Bill Raden

Director Jaime Robledo

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Inside East Hollywood's Sacred Fools Theatre on a recent Sunday afternoon, actor Donal Thoms-Capello is capering through a bizarre step of percussive, deliberate foot stomps, which alternate with clanking sound effects.

"No," a voice from the gloom interrupts, "there are three clanks." A shadow makes its way to the stage where, under the lights, it takes on the lanky features of writer-director Jaime Robledo, who sidles up to Thoms-Capello and a stagehand pantomiming a Coney Island carousel to demonstrate: "So the first one should be bang [stomp], bang [stomp], and you can both laugh." Thoms-Capello and Robledo both let out a laugh in time with the final stomp.

The step being rehearsed is part of a runaway-carousel scene, ripped from Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, for Robledo's new show, Watson and the Dark Art of Harry Houdini, beginning June 21. It is the kind of big, Broadway-grade spectacle on a small-stage budget that has given Robledo a reputation as the poor man's Julie Taymor -- the director who can stage the impossible.

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Kevin Scanlon

Derek DelGaudio (left) and Helder Guimarães

In November, L.A. Weekly ran a cover story on Helder Guimarães and Derek DelGaudio, two L.A. magicians who created the most popular show at the Magic Castle in years, and then transferred it to the Geffen Playhouse. Along the way they got help from Magic Castle President Neil Patrick Harris, who directed the Geffen show.

Now that the four-month Geffen run has ended, we sat down with the pair to debrief the experience. (And in case you missed the show, you might not have to worry -- they're currently in negotiations to bring it to New York.)

After closing night in March, the pair felt a bit of withdrawal. "The first day I was supposed to do the show, but didn't, at the time of the show I started to feel an adrenaline rush, some anxiety," DelGaudio says.

It affected Guimarães's body, too -- he started only sleeping four hours a night. "This is my logic: When you go on stage, there is this kind of energy that you consume doing the show," Guimarães says. "Your body needs to rest more." That means that "after this show closes, I only needed four hours of rest to be okay."

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Kat Hess

Michal Sinnott and Christopher Illing in Tommy Smith's "White Hot," The Vagrancy at Theatre Asylum

It's Fringe, Fringe and more Fringe festival coverage this week in new theater reviews (see below) and this week's theater feature. There will be a bit more Fringe coverage next week, but we'll also be turning our attention to some deserving productions that got pushed to the Fringes by the Fringe.

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Image courtesy Actors Company

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*10 Best Stand-Up Comedy Shows in Los Angeles
*12 Comedy Acts to Watch in 2013
*Our Latest Theater Reviews

The 2013 Hollywood Fringe Festival is upon us, which means drama, stand-up, improv, music, socializing and lots and lots of one-person shows are headed to the area around Santa Monica Blvd. and Vine St.

Here are previews of 10 of the most intriguing-sounding shows on the festival's roster based on their descriptions. Check back here in a couple days for our critics' reviews of the actual shows they saw during previews this past week.

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Ruffin Entertainment

Odell Ruffin

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*Our Latest Theater Reviews
*Why Tupac's Legacy Endures

Odell Ruffin is not the first playwright to tell the story of Tupac Shakur on stage. Ruffin's play A Tupac Tale, set to bow in L.A. for the first time to commemorate what would be Shakur's 42nd birthday, is one of at least three stage works about the late rapper. It is, however, the only work to follow Shakur through one of the darkest periods of his life: his trial for rape in 1993.

Ruffin first appeared as Shakur in an early version of Tale, then a one-man show, at Howard University in 2009. Since then, she show has evolved several times over, most recently for the play's West Coast bow later this week (starring Calvin C. Winbush in the title role).

Ruffin spoke with L.A. Weekly about the newest version of the show and why Shakur remains an iconic figure years after his death.

How does making Shakur's rape trial the focus affect the play?

It's the part that people don't necessarily pay attention to, that they