Federico Mata

Urban Theatre Movement's "Short Eyes" now playing downtown at Los Angeles Theatre Center

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Miguel Pinero's 1970s prison play Short Eyes nabs this week's Pick of the Week.

​ Good notices also for Martin McDonagh's The Lonesome West at Santa Monica's Ruskin Theatre Group; Rene Rivera's King of the Desert at Casa 0101 in East L.A.; and Molly Smith Metzer's new play, Elemeno Pea at South Coast Rep. Here are all the latest New Stage Reviews, or you can find them after the jump. This week's stage features include reviews of Oswald at Write Act Rep in Hollywood, and an interview with William Shatner, as he's about to take his one-man show to Broadway before bringing it back to the Pantages. The coming week's Stage Listings are coming tomorrow.

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Craig Schwartz

CTG/Playwrights Horizons "pre-Broadway" run of "Clybourne Park" currently playing at the Mark Taper Forum

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Jaws have been dropping since the New York Post broke the story yesterday

​ that producer Scott Rudin was walking away from plans to produce Bruce Norris' Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Clybourne Park, on Broadway later this season. The blowup between the producer and the playwright-actor appears to have been retaliation for Norris' decision to walk away from a contracted agreement to appear in an HBO pilot being produced by Rudin based on Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections. This has got to be disheartening for the Playwrights Horizons cast and director (Pam MacKinnon) currently performing Clybourne Park in what was to be its pre-Broadway run at the Mark Taper Forum, whose artistic director, Michael Ritchie, holds out hope that other producers and investors can still be found to give Norris' excellent play its moment on Broadway.

UPDATE 3/3/12: Jordan Roth, President of Jujamcyn Theatres, announced this morning that he will bring Clybourne Park to Broadway, regardless of the departure of producer Scott Rudin from the project.  

Check out the local reviews of Clybourne Park and the play it's spun from, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, produced by Ebony Repertory Theatre. For the latest New Theater Reviews, click here. For this coming weekend's Stage Listings, go to the jump.

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Ed Krieger

"Dreams of the Washer King" at Theatre 40; see the review after the jump.

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Registration is now open for the Third Annual Hollywood Fringe Festival, a noncurated open-invitation performance festival situated in Hollywood, and slated for mid-June. For more info, go to HollywoodFringe.org.

​ Also, the Festival announced yesterday that its headquarters, aka Fringe Central, will be the Open Fist Theatre, located on Santa Monica Boulevard, near El Centro Avenue.

Click here for the latest New Theater Reviews, or go to the jump; Later today, check out this week's Stage Feature comparing the interrelated plays and productions of A Raisin in the Sun and Clybourne Park -- the former a presentation of Ebony Repertory Theatre at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, the latter a Playwrights Horizons production at the Mark Taper Forum.

This week's Stage Listings coming Thursday

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Paul M. Rubenstein

Charles L. Mee's "Agamemnon," presented by City Garage

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City Garage, the Santa Monica-based experimental theater troupe now situated in Bergamot Station, is seeking ambitious and dynamic actors for an upcoming project -- a new play Charles Mee has written for the company.

​The actors are invited to participate in the company's weekend style workshops, at no charge, with the aim of casting the play later in the month. For more information contact citygarage@citygarage.org

Click here for all the latest New Theater Reviews, Also check out stage features on playwright Tanya Saracho, whose Mexican adaptation of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard opens this weekend at the Fountain Theatre, and a review of Our Town at the Broad Stage, in Santa Monica.

Click here for the weekend's stage listings, or find them after the jump.

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Courtesy Fountain Theatre

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Though Tanya Saracho is 35 and has lived in the United States since she was 12, she still isn't a citizen, holding only a green card. Deeply grateful to the United States for the life she's lived here so far, she finds the citizenship process now administered by the Department of Homeland Security a bit daunting.

​Born in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, she grew up in the adjoining border towns of Reynoso, Mexico, and McAllen, Texas; her father still works on the Mexican side. Saracho has been tentatively crossing borders ever since, including literary borders -- among contemporary Latino literature, classical Spanish plays and even Russian classics.

Hollywood's Fountain Theatre is presenting her play El Nogalar (The Pecan Orchard), based on Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, starting this week. (The play premiered last year in a joint production between Teatro Vista and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago.)

