Shari Barrett - Page 47

Kentwood Players, the community theater group based at the Westchester Playhouse, was founded in December 1949 by Jan and Arky Marcom. At the end of each season, all Kentwood Players members in good standing who have seen all six shows vote by secret ballot and then the group presents their annual Marcom Masque Awards to the winners in each category at an entertainment-filled awards ceremony, held June 28, 2014 for the 2013-2014 season..

Wilson Milam directs the West Coast premiere of DATES AND NUTS, a romantic comedy by Gary Lennon ("Orange is the New Black" and "Justified"), about Brooklyn animal rights activist Eve who has just been dumped by her fiance - for a man. Angry at the male species, she becomes increasingly frantic as she searches for love in the dating jungle of New York City. Will she ever find the man of her dreams? Can she learn to keep her mouth shut and not scare all of them away?

Highlighted with brilliant acting, writing and directing, the world premiere comedy MEET & GREET is bound to be one of the biggest hits at this year's Fringe. The premise is we are in a casting office in the San Fernando Valley, present day. Four actresses have been called in for one part during pilot season, and each one appears to be at the end of her acting rope and really needs the job.

Your GPS tells you how to get where you're going, but what if it could tell you more? Such is the inventive premise of THE NAVIGATOR, enjoying its West Coast premiere during Fringe. Written by Eddie Antar and directed by Leslie Kincaid Burby for Burning Clown Productions, this show was nominated for 2 Drama Desk Awards and 8 New York Innovative Theatre Awards, all well deserved.

As a huge fan of The Twilight Zone TV show, I enjoyed seeing the different mash-ups of episodes as well as being able to catch references to many other episodes (ie: Willoughby, Hitchhiker, To Serve Man Diner). It was also fun to see clips from many original episodes played on a large TV monitor on the set. Very clever editing on all of these.

AFTERLOVE: LOVE LIFE IN THE AFTERLIFE, written by and performed by Ron Hanks and Betsy Reisz is one of the most brilliant and inventive shows I have seen at this year's Hollywood Fringe Festival. In the dating pool of the afterlife, there are a LOT of choices, and this show presents 8 couples of public figures across time and space as they attempt to create new and continued love with each other in Heaven.

SORDID LIVES, a black comedy about white trash, centers on a colorful family from a small Texas town who must come to grips with the accidental death of the elderly family matriarch during her clandestine meeting in a seedy motel room with a much younger, married neighbor. The woman's family must deal with their own demons while preparing for what could be an embarrassing funeral. This play is filled with adult situations and language.

The Los Angeles premiere of THE BROTHERS SIZE at the Fountain Theatre, directed by Shirley Jo Finney, is an exuberantly theatrical drama that weaves together the pulsing rhythms of the bayou with African Yoruba mythology to create a stylized story of love and heartache. What makes the play even more appealing than the skill of the actors is they always speak their stage directions, which invites the audience to remember they are in a theater and the story being told is for them.

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF was always the playwright's favorite among all his plays. Theatre Palisades is presenting the original version of the script as written by Tennessee Williams before Eli Kazan, who was already hired to direct both Broadway and the film version, forced him to re-write the script to conform to the mores in McCarthy era 1955. This compelling original version has been professionally produced only two times, in 1958 in London and in 1974 on Broadway with Elizabeth Ashley, Keir Dullea and Fred Gwynne.

Chalk Repertory Theatre has created a very intimate way to experience the show, setting it in the backhouse of a Beverlywood area home transforming it into May's 1980s hotel room as she attempts to untangle herself from Eddie on the night their hearts reach their breaking points. With only 20 audience members at each performance, you can't help but be drawn into the story and characters since you are sitting in the hotel room with them, watching them run in and out of the room, slamming doors, hiding in the bathroom, drinking, and of course wrestling on the floor right at your feet.

