Haile D'Alan News

Here is my interview with Gloria Gifford about presenting LOVERS AND OTHER STRANGERS live-streamed online as well as her Gloria Gifford Conservatory and how she is managing to keep her students active during the past year.

Lovers and Other Strangers is an evening of five untitled comedic one-acts adding up to less than eighty minutes of brilliant comedy writing and wonderful relatable people seduced by love, arguing about love, marrying with love, cheating with love and confused by love. The play was turned into a hit movie starring Diane Keaton, Gig Young, Richard Castellano and Bea Arthur.

Art, as a rule, is subjective. It can be appreciated or not, liked or not. At opening weekend's Sunday performance, playwright Tina Howe's THE ART OF DINING had its own built-in laugh gallery, who loved this ART, as this one large portion of the house frequently led all others in laughter. Set in a home-converted restaurant - The Golden Carrousel - at the Jersey Shore in the late 70s, ART covers one evening of this newly opened, two-man operation fraughtly run by husband Cal and chef Ellen. Gloria Gifford directs her enthusiastic cast through slapstick, overprojecting and over-the-top acting in lightning-fast dialogue, often overlapping, often two separate monologues simultaneously.

Juicy. Delicious. Salivate your way through The Art of Dining, a hilarious exploration of tantalizing appetites and desires. Then eat with the cast. Gourmet meals at every show (for V.I.P. ticket holders).

Gloria Gifford is a stage-trained actress from New York City, giving her the necessary background to understand the intricacies of people caught up in a place where the traffic is loud and people live in close proximity to each other, yet still think it's necessary to always be screaming at one another to get the upper hand. Such is the case with the five characters in Stephen Adly Guirgis' 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning THE MOTHF**CKER WITH THE HAT, an urban comedy now being presented as the inaugural production at the Gloria Gifford Conservatory for the Performing Arts new location on Theater Row in Hollywood.

Thanks to director Gloria Gifford, who retains Shakespeare's text while augmenting the proceedings with a contemporary and very soulful song score in the current production at Grey Studios in NoHo, the overall addition of the much-needed modern sensibility through music makes the complicated plot easily understood, even while adding in moments of sheer levity. Just imagine Anthony and his troops starting off the show by lining up and singing Super Freak by Rick James, as their way to describe Cleopatra and you get the idea.

Comprised of 10 short plays in 2 acts about the follies and foibles of love and lovers, LOVE ALLWAYS addresses the subjects of love and romance which have long provided great source material for comedy, created from the pens of two proven masters of American comedy. With busy careers in film, television and Broadway, Taylor and Bologna have defied the Hollywood odds with a marriage that's lasted 51 years (so far). And no doubt, many of the relationship stories shared must be of a very personal nature to them, or perhaps some of their closest friends!

THE HAIRY APE at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble through July 17 tells the story of Robert 'Yank' Smith, a brutish ship laborer who searches for a sense of belonging in a world controlled by the wealthy elite who he believes only see him as a dirty and hairy ape rather than a real human being. As head coal stoker on an ocean liner, Yank (Haile D'Alan whose incredible and extremely physical performance lifts the entire production to the highest artistic quality) is in his element where he rules his dark, hot, hard-drinking smoky world while managing a group of six other coal stokers who seem to prove their resemblance to simians no matter what they do thanks to the brilliant and totally physical ape-like choreography of their every move by director Steven Berkoff. It's truly a wonder as to how the ensemble manages to keep their energy at such a high level throughout the entire show.

Renowned British actor/writer/director Steven Berkoff directs a rare production of Eugene O'Neill's 1922 expressionist play THE HAIRY APE. The production opened on May 14 at West L.A.'s Odyssey Theatre, and BroadwayWorld has a first look at the cast in action below!

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S THE TEMPEST, the last of his romantic comedies, was written in 1610 and published in 1623. This great romantic comedy has it all: danger, intrigue, politics, revenge, a mighty sorcerer, and his beautiful daughter who falls deeply in love at first sight with the handsome prince who is so conveniently shipwrecked near her island home. THE TEMPEST still exerts an influence over popular culture four centuries later, ranging from "Forbidden Planet" to "Gilligan's Island" to "Lost."

In this day of instant communication, how do you feel when the person you love does not answer a text or email within an hour? Makes you wonder what that person is up to and with whom, doesn't it? So image how was it in the days when the only way to reach a loved one was by sending a letter, and then having to wait for weeks or months for a response. Certainly the most outrageous scenarios would play in your head as to what was really going on.