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Lew Abrahmson

"Fairy Tale Theatre, 18 and Over"

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This week's Pick goes to Inkwell Theatre Company at the Matrix Theatre in West Hollywood, and their production of Fairy Tale Theatre, 18 & Over, which Mayank Keshaviah describes as having "go-for-broke vivacity and edginess reminiscent of Monty Python."

​Also, good notices for Indedpendent Shakespeare Company's revival of its own Hamlet in Atwater Village, Open Fist Theatre's revival of Ken Ludwig's stage farce Moon Over Buffalo and Crique du Soleil's pageant about insects, Ovo performing under the Big Top next to the Santa Monica Pier.

Click here for all the latest New Theater Reviews, or go to the jump. Also check out this coming week's stage features on playwright Tanya Saracho, whose Mexican adapatation of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard opens this weekend at the Fountain Theatre, and a review of Our Town at the Broad Stage, in Santa Monica. These will be up tonight, comprehensive theater listings will be posted tomorrow.

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Irish Schneider

David L M McIntyre as the professor from the state university, and Helen Hunt in "Our Town"

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Speaking with a disgruntled colleague at Wednesday's opening of David Cromer's much anticipated, intimate staging of Our Town at Santa Monica's Broad Stage, I told him that the production recalled the movie, Vanya on 42nd Street, where actors wander in from the street to a decrepit Broadway theater for a rehearsal of Uncle Vanya (Wallace Shawn). They're all in quasi street clothes, yet as the run-through progresses, you find yourself inhabiting the world of the play in a perfect suspension of disbelief. "But that was Chekhov!" my colleague complained.

​But so is Our Town. Chekhov and Wilder were both writing at about the same time from different corners of the world, asking what people would think of their ordinary yet endearing characters in 100 or 1,000 years. And here we are, 100 years later. For reasons to be elaborated on in next week's stage feature, I found the production beautifully rendered and very moving, like a church service in a community hall. Helen Hunt, as the Stage Manager, orchestrated events with wry detachment and an unspoken compassion.

Our Town Helen Hunt stars in David Cromer's staging of Thornton Wilder's American classic. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 730 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 & 730 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Continues through Jan. 31. Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center, Broad Stage, 1310 11th St., Santa Monica, 310-434-3414, www.thebroadstage.com.

Theater Listings are back. You can also find them after the jump. Click here for the latest New Stage Reviews, Also, check out an interview Cirque du Soleil costumer Liz Vandal, and a feature on Kathleen Turner portraying muckraking journalist Molly Ivins, at the Geffen Playhouse
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The satirical satyrs of Poor Dog Group's Dyonisia

​​The venerable "best bets for the new year" critic's post always carries with it the uncertain odor of the racetrack tout. Even the seeming sure things -- the NYC-anointed, blue-chip transfers of Broadway hits -- are too often diminished by dispiriting changes in the cast or production design that can leave one wondering what all the fuss was about. Worse, invariably some inspired dark horse production will emerge in the year's homestretch to sweep the field and make liars of us all.

Those caveats aside, the following represents what promises to be, to this critic at least, the top ten no-brainer ticket wagers for L.A.'s 2012 theater season:

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"Jackie Five-Oh!"

Courtesy, Jackie Hoffman

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Our critics were in a upbeat mood this week, serving up a Pick of the Week to Jackie Hoffman's Jackie Five-Oh!" at the Gay and Lesbian Center

​, with recommendations for the Actor's Company's O(h), the production company's The Beauty Queen of Lenane (at the Lex) Days of Wine and Roses at the Lounge, and more. Click here for all New Stage Review, or after the jump 

Also, check out an interview Cirque du Soleil costumer Liz Vandal, and a feature on Kathleen Turner portraying muckraking journalist Molly Ivins, at the Geffen Playhouse

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Lloyd B. Schwartz

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Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is this week's Pick of the Week. See all New Theater reviews after the jump.

​ Also check out this week's features on John Malkovich directing Julian Sands in readings by Harold Pinter, and a review of Leslie Jordan's Fruit Fly

We learned yesterday that Dany Margolies was let go as editor of L.A. branch of Back Stage in a management trim-down. She's about as dedicated and disciplined and supportive of local theater as anybody in town. This is upsetting news for the local arts organizations.
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