family and found myself, although white, identifying thoroughly with the issues at play. The family is black - and much of the humor is unmistakably black - but the conflicts are universal. Under Phylicia Rashad's steady hand, Immediate Family in its West Coast premiere at the Taper is one great big hit.

The creation of Arthur Miller's now classic The Crucible about the Salem witch trials of 1692 was influenced by the McCarthy era of the 50s. It provided an intensely ferocious perspective on the unjust distortion and destruction of human life. In Salem, Massachusetts it was a religious issue - did you believe in God or the Devil Incarnate? McCarthyism was about Americans and their supposed involvement with the Communist Party. Religion and politics should be private issues, but in a community riddled with guilt about morality, there is no such thing as personal. Your way of life is an open book for all to judge and condemn. Roberto Aguirre-Acasa has penned an imagined sequel to The Crucible entitled Abigail/1702 about protagonist/witch namer Abigail Williams (Jennifer Cannon), who escapes Salem and tries to find salvation after her crimes. The action picks up ten years later in 1702, and as a thought-provoking piece now onstage at ICT, Long Beach, it works quite well under the expert guidance of director Caryn Dasai and with the help of five outstanding performances.

The musical Side Show played Broadway in 1997 for 91 performances and was Tony nominated but never got the recognition it deserved. A revamped version went to Broadway in 2014, but it, too, closed early. Like Jason Robert Brown's Parade, another noteworthy Broadway miss, it's worth the attention, but its dark grotesque presentation of carnival freak shows is not the most appealing fare for commercial theatre audiences. Many are repelled by the sight of a man with three legs, a bearded lady, a half-man, half-woman or in the case of Daisy and Violet Hilton, by the appearance of twins who are conjoined. The girls hated the term Siamese twins, for they were not Siamese, and also if people asked them if they wanted to be normal. What is normal? Now in a revival production of the original - not the 2013 revamped production, which played La Jolla and the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. before Broadway - by 3-D Theatricals at Plummer Auditorium, Fullerton, Side Show comes out as winning and memorable as when it first appeared.

David Mamet's curious one-act The Anarchist, which bombed on Broadway in 2012 after a mere 17 performances, was called by critics 'a slip of a play'. True, it does come in at 70 minutes, but who cannot be riveted by Mamet's intriguing exploration of salvation? Yes, religious salvation that erupts during a prison interrogation serving as a final appeal for prisoner Cathy (Felicity Huffman), convicted some 35 years previous for the murders of two guards. Cathy was a young revolutionary at the time in Algeria; when we see her she describes herself as 'an old lady', perhaps somewhere in her 50s. Ann (Rebecca Pidgeon), the warden of the prison or psychologist working in direct connection with the prison authorities, performs the interrogation with one goal in mind: to break down Cathy, to make her confess the whereabouts of her accomplice, whom she hasn't seen or had contact with since the crime. Far-fetched, you say? But Cathy's release depends on this piece of information. Despite some dissatisfying results, Mamet's fiercely engrossing dialogue, crisp direction from Marja-Lewis Ryan and superior performances from both Huffman and Pidgeon make the one-act worthy of note.

Everybody's favorite character actress/singer/ comedienne from stage, TV and film Mary Jo Catlett will appear in S.T.A.G.E on May 9 at 7: 30 at the Saban in Beverly Hills. This year's show is entitled To Broadway from Hollywood...with Love. What are you doing in the show this year?

On Sunday April 19, actress/singer Alexandra Billings brought her new show I'm Still Here...Still! to Sterling's Upstairs at the Federal to overwhelming success. It was a packed house of adoring friends and fans who have come to love Billings for what she brings to the stage -passion, a passion for performing, and most importantly, a passion for her audience. She genuinely cares about everyone, and on top of that, she is screamingly funny. When I first reviewed her cabaret six years ago, I stated:

Actor Reed Shannon is currently on tour with Motown the Musical playing Young Berry Gordy, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson. In our chat he talks about preparing for these roles and his young theatre life so far. Unbelievable! You are playing Berry Gordy, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson when they were young like you. How difficult is it for you to differenciate between the 3 boys? What do you have to do physically and mentally to portray them? Did you watch tapes or listen to CDs to get the voices just right? I know Jackson performed young but I'm not sure about Little Stevie Wonder.

