So Cal Arts & Entertainment
Colleen Moore’s “Annie” on Blu-ray, Edison sound experiments and Eugene Debs doc on DVD
What are the chances of seeing a beautifully restored version of “Little Orphant Annie” (1918), starring a youthful Colleen Moore in her earliest extant movie? Pretty good, now that film historian and preservationist Eric Grayson has decided to make this long-held...
read more“Winter’s Tale” at New Swan Shakespeare, “World’s a Grave” at Stages
How many “Macbeths” and “Twelfth Nights” will audiences for Shakespeare support? An infinite number, it seems. Will people come to see something of the Bard’s so seldom staged most have never even heard of it, for example “The Winter’s Tale”? Yes, as it turns out—even...
read moreBay Area’s Chaplin festival, lost Jewish culture on DVD and CD
There’s a little community called Niles in the Bay Area, south of Oakland, that has a unique claim to fame. In the early days of cinema, Charles Chaplin made a series of comedies there and “Broncho Billy” Anderson, the movies’ first cowboy star, made westerns. More...
read more“Greater Tuna” at Fullerton’s Stages, “Life in Two Acts” in Santa Ana
“Greater Tuna” is served up not in a casserole dish, but by actors who know what they’re doing when it comes to satire. It would be easy to go over the top—after all, this zany, comedic look at the denizens of a tiny town somewhere in Texas lends itself to broad...
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“Sisters Rosensweig” at South Coast Rep, “Jupiter Moon” at the Garage
Eleanor Reissa, Amy Aquino and Betsy Brandt in The Sisters Rosensweig. Photo by Debora Robinson/SCR. Since Wendy Wasserstein’s untimely passing in 2006 her plays have not been widely produced, at least in this neck of the woods, making South Coast Repertory’s revival...
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Charlayne Woodard’s “Flight” in Long Beach, “Elevada” in Anaheim
Charlayne Woodard may be best known for her remarkable one-woman shows, but she is by no means limited to the genre. Her imagination really takes “Flight” in the show of the same name (now on Long Beach Playhouse’s mainstage through June 16). It’s not the story you...
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“Good People” at the Chance, “Conversation,” “Urinetown” at Stages
Taj Johnson and Amanda Zarr in “Good People” at the Chance. Courtesy Doug Catiller, True Image Studio. Where’s the comedy in a “dramatic comedy” about a single mother struggling to keep her head above water? Trust me, there’s plenty of it in “Good People” by David...
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“Little Black Shadows” at South Coast Rep, 19th annual Newport Beach filmfest
“The Bill Murray Stories,” courtesy NBFF. “Little Black Shadows” by Kemp Powers (at South Coast Repertory through Apr. 29) is as much about the power of storytelling as it is about the story being told. The tale—of young slaves who acted as servants to their master’s...
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Amy Freed’s “Shrew!” at South Coast Rep, “Triplets of Belleville” at the Barclay
Susannah Rogers and Elijah Alexander in Amy Freed’s “Shrew!” at South Coast Rep. Photo by Tania Thompson/SCR. If Amy Freed tripped herself up in her last at-bat at South Coast Repertory (in my estimation), she has scored a solid home run with “Shrew!” While the first...
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9th annual TCM Classic Film Festival returns to Hollywood
If “millennials don’t really care about classic movies,” as the New York Post proclaimed last year, there are many young people who most assuredly do. Meeting and chatting with them is one of the unheralded pleasures of the TCM Classic Film Festival, which returns to...
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