Shari Barrett - Page 34

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)

Art-In-Relation (A.I.R.) is an innovative production company focusing on breathing new life into lesser-known plays and musical theater. I have seen their productions at other locations throughout the city, but unfortunately the facilities and cast talent in past productions has been less than stellar. So I am very pleased to announce A.I.R. has upped its production ante with their latest production staged at the Dorie Theater in the Complex on Theater Row in Hollywood: Andrew Lippa's musical THE WILD PARTY, based on the poem by Joseph Moncure.

Playwright Robert O'Hara provides the mood-setting intro for the West Coast premiere of his comedy BARBECUE now playing at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood through October 16. And while his very off-color language is shocking at first, I guarantee it will start you laughing and prepare you for the very realistic language used throughout the play.

Like all of August Wilson's plays, this one contains more dialogue than perhaps is needed, with the first act seemingly bogged down at times as you listen to four musicians (Damon Gupton as Cutler, Glynn Turman as Toledo, Keith David as Slow Dawg, Jason Dirden as Levee) stuck in a rehearsal room as they banter about life, women, music, and a much-loved pair of new shoes. It's a shame these brilliant musicians were not allowed to share their skills in more than just one song during the show as they rocked the house. Make no mistake; this play is NOT a musical but a hard-hitting drama about the inequities of life.

The heart of the story in Wendy Graf's world premiere play PLEASE DON'T ASK ABOUT BECKET centers on a young woman's journey to self-awareness as she learns to separate herself from her identity as the twin of a young man who should have been able to achieve greatness due to his social standing and upbringing as the "star" of his close-knit Jewish family. Seen through the lens of upper middle-class privilege where a favored son is seen as perfect in every way, we are taken on the journey through his life and how his presence affects each of his family members, both uniting and dividing them as they struggle to reconcile their relationships.

As the eighth production of Little Fish Theatre's 2016 season, THE HOW AND THE WHY written by Sarah Treem, the Emmy-nominated House of Cards writer and producer, continues through September 1, 2016 on select Wednesdays and Thursdays at 8:00pm. The production is directed by Danielle Ozymandies and features Natalie Beisner and Mary Wickliffe. This powerful foursome joins forces to create a deeply intelligent and emotional examination of what it takes to succeed in a man's world and with each other, especially after secrets between them are revealed. It's a fresh and fascinating take on two women biologists - one near the end of her career, and the other whose is just beginning.

Director Gloria Gifford takes her job of inspiring upcoming stars in proper stage presentation, and above all, I must commend her for making sure each actor in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING at TU Studios understood exactly what they were saying so audience members could not only understand the words but also what was being said in terms of the dialogue's meaning. It is the first production of the play in which I could get the meaning of each line, even though the words as written were foreign to modern English. Some of the actors shared with me that Gloria demanded their line presentation and stage movements make perfect sense, and the actors responded with great care.

Cock Tales: Shame on Me! the new and very personal play from Debra Ehrhardt, the award-winning solo artist and writer of the internationally acclaimed Jamaica Farewell, is a remarkably honest tale about how her repressed and very religious childhood was challenged by her discovery of boys' bodies before she was in her teens. Her 80-minute show is based on Ms. Ehrhardt's colorful history of a lifetime of encounters with a world full of testosterone-fueled gentlemen--and not-so-gentle-men- that has given her plenty of 'source material' from which to create a memorable evening of theater. From her early years as a young girl raised in a religious family, through her sexual awakening as a young adult, she takes us on a bumpy ride over a funny, sexy and emotionally rocky road. I guarantee you will laugh along with her and nod in recognition of our common sexual experiences while fighting with the shame and guilt her experimentation caused her psyche.

Kentwood Players presents WAIT UNTIL DARK, a suspenseful thriller by Frederick Knott, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher, opening Friday, September 9 through Saturday, October 15 on Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00pm and Sundays at 2:00pm at the Westchester Playhouse, located at 8301 Hindry Avenue in Westchester, CA 90045. The production is directed by Kathy Dershimer and produced by Jenny Boone by special arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc. Featured in the cast in alphabetical order are Samantha Barrios, Stanley Brown, Ty Budde, Harold Dershimer, Brian Roach, and Ixchel Valiente.