Mary Poppins/book by Julian Fellowes/music by The Sherman Brothers/new songs by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe/directed by Lewis Wilkenfeld/choreographed by Cheryl Baxter/Cabrillo Music Theatre at the Fred Kavli Theatre of the Thousand Oakes Civic Arts Plaza/through April 26 only

On Friday, April 17 Barbara Minkus brought her new one-woman show An Evening with Barbara Minkus 'It's All About Love' (the good, the bad, the funny, the sad) to Saint Mark's Episcopal Church in Glendale as a fundraiser for the Sacred Arts Ministry. Affable Ron Barnett served as musical director and accompanied at the piano and Cooper Appelt was on bass for the bright 65-minute set.

Unlike books about the disabled that prey on your sympathy, The Hitman and other short plays show the disabled living within a mix of regular people, and facing the same conflicts and feeling the same emotions as everyone else. It's one big melting pot of human beings from every walk of life. There are the young and the old; there's new-found love and romance, and then there's marriage; there are politicians, actors and just plain middle class workers at IKEA and and in an optometry store in Wassila, Alaska. Henry Holden creates characters that are simultaneously similar and different...and we can relate to all of them.

Satire on religion can be fun to watch. Take The Book of Mormon, for example, with its ferocious attack on innocence and man-made intervention. On a much smaller scale, Smoke on the Mountain is an intimate up close theatrical experience that comes to life via its bluegrass-style gospel musical numbers. Some of the stories as told by the Sanders family, a group of traveling singers/musicians, who perform a one-night gig circa 1938 at the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church, Mount Pleasant, North Carolina are wrenchingly funny. In a well-directed and very well-cast revival at Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, Smoke on the Mountain becomes a real audience pleasing entertainment.

The now classic musical A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum is silliness personified from its zany characters and inane plot contrivances to its corny yet witty dialogue. It is clever farce set to music. Mistaken identities, zippity fast exits and entrances...it has no rhyme or reason but is terribly, terribly funny with belly laughs about every two seconds. Crown City Theatre's new revival rates an A+ with a devilishly good cast and delicious direction and choreography from Lisaun Whittingham. The production is about as good as it gets.

Sweeney Todd first bowed on Broadway in late 1979. Fortunately, I was in New York to witness the brilliant achievement of Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim, Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou and the entire creative team. Kelrik Productions is presenting the masterwork for the first time, hardly an easy task in a small intimate theatre space such as the Monroe Forum Theatre of the El Portal. Well, let me tell you, they may be exceedingly proud of this production, as it replicates just about everything that the original achieved, minus a full orchestra. Every detail, every move and every musical beat are in line with wonderful musical director Joe Lawrence at the piano. With a perfect cast and brilliantly inventive direction and staging from Kristin Towers-Rowles, this Sweeney Todd could not be better.

Charles Evered's West Coast premiere Class is a lovely piece of theatre currently onstage at the Falcon Theatre through April 19. It's always great to see a good script be given a laudatory production with fluid staging by director Dimitri Toscas, two sensitive performances from Gildart Jackson and Callie Schuttera, and a superior set design from Francois-Pierre Couture. It's a flawless experience that makes you realize just how much value theatre has in our lives.

On Monday March 30 actor/singer Kevin Earley brought his show On the Record to a packed house of adoring fans at Sterling's Upstairs at the Federal in NoHo, and it proved nothing short of a triumph. Earley's tenor is no stranger to these parts, as the Chicago born spent a lot of time from 2001 onward playing supporting and lead singing roles on legitimate stages in and around Los Angeles, such as his award-winning Rutledge in 1776, Terry Conner in Side Show, as well as leads in Can-Can and No Strings. He has also appeared on Broadway in Les Miserables, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Death Takes a Holiday and A Tale of Two Cities.