Evan Henerson - Page 6

If a playgoer knows anything about Shakespeare and/or musicals, then for sheer inventiveness, sweetness and curtain-to-curtain smiles, SOMETHING ROTTEN! has you covered.

Directed by Thomas Caruso from the original production helmed by Matthew Warchus, the L.A. production of A CHRISTMAS CAROL is delightful if not magical, certainly enough to scratch anybody’s holiday itch and maybe a little bit more.

Charles L. Mee’s rumination on the foibles of love and the love of foibles is enjoying a gloriously self-indulgent revival at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre through December 19. The Les Waters-directed production is every inch an old home week occasion at Berkeley Rep, featuring longtime company members James Carpenter, Sharon Lockwood and Lori Holt.

Based on a 2007 movie and a premise that you wish actually happened (even though it didn’t), the musical, directed by David Cromer, is a gentle ode to open minds, tolerance, wrong turns and – sure – faith. 

PARADISE BLUE, a play that contains music, begins with the sound of a sublime note issued by a trumpet and concludes, a couple of riveting hours later with an equally beautiful strain…followed by a far more discordant sound.

If you are a person who enjoys a good “out of sync,” then you belong in the turbulence-riddled realm of Arcadia by way of the Pasadena Playhouse where kings are queens, handmaids love above their station and amazons are…well, lots of things to a lot of people.

Music and musicality run through the works of August Wilson like a sweet and impenetrable blues lick. There figures to be notes aplenty in any opus titled SEVEN GUITARS, the fifth play of Wilson’s cycle which is enjoying a muscular revival directed by Gregg T. Daniel at Pasadena’s A Noise Within.

Sixty minutes spent in the company of an individual this thirsty for a human connection can be a bit exhausting, but it's well worth the investment.

While there are laughs to be had, nostalgia to be indulged and charm aplenty in Christian Lebano’s production of YaGM Charlie Brown for the Sierra Madre Playhouse, there is also a certain quotient of angst that no bright costumes or cutesy set pieces can disguise.

'A lean an hungry look,' Julius Caesar’s oft-quoted descriptor for Cassius, is an apt metaphor for the season-opening production of JULIUS CAESAR at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, and not always in a good way. The leanness box is dutifully checked, but director Ellen Geer’s production could certainly be hungrier and more thought out.

Judith Moreland’s cunning production for the Fountain Theatre sneaks up behind you, gooses, tickles, sings, brays and pretty much does everything but give everyone in the audience a wedgie.

Figuring out whodunit feels like a bonus of this diverting if light slice of drama rather than its primary aim.

As Denzel Washington, Kenny Leon and Co. usher in the umpteenth renaissance of Lorraine Hansberry's A RAISIN IN THE SUN, across the country, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is mounting a 50th anniversary revival of the only other work the Hansberry- who died at 34 - lived to see produced.

It may take a few minutes for a viewer to get his bearings within the world of WATER BY THE SPOONFUL. The canvas laid out by playwright Quiara Alegria Hudes stretches from Puerto Rico to San Diego, from Philadelphia to Japan. Characters go by their chatroom handles, and their relationships to each other - even among family members who meet face to face - are complicated and are not immediately made clear.

Feats of magic are at an end, resolutions have been made and Ferdinand and Miranda are bound for a world far braver and newer than what they've experienced on this magical island. That's when Jeffrey King, as Antonio, turns to face his brother Prospero whose Dukedom Antonio usurped lo those many years ago. Prospero has forgiven him, and what does Antonio do?

The throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-pray-for-laughs approach to low comedy is a staple of live theater, and certainly, of William Shakespeare's plays. None play would seem to invite a shtick-fest - beg for one even - than the hugely ridiculous THE COMEDY OF ERRORS. At the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, alas, Kent Gash's free-for-all staging of Errors exposes the play's lameness rather than celebrates its lunacy. For ninety non-breezy minutes, every actor on that stage is mugging (or frugging) his or her collective buns off. Some of the players are quite deft and, indeed, the production has its share of laughs. Too often, though, the jokes don't land, the pace slows and the endeavor is dead in the water.