Shari Barrett - Page 34

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.

During the West Coast premiere of UNDERNEATH by Olivier Award winner Pat Kinevane, be prepared to be called upon and repeatedly referred to during the show if you challenge the audience's attention by unwrapping candy during his performance, drop something on the floor, or just happen to be seated in the front row. That's because Kinevane wants you to pay attention to the play's theme, that "you can never know what might be around the next corner so go out and LIVE your life," he begs of us. With his otherworldly appearance, completely covered in black clothing and face paint highlighted with gold, there is no way you won't pay attention to his mesmerizing performance on a darkened set highlighted with pieces of gold lame which he often uses to reflect light onto the audience.

Los Angeles Ballet's eleventh season celebrates the masters and introduces LA to a new choreographer that is changing the dance landscape. The season opened with Modernists/Ballet Visionaries which features works of three icons of their time: August Bournonville, 1805-79, creator of the Danish Bournonville style of ballet, still vibrant today; George Balanchine, 1904-82, Master choreographer who transformed American dance and created modern American ballet; Aszure Barton, contemporary choreographer who is leading ballet into rich, new territory. The program includes Bournonville's Napoli Pas de Six and Tarantella, Balanchine's Stravinsky Violin Concerto and the Los Angeles Ballet Premiere of Barton's Untouched (2010).

Kentwood Players proudly presents the wickedly inspired musical YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN with book by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan, music and lyrics by Mel Brooks, opening Friday, November 11 through Saturday, December 17, 2016 on Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00pm and Sundays at 2:00pm at the Westchester Playhouse, located at 8301 Hindry Avenue in Los Angeles, CA 90045. The production is directed and choreographed by Alison Mattiza, assisted by Musical Director Catherine Rahm and Assistant Director Valerie Ruel, produced by Lori A. Marple-Pereslete by special arrangement with Musical Theatre International.

Each October for the past several years, I have thoroughly enjoyed welcoming the Halloween Season by attending WICKED LIT, produced by Unbound Productions at the spooky Mountain View Mausoleum & Cemetery in Altadena. This year audiences are being treated to three World Premiere short plays staged at various locations indoors and outside (yes, it is dark as you walk among the standing headstones with werewolves howling in the distance). When you arrive, you are issued a program on which there is either a red, yellow or green sticker denoting in which group you will view the three plays with a running time of almost 3 hours, including a pre-show and two intervals during which all audience members meet at Camp Mountain View, the outdoor staging area for the evening.

British playwright Shelagh Delaney was a precocious young woman with a keen eye for detail and a gift for naturalistic dialogue. She reached the height of her literary fame at 19 with the premiere of her play A TASTE OF HONEY which she wrote in just two weeks. Much to her dismay, Delaney was often called 'an angry young woman' since she grew up in working class Salford, a gritty industrial neighbor of Manchester. And much of that environment is reflected in her Tony Award winning play which tells the story of Jo, a teenage girl abandoned in a working class town by her slatternly mother and her lover, a gentle black sailor who leaves her pregnant when he returns to sea. But it is another outcast, a homosexual man, who cares for her and provides the only true solace Jo has ever known, though he, too, is destined to leave.

DELUSION is the premiere first-person horror experience where audiences are an essential part of the storyline. In order for the Sullivan children to make good on their quest, they must interact with their environment by unearthing clues, engaging with the strange and surreal characters of the villa - all the while doing our best to survive and not stumble on precariously dark staircases while dealing with many surprise characters who pop out of the most unexpected places. But the experience is more than just vampires popping out. YOU are part of the action and can wield incredible personal power to hold off danger, especially when the entire audience of 12 works together. You really will feel you are part of the unfolding story.

Before Peter had the last name Pan, he was a browbeaten 13-year old orphan shipped off with his two mates from Victorian England to a distant island ruled by the evil King Zarboff. The boys know nothing of the mysterious trunk in the captain's cabin, containing a precious, otherworldly cargo, given to a precocious young girl named Molly, a Starcatcher-in-training, who realizes that the trunk's precious cargo is starstuff, a celestial substance so powerful it must never fall into the wrong hands. During the journey, the ship is taken over by pirates - led by the fearsome Black Stache (who will later be known as Captain Hook in The Adventures of Peter Pan) - a villain determined to claim the trunk and its treasure for his own, making the journey quickly become a thrilling adventure. From marauding pirates and jungle tyrants to unwilling comrades and unlikely heroes, PETER AND THE STARCATCHER playfully explores the depths of greed and despair... and the bonds of friendship, duty and love.

The great genius of contemporary musical theater, creator of Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods and Company, Stephen Sondheim leads audiences on a tuneful revue of presidential assassins and would-be killers from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley. The performance is guided by the Proprietor (brilliantly portrayed by Will Shure) who takes you through a most unusual musical history lesson in the form of a carnival game called "Shoot the Prez - Win a Prize" during which the sounds of each era accompany riveting portrayals of history's most impassioned and deranged. Thought-provoking and darkly delightful, ASSASSINS won five Tony Awards in its first revival on Broadway and remains one of the most controversial Broadway musicals ever written.

In today's world, many are passed over for promotion, often causing jealousy and bitter reactions to the person who does advance over you. But just how far would you go to get that job you want and feel best qualified for, at least in your own mind? And what if you feel that person in the positions above you was just so vile and wrong for the job that you became convinced the world would simply be a better place if that person was dead? Would you have a moral imperative to shove that individual over to the other side? That's the question posed by the new World Premiere mystery MORAL IMPERATIVE by L.A.-based playwright Samuel Warren Joseph, now onstage at Theatre 40 through October 17.

Created and performed by Amy Snowden, Casting Confessions from La to LA is an outrageous and comical insight into her formative years in a small town in Louisiana, her move to Hollywood to become a sitcom actress but getting chewed up and spit-out in Hollywood, and her unique secret ways of finally making money to survive and rise in the OC. Amy's wild ride is full of hilarious and terrifying stories of nightmare roommates, nowhere jobs, massage parlor encounters, public transportation, and see-through underwear!

Solo shows written and performed by their authors need to be told with enough personal stage presence to be truly interesting to the audience. Such is the case in Lucy Alibar's world premiere THROW ME ON THE BURNPILE AND LIGHT ME UP in which she enthusiastically and humorously shares journal entries blending scenes of a lecherous goat, Pentecostals on the radio, disputes with a childhood freinemy, a clutter of inbred cats, phone calls from death row, Daddy's burnpile, and countless other rich ingredients into a delicious and magical stew of stories about her singular childhood in Grady County, Florida. The play is currently onstage through October 2, 2016,.at the Center Theatre Group's Kirk Douglas Theatre in downtown Culver City, directed by Center Theatre Group Associate Artistic Director Neel Keller.

Solo Performance Artist Bonnie Joy Sludikoff has spent the last 2 years performing her 2014 Hollywood Fringe Hit, That's What She Didn't Say: A True Story of Taboo, Redemption, and Musical Theatre. But always feeling she had blown the chance to have dozens of important, meaningful conversations over the last three years, she's back now with an even bolder approach that shows the collision of rape culture and pop culture from her very personal perspective: BACKWARDS: A COMEDY (ABOUT TRAUMA)