Shari Barrett - Page 33

Much in the same vein as Arthur's Miller The Crucible, DEVIL'S SALT presents a tale about witchcraft in which a young woman is accused of consorting with the devil and forced to give her life just for being who she is, a modern-thinking woman before her time. Jovanka Bach's World Premiere drama, directed and produced by her husband John Stark as a guest production at the Odyssey Theatre, is set in the 17th Century in the King James Colony of Plymouth Bay in New England, a very Puritanical community in which Hannah Mulwray, a young woman who acts as a mid-wife, is brought to trial for witchcraft. Her main accuser, Hooker Wainwright, is the Governor of the colony and a man driven by religious zealotry and his own sexual obsession ignited by witnessing Hannah and her husband William (handsome Robert Brettenaugh) making love in the forest. And since he cannot accept the sexual excitement he feels as anything other than the devil, poor Hannah is doomed to suffer just for being a free-spirited being.

LA Ballet returns the essential holiday tradition of THE NUTCRACKER ballet to hometown audiences during the month of December, including venues in Glendale, Hollywood, Westwood and Redondo Beach. This production is the perfect introduction to classic ballet for the whole family as there are many children of all ages in the cast, all students of Los Angeles Ballet School. And given the number of touring companies bringing productions to Los Angeles, it's nice to be able to support a hometown ballet company where many of the featured dancers were born in our area.

Set in a boxing gym where female boxing phenom Dee Crosby (Suli Holum) is preparing for a whole new fight, THE WHOLEHEARTED looks past the neatly-packaged Cinderella stories of sports coverage into the real world of a woman grappling with lost love and her abusive husband, Charlie, who is being released from prison on the date we meet her. This tale of revenge and redemption addresses the violence of love, the sexuality of sports, and the high cost of fame through the use of live projections, filmed interviews broadcast on an overhead screen resembling a scoreboard. and a thumping rockabilly score to explore the line between personal fantasy and hard reality - and what it takes to be a champion.

Director John DiFusco, himself a Vietnam Veteran, opened the world premiere of Rebecca Stahl's EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN on Veteran's Day 11-11-16 at the Hollywood American Legion Post 43, produced by Karl Risinger and Liberty Theater. The play tells the interrelated tale of four generations of vets, each dealing with their own difficulties, who collaborate to help a Lance Porter, a young veteran coming home from the war in Afghanistan. who is haunted by the loss and experiences that followed him back and are destroying his personal relationships and life as he knew it.

Eugene O'Neill is the only American playwright ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature and he is a four-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. Between 1920 and 1943, he completed 20 long plays, with several of them double and triple length. And unfortunately, the current Pacific Resident production comes in at over 3 hours, a trying time for a play with such dramatic verbiage that it is necessary to pay full attention throughout since O'Neill's brilliant writing is both incredibly introspective yet often very repetitive. So be sure not to eat a huge meal before attending so the urge to fall asleep does not overtake you.

Surely most theatre folks have seen productions of the fabulous musical THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE, winner of six Tony Awards including Best Musical, making the show the 2002 season's most awarded new show on Broadway, based on the original story and screenplay by Richard Morris for the 1967 Universal Pictures film directed by George Roy Hill and starring Julie Andrews. I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, the current production directed by Anne Gesling for the Y.E.S. Youth/Teen Program at Santa Monica's Morgan-Wixson Theatre is just as good as many adult production I have seen, given the cast's talent, Gesling's spot-on fast-paced direction and fabulous 1920's costuming, Daniel Koh's musical direction creating wonderful cast harmonies, and creative choreography by Lauren Blair.

As a lifelong fan of Frank Sinatra thanks in part to my Mom being one of the bobbysoxers who fawned over him as I did for the Beatles, I was thrilled to jump at the chance to attend SINATRA 101 at the El Portal in Noho on November 26, 2016 at one of the 2 shows they did that date. Since 2011, Matt Mauser and the 101 Big Band led by Pete Jacobs have been playing Frank Sinatra's greatest hits with high-octane arrangements. Their collaboration captures Sinatra at the height of his career at the Sands Hotel in early 1966, backed by Quincy Jones conducting the Count Basie Orchestra.

Theatre Planners presents the world premiere of WAITING FOR GRACE, an award-winning comedy by Sharon Sharth, as a guest production at the Odyssey Theatre, directed by Lee Costello. Centering on a woman who wants to have it all, a great career, marriage and children with the perfect husband, but just seems to waste her life with men who don't want what she does. And when she finally meets the right man, what if her fear of abandonment prevents her from ever accepting she has finally found the right man?

With so much social and political upheaval taking place right now in America, it seems to be the perfect time for IAMA Theatre Company to present the World Premiere of UNBOUND, written by D.G. Watson and directed by Jennifer Chambers at the Hudson Backstage Theatre in Hollywood. Taking place in the fall of 2011, UNBOUND examines the intersection of race, sex, and power by posing the question: "How far are we willing to go in our quest for a more perfect Union?"

Westwood's Geffen Playhouse is presenting the World Premiere of ICEBERGS written by Alena Smith and directed by Randall Arney through December 18. This biting new play is set in the Silver Lake community of Los Angeles, California, where the weather is always nice and the future looks bright…at least on the surface. This acerbic, affectionate and affecting world premiere comedy takes place on a warm November night, centering on a new generation of thirtysomethings as they navigate filmmaking, family planning, and global warming, all the while trying to put down roots before everything melts away. They cross each other's paths like icebergs, ever moving on their own currents as they melt away into nothingness.

