Shari Barrett - Page 26

Directed by Jenny Sullivan in the smaller Lovelace Studio Theater at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts so that no matter where you are seated, Burrows will repeatedly pull you into the very private life of this American icon on two of the most traumatic evenings of her life. Act I takes place on the night of Robert Kennedy's win the 1968 California primary election, which guaranteed him the Democratic nomination for President. But the play begins just after Jackie saw her brother-in-law get shot on live television as he walked through the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel after leaving his victory celebration. She is spinning out of control emotionally, smoking, drinking, and popping pills as she attempts to cope with the idea that the one man she has counted on since the death of her husband will soon leave her too, again due to a madman with a gun.

A story relevant to generations past and present, Shakespeare's cautionary tale of love serves as a modern metaphor for the influence of society over individual freedom. For although the personal journeys of Romeo & Juliet are integral to the tale, this is a love story within a clear social and political context - the collective identity of the group is considered more important than the desires of its citizens, dooming the young lovers from "opposite sides of the tracks" to their tragic end as their personal lives are molded by the hostilities of the previous era. Beginning in the 1930s during a time when a rigid dictatorial system had taken over the country, the Capulet family represents the upper-class conservatives with stiff, militaristic movement, while the Montagues represent the liberal low and middle classes, danced with loose, flowing motions laced with pedestrian naturalism.

Perhaps you are one of those people who cringe at opera's lengthy runtimes, rambling plot lines, and the need to read English subtitles rather than pay attention to the overall magnificent scenes being paraded before you. Then again, perhaps you are among the select group of aficionados who relish the pomp and splendor created by opera singers whose voices reach to the heavens while performing in the popular operas of Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Wagner, and Verdi. Certainly the four characters in Ronald Harwood's play QUARTET count themselves among not only the greatest operatic performers but also as some of the greatest fans of the genre to ever tread the boards in their glory days.

Have you ever wondered what the legal sex industry will look like in the future, given how rapidly our views on personal equality and freedom are changing? Certainly Tony Award-winning playwright and performer Sarah Jones has, given the subject matter of her new play SELL/BUY/DATE in which she takes on the role of an instructor presenting an honest, moving and even humorous look at the complex and fascinating subject, all while preserving the full humanity of voices seldom heard in the theater. Directed by Carolyn Cantor and brimming with Jones' masterful, multiple, multicultural characterizations, SELL/BUY/DATE asks the audience to participate as students in a study hall as Jones describes the historical research she will be presenting, recorded with futuristic mind-sharing technology which allows people to truthfully share their opinions on human sexuality and what part it has played in their lives as society evolved into an "anything goes" mentality.

Perhaps the Ammunition Theatre Company has a built-in audience of millennials who enjoy their brand of silly and senseless humor in THE TRAGEDY: A COMEDY written by D.G. Watson and directed by Ahmed Best. Currently promoted as being 'back by popular demand,' all I can figure out is since marijuana is now legal, the younger audience members went out and got the best varieties and smoked a lot of it before seeing this show, then really enjoyed laughing at all the silly situations and dialogue, performed to the best of their ability by actors who enjoyed engaging the audience to play along with them.

George Takei is known for his founding role as Mr. Sulu in the acclaimed television series Star Trek and as an influential social media icon. But long before that fame, Takei was born in Boyle Heights and spent his childhood in the Rohwer Incarceration Camp in Arkansas and later at Tule Lake in Northern California during World War II. His story of resilience and hope is the inspiration for ALLEGIANCE, a new Broadway musical making its Los Angeles premiere, co-produced by East West Players (EWP) and Japanese American Cultural & Community Center (JACCC) at JACCC's 900-seat Aratani Theatre in Los Angeles through April 1, 2018.

