The 2010-11 Kirk Douglas Theatre Season, the seventh since Center Theatre Group converted a Culver City movie theater into one of the region's most consistently rewarding theater operations, will begin October 7 with a commissioned premiere.
The season will also include the Druid Theatre Company’s production of Martin McDonagh’s Cripple of Inishmaan, Melissa James Gibson’s This, and a four-show DouglasPlus Series. It will run through August 28, 2011.
The “world premiere” of Venice began in April at co-producing Kansas City Repertory, where TIME Magazine’s Richard Zoglin saw Eric Rosen and Matt Sax’s Venice and declared it, “[an] ambitious and expansive work, combining elements of Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, Brechtian allegory and dystopian political fable, all enhanced by rap narration and a melodic, rock-influenced score that is one of the most winning I have heard onstage in years.”
“We have been developing Venice for several years with Eric Rosen and Matt Sax,” said CTG Artistic Director Michael Ritchie “and this marks the first time that a DouglasPlus workshop has moved to a full production, four-week run in a Douglas season.”
The book for Venice is by Eric Rosen (who directs), music is composed by Matt Sax (with additional music by Curtis Moore) and lyrics are by both Sax and Rosen (who created the hip-hop musical Clay, premiered here in 2007
With “a powerful score that fuses elements of hip-hop, R&B and opera,” it is, according to CTG, “set in a not-too-distant future where two brothers clash over how to save their city in the aftermath of a 20-year war.”
For more information, visit the CTG website.
’Digging’ in Santa Ana
The world premiere of Cherrie Moraga’s Digging Up the Dirt opens Friday, July 30 at 8 p.m. at Breath of Fire Theater at 310 W. 5th Street (2nd Floor) in Santa Ana. Breath of Fire Latina Theater Ensemble and See-what Productions are producing the play, about “poetry and perversion; about making love and making art; about that old story of loving to death.”
Designer Lonnie Alcaraz, one of the co-produceers, told his Facebook friends, ”I have worked with this company for four years and they are great,” Alcaraz told Facebook friends. “And, this is an important work.”
Directed by Moraga & Adelina Anthony, the production will run through August 29. For more information, call 714-600-0129 or email info@breathoffire.org
Zaks Education:
His Life is Good!
In a subject near to our hearts, the announced world premiere of Randy Newman's Harps and Angels, set to conclude next year's Taper Season (November 10 through December 19), now has a director attached. Four-time Tony Award-winning Jerry Zaks will direct the world premiere, which, according to the release, "features the infectious music and lyrics of one of America’s most beloved songwriters." CTG Head Michael Ritchie made the announcement.
Our fondness for Newman oes back as far as the initial release of his lps. In a world then as now choking on comedians, Newman was the surprisngly rare phenomenon of an American humorist. And, what's more, he could compose and perform his songs. If George Gershwin and Will Rogers, or Mark Twain and Scott Joplin, had somehow been fused in an alchemy experiment, there might have been a Randy Nemman decades earlier.
On stage, Newman has been less successful. While his musicals – the revue Maybe I'm Doing It Wrong, launched at the La Jolla Playhouse some 20 years ago, followed by the original musical Faust, aksi developed and premiered in La Jolla and then South Coast Repertory's premiere of The Education of Randy Newman (where we worked with Newman as the theater's publicist) – have all fallen short of Broadway after two or three productions.
Let's hope the Zaks Factor gets this pre-eminent songwriter the same success (without the same cliches) that have produced hits for many, many others.
The Kirk Douglas Theatre / Craig Schwartz
Barricelli, Chappell Face Off For 'Winter' in Santa Cruz
It promises to be a marital face-off of historic proportions when two of California’s finest stage actors bring one of British royalties great domestic battles to the Shakespeare Santa Cruz Mainstage this summer.
SSC Artistic Director Marco Barricelli has waited three seasons to act in a production at the theater he began running in 2007. He has chosen the role of Henry II in James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter. Subscribers and single ticket buyers who had not already seen him – during eight years in the acting company of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre (ACT), or in always-worthy productions in Southern California – are going to be doubly impressed by their artistic leader.
Marco Barricelli and Kandis Chappell rehearse The Lion in Winter (RR Jones).
The wait for Santa Cruz audiences to see Barricelli on their boards has been shorter than his own long wait to appear as Henry in Winter. He and Kandis Chappell, an associate artist at The Old Globe in San Diego and frequent guest at South Coast Repertory and others, have had the pairing off in mind for years. In 2002, she was Queen Elizabeth to his Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, in Amy Freed’s Shakespeare Authorship comedy, The Beard of Avon.
The Great Goldman
Goldman's script, which he labeled "a comedy in two acts," premiered at the Ambassador in March 1966. Robert Preston and Rosemary Harris were the King and Queen, and James Rado, a year before his musical Hair would premiere. The same year as Winter debuted, Goldman had his first association with Stephen Sondheim, collaborating on a television adaptation of John Collier's short story, Evening Primrose. (They would reunite for Follies.).
Two years after the New York debut of Winter it was made into a film starring Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn. In 1976, Goldman returned to the late 12th Century for a take on the Robin Hood legend in Robin and Marian. "One of the best Robin Hood films," according to a top website on the legend, it starred Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn as the aging couple, reunited after Robin's return from the Crusades
I rediscovered this film while researching program notes for Robin and the 7 Hoods, a new musical opening this month at the Old Globe in San Diego. The show takes the "Robbo" persona from the 1960s film about a 1920s Chicago Hood, and moves it up to the 1960s Rat Pack era of the film's star, Frank Sinatra. It then musicalizes the story with hits from the Sammy CahnJimmy Van Heusen songbook – many made famous by Sinatra ("Come Blow Your Horn," "Come Fly With Me," "All The Way," and "High Hopes." Seen in previews, "High Hopes" is what we have for it! -- Cristofer Gross
LATEST REVIEWS
Supernova
Elephant Theatre Company / Hollywood / Thru June 27
Something dry and abrasive, like a nuclear wind coming off the Baby Boom, blows through Timothy McNeil’s Supernova. Part wistful comedy about one generation’s fading dreams and part cautionary tale about the harsh backlash from the generation it bore, Supernova balances its dramedy on the backs of two middle-aged women in need of affection. Above, Gina Garrison and Bonnie McNeil • Click for full review
Behind the Gates
Marilyn Monroe Theatre / Hollywood / Thru July 3
Stories of troubled young women disappearing into male-dominated cults usually center around messianic Americans like Jim Jones, Charles Manson or David Koresch. In Behind the Gates, Playwright Wendy Graf follows a distraught American teenager into the heart of Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim district, to blow the yarmulke off an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect whose strict service to God demands binding servitude to husbands. • Click for full review
Love, Loss and What I Wore
Geffen Playhouse / Westwood / Thru July 3
Love, Loss and What I Wore may divide audiences in the Geffen Skirball Theatre as dramatically as a closet split between summer and winter wardrobes. First, this ‘collection of intimate stories’ read from scripts by a quintet of talented actors, may separate those who want a play from those happy with a star-studded reading. Second, these vignettes in which significant moments in women’s lives are informed by what they wore may wear on male attendance members who find it the theatrical equivalent of 95 minutes outside a department store changing room. • Click for full review
for the ages. He began as a medical doctor, inspired by a drive, as he once told Charlie Rose, to “learn how the brain works.”