Now onstage at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills, THE CONSUL, THE TRAMP AND AMERICA'S SWEETHEART tells a tale suggested by true events in the United Artist office of Mary Pickford that took place with Charlie Chaplin and Georg Gyssling, German Consul in Los Angeles and a Nazi party member, to discuss the upcoming production of Chaplin's film "The Great Dictator" and whether or not it should even be made. This meeting, witnessed by Pickford's novice secretary, Esther Hollombe (who turns out to be Jewish), would change all of their lives forever.

With more than twenty-five plays, three screenplays and numerous books to his credit, American actor, screenwriter, playwright and female impersonator Charles Busch is known for his appearances on stage in his own camp style plays and in film and television. His offbeat comedy "The Tale of the Allergist's Wife" is probably his best-known and most "normal" play, which was a hit on Broadway running for more than 700 performances. It was nominated for several Tony awards including Best Play (Mr. Busch), Best Actress (Linda Lavin) and Best Featured Actress (Michele Lee), and can now be seen onstage at Theatre Palisades' Pierson Playhouse through December 11.

RAGTIME: The Musical, currently being presented brilliantly by Actors' Repertory Theatre of Simi at the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center through December 4, 2016, is set in the volatile melting pot of turn-of-the-century New York. Based on the classic E. L. Doctorow novel, featuring a Tony Award-winning book by Terrence McNally, RAGTIME weaves together three distinctly American tales -- that of a stifled suburban mother represented by Mother, the matriarch of a white upper-class family in New Rochelle, New York; Tateh, an inventive Jewish immigrant from Latvia; and Coalhouse Walker Jr., a daring young Harlem musician - all united by their courage, compassion and belief in the promise of the future in America at the turn of the 20th Century.

On February 3, 1959, after performing together on the Winter Dance Party Tour, rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. 'The Big Bopper' Richardson were killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. The three, together with pilot Roger Peterson who also perished, were attempting to make it to their next stop by plane rather than travel by bus during a raging snowstorm. The event later became known as 'The Day the Music Died' after singer-songwriter Don McLean so referred to it in his 1971 song 'American Pie.' And although I was too young at the time to really understand what their deaths meant to the world of early rock and roll, I certainly appreciate the music they left behind that will live on as long as others continue to spin the tunes and keep imitating these rock and roll icons onstage.

LETTERS TO EVE has been a 7-year labor of love for Daniel Sugimoto, which he started writing for his grandmother, Midori Sugimoto, who grew up in an American Concentration Camp during WWII. Even through their incarceration, Japanese Americans continued on living, loving, and laughing, all life aspects beautifully portrayed through Sugimoto's story and music, especially since he plays the score live onstage during every performance. This epic WWII musical follows a Japanese American family and their plight through forced incarceration and an African American jazz musician captured during Germany's occupation of France, all expressed through the powerful spirit of music. Sugimoto acknowledges, 'In America's current political situation, I also wanted to speak to the fact there are flickers of history repeating, and it is important to hear the lessons of the past to make a better future.'

VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE by Christopher Durang won the Tony and Drama Desk Awards for the Broadway production of this show. Having never seen the comedy before, I was thrilled to find out a production was taking place at the Edgemar Center for the Arts in Santa Monica and rushed to arrange my tickets. And now I can understand why the show got so many rave reviews in the past and am happy to add mine to them.

Given the uproar in our society today, it's the perfect time to get to the Ruskin Group Theatre for the World Premiere of IT'S TIME written and performed by Paul Linke and directed with great insight into personal acceptance and growth by Edward Edwards. I walked out of the theater in tears, convinced the way to celebrate and live my life in celebration is to look to the future with love and hope, and not live convinced the way to more forward is by focusing on the disappointments seen in rear-view mirror of my life.

In the 1995 comedy SYLVIA by A.R. Gurney, married couple Greg (Steve Howard revisiting the role he played with Tanna in 2011) and Kate (appropriately named Beege Barkette) are empty-nesters in the big city. In the opening scene, Greg and Sylvia arrive home after meeting in the park where Sylvia, a bouncy, frisky poodle mix, literally adopted Greg. Tanna jumps up and down, running around just as a new dog inside a home would react, her nervousness and excitement leading her to smell every single inch of the place, leave a liquid deposit, and then remind her new companion over and over again how he is her God she will love and respect forever - as long as he never hits her.

The world premiere of Jon Robin Baitz's 'Vicuña,' directed by Robert Egan, recently opened at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, just in time to present an interesting take on this year's presidential election happening next week. After show discussion revealed Baitz writes daily updates to the script, obviously influenced by the evolving political landscape, thus making the satire a very relevant tale of what might be happening behind the scenes in this year's hotly contested election.

As a life-long fan of Edgar Allan Poe and site-specific theater, I jumped at the chance to attend NEVERMORE, a one-of-a-kind guided tour experience by Metro bus through the San Fernando Valley. Billed as a unique Halloween experience taking place only on Saturday, October 29 celebrating Edgar Allan Poe and the San Fernando Valley, audience members accompanied by a tour guide travelled along METRO's Orange Line each hour from 11am to 3pm. Each tour commenced at the Van Nuys Civic Plaza, and traversed through Laurel Canyon shops and the Eclectic Company Theatre, and culminated at North Hollywood Park.