No one painted love like Marc Chagall. He once said, 'In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.' On Chagall canvases, couples sweep each other off their feet and up into the air. They soar over cities, arm in arm, leaving the rest of the world behind them. They are, one critic reckons, 'a banner to collective love.' As it turns out, his inspiration was based on the many struggles he and his wife Bella faced during the early years of their marriage when their overwhelming love for each other kept the element of sanity in an outside world gone mad. Now, the magical world of artist Marc Chagall and his wife Bella is being tenderly brought to life onstage at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts (The Wallis) in director Emma Rice's production of Daniel Jamieson's THE FLYING LOVERS OF VITEBSK

TRUMP IN SPACE is a combination of Star Trek and Avenue Q meeting Trump, a musical battle of good vs. bad and ideals vs. opportunism, with tons of sex and profanity thrown in for fun. This original musical is an epic space adventure filled with all the sci-fi tropes we love and all the politics we love to hate. Taking place four hundred years in the future when the fallout of the Trump administration has left humans stranded without a planet, Captain Natasha Trump (Gillian Bellinger, writer of the script and lyrics), a direct descendant of President Donald J. Trump, races to find humanity a new planet called Polaris 4 to call home.

If you struggle with managing your busy schedule, making it to the gym, while you just can't say no to that giant chocolate chip cookie with your name on it, you aren't alone! Under the direction of Matthew E. Silva, WAISTWATCHERS THE MUSICAL with Book and Lyrics by Alan Jacobson and music by Vince Di Mura, takes us inside Miss Cook's Women's Gym where four women share their marital pitfalls, a "little more to love" body size issues, and their weakness for sweet treats. Their universal tales of weight loss struggle amid lives in turmoil will keep you laughing continuously, wishing it could assist you in losing a few pounds of your own during the 90 minutes of hysterics!

Celebration Theatre is a very small venue known for putting on very big musicals and doing them very well. But I have to tell you, seeing Del Shores claim the stage as his own was really a treat as he transformed himself into not only his mother but several other friends and relatives from his childhood in Texas or others he has met over the years in gay bars, banks and convenience stores in SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF A PLAY. The title, of course, riffs on Pirandello's classic title, but in this one, Shores brings to life six one-of-a-kind characters he has met in real life that haven't quite made it into one of his plays, films or TV shows. In 90 minutes, the audience heard the truth behind how he collected these eccentrics and their stories as he portrays his hilarious, off-the-rails encounters with them.

Actors Co-op Theatre Company presents the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award nominated drama A WALK IN THE WOODS, written in 1988 by playwright Lee Blessing. The witty two-hander concerns a relationship between two arms negotiators, one Russian and one American, and what happens when they step out of the war room and into the woods above Geneva, Switzerland, during a year of negotiations. Although the two eventually develop a friendly relationship, their personalities certainly differ in that the American is formal and idealistic while the Russian is easily led off topic and very pessimistic that any agreement will ever amount to any changes in the escalating arms race.

Yazmine Reza's 2009 Tony Award winning play GOD OF CARNAGE centers on two sets of parents, unknown to each other until their 11-year old sons, Benjamin and Henry, get involved in an argument in a public park because Benjamin refused to let Henry join his 'gang'. In their altercation following the snub, Henry knocked out two of Benjamin's teeth with a stick, details we learn in the opening scene taking place that night as the parents of both boys meet to discuss the matter. However, as the evening goes on, the "adults" become increasingly childish, resulting in the evening dissolving into chaos.

The third and final play, THE HAPPIEST SONG PLAYS LAST, is being presented by the Latino Theater Company, directed by Edward Torres with the heart and soul of Latino culture brought into crystal clear focus. Set to the joyful sounds of traditional Puerto Rican folk music beautifully played onstage by guitarist Nelson Gonzalez, HAPPIEST SONG chronicles a year in the life of two kindred souls as they search for love, meaning and a sense of hope in a quickly changing world. At the dawn of the Arab Spring in an ancient Jordanian town, Elliot, an Iraq War veteran (Peter Pasco), struggles to overcome the traumas of combat by taking on an entirely new and unexpected career: an action-film hero. At the same time, halfway around the world in a cozy North Philadelphia kitchen, his cousin, Yaz (Elisa Bocanegra), takes on a heroic new role of her own as the heart and soul of her crumbling community, providing hot meals and an open door for the needy.

As you relax at cocktail tables with drinks in hand, chatting amicably with others seated near you, singer Marian Frizelle, who we later learn is the director's ex, steps onto one of the two platforms in the room to entertain us with a sexy rendition of "It Was Just One of Those Things," which happens to be exactly the type of relationship action we are about to experience around us. The show then begins as actors walk around among the tables as their characters meet and get to know each other, often speaking directly to audience members who are more than welcome to answer back or give an opinion on how their hook-up chances are going. Without the fourth wall to separate the actors from the audience, everyone is the room has a chance to be in the show - so be prepared!