Queer Classics re-imagines one of the most popular comedic plays ever written - Oscar Wilde's THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST by presenting the four lovers in the story as dashing gay men. Director Casey Kringlen brings this sassy comedy to the Hollywood Fringe Festival, mining hysterical new meaning into many of the classic play's lines about society and manners.

THE BEST OF CRAIGSLIST started in 2012 as a comedic web series on Funny or Die starring John Pick. In early 2013, after taking the video characters live for a couple of solo performances, Pick designed a rotating ensemble-based performance using real Craigslist posts as source material. Any of us who have placed Craigslist ads to try and sell something, trade something, find a roommate, or follow up on a chance meeting will surely laugh their way through the one hour performance.

The World Premiere of ROCK & ROLL'S GREATEST LOVERS, with music by Anzu Lawson and Joerg Stoeffel, book and lyrics by Anzu Lawson, tells the Romeo and Juliet story of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, two rebels from opposite ends of the world who stood together in the name of LOVE only to face every kind of hate and tribulation. The 60 minute production of selected songs from the play is directed by Nell Teare, presented at the Lillian Theater during the 2014 Hollywood Fringe Festival.

Is it the role or the actor that lives on through history? In DRAMATIS PERSONAE Kristopher Lee Bicknell gives a tour-de-force performance starting out as a modern actor dressed in stage blacks, going through his warm-up exercises to great classical music as the audience is seated. The actor brings both a genuine respect and a passionate portrayal to a series of selected pieces, both deeply dramatic and side-splittingly funny. The result is a revelation for audiences, a bravura performance of surprising wit, subtlety, passion, and heartbreaking vulnerability by Bicknell.

Jo March really thinks she could be the voice of her generation….or at least, a voice of a generation in WOMEN, the record-breaking hit from #Serials @ The Flea Theater, fresh off its sold out run in NYC, which is now at The Hollywood Fringe Festival, directed by Stephanie Ward. This fast-paced comedy is a mash up of Louisa May Alcott's classic, 'Little Women' and HBO's critically acclaimed 'Girls' delivering a smartly crafted and hilarious 55 minute show.

Mariah Bonner strikes quite a figure as the narrator of these 5 short plays by The Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights (ALAP). Encouraging the audience to post on social media about the show, many in the audience were more than happy to oblige! Each of the 5 plays poses questions about sexual orientation, attraction, and how social media has affected our relationships. Each story is simple in the telling, but deep in human interaction.

Organized disorder and unintended hilarity. Dropped lines and missed entrances. Forgotten props and late sound effects. Certainly those of us ever involved with producing, directing, or being in a play know how the combination of all these things can lead to a flop. Lucky for the cast of DROP DEAD at the NoHo Arts Center, the combination of these disasters leads to hysteria and a hit comedy!

Thanks to Carole Eglash-Kosoff's World Premiere production of her play THE HUMAN SPIRIT at the Odyssey Theatre directed with insight and compassion by Donald Squires, I now have a much clearer understanding of the horrible decisions made by white Europeans leading to apartheid against native black Africans, even those who had fought during World War II and were treated as second class citizens once they returned home.

The 46th Kritzerland show on Sunday, June 1 featured one of the most influential female lyricists of all time, the great Dorothy Fields. In a time when Tin Pan Alley was almost exclusively a male-dominated club, Dorothy Fields rose to the top, first writing hit after hit with Jimmy McHugh, and later becoming one of the first female lyricists on Broadway and in film. Fields created some of the cleverest and most beautiful lyrics ever written, and was a master of the craft who forged the way for so many other talented female lyricists. There was no one like Dorothy Fields.

With performances through June 21 in Los Angeles, the two-act story ballet LA SYLPHIDE will be paired with George Balanchine's romantic SERENADE at four of Los Angeles Ballet's home venues: UCLA's Royce Hall, The Alex Theatre in Glendale, Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center, and Valley Performing Arts Center in Northridge. Los Angeles Ballet will be touring out of California for the first time, presenting the same production in Seattle, Washington on June 27, 2014, at McCaw Hall at Seattle Center.