First of all, kudos to director James Esposito for discovering the musical DESSA ROSE, based on the 1986 novel of the same name by Sherley Anne Williams. This awe-inspiring musical received its New York premiere at Lincoln Center in 2005 and it's a wonder no other theater group has decided to produce this timely exploration about the universal need for freedom and equality. With book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens and music by Stephen Flaherty, it tells the story of a young black woman (a runaway slave) and a young white woman (an abandoned mother) beginning in the years just prior to the Civil War and continuing through their journey to acceptance in the antebellum South. The audience has the role of playing their grandchildren, to whom the elderly pair tell their story as it is presented to us.

It ended too soon is all I can say. I could have kept dancing for hours to the music being celebrated from the stage in MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET, now being presented by 3-D Theatricals in Redondo Beach and Cerritos. For those like me who have always been a fan of wild child Jerry Lee Lewis and the sexy performance style of Elvis Presley, or the music of the man in black Johnny Cash or rock and roll pioneer Carl Perkins, get your tickets ASAP for an evening of theatre you will never forget as you act like a fly on the wall as you experience one night that changed rock and roll forever.

Quiara Alegria Hudes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who wrote the book for the Broadway musical "In the Heights," which received the 2008 Tony Award for Best Musical, a Tony nomination for Best Book of a Musical and was a 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Her Pulitzer-nominated and winning trilogy of plays known as the "Elliot Trilogy" are now being presented concurrently, giving Los Angeles theatre audiences a rare opportunity to immerse themselves in this exciting playwright's work. ELLIOT, A SOLDIER'S FUGUE, the first in her trilogy of Elliot plays, is being produced by Center Theatre Group at the Kirk Douglas Theatre at the same time they are presenting the second play in the trilogy, Hudes' Pulitzer-winning WATER BY THE SPOONFUL at the Mark Taper Forum. The Latino Theater Company will present the final installment of the trilogy with their production of THE HAPPIEST SONG PLAYS LAST at the Los Angeles Theatre Center (LATC) opening later this month.

Now playing at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood, the 80-minute play IRONBOUND by award-winning playwright Martyna Majok recounts the hard luck life of Polish immigrant Darja and the men she chooses to have in it. Moving between 2014, 1992, and 2006 - but not necessarily in that order - this wry drama points out that sometimes survival is the only measure of success. No doubt the title of her play, though set at a bus stop a quarter of a mile from Elizabeth, NJ, makes sense since that blue-collar town is just like where Darja works in a nearby noisy paper factory and as a maid for a wealthy married woman, and yet still suffers through poverty, abusive husbands who drink too much, single motherhood, and then an adult son who steals her car and abandons her with no way to get to work other than the bus, which of course is always late.

SISTER ACT is a feel-good musical comedy smash hit based on the 1992 film that has audiences ready to rejoice! Featuring original music by Tony® and 8-time Oscar® winner Alan Menken (Disney's Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast, Newsies, Enchanted), dazzling dance routines and songs inspired by Motown, soul and disco, SISTER ACT qualifies as the funniest and funkiest musical around. Lately this popular musical has been performed at many theaters in the greater Los Angeles area, each one brilliant in its own right. But I have to say I have never seen one more perfectly cast than the current production at the Simi Valley Cultural Center with the amazingly talented Elizabeth Adabale as Deloris Van Cartier, a disco diva whose life takes a surprising turn when she witnesses a murder and then goes into hiding in a convent!

When Danny, son of an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic rabbi, injures the more traditionally Orthodox Reuven during a baseball game between their rival yeshivas, their two universes collide and a unique friendship is born. "This powerful story shows how essential it is to consider the views of those who are different from us," says director Levy. "It's an antidote to the toxicity of our times. Potok beautifully depicts what it means to bridge chasms - between modernity and tradition, the secular and the sacred, Zionism and Hasidism, adolescence and adulthood, friendship and family, fathers and sons, the head and the heart, and the struggle to choose for ourselves, to fight for what we believe in and who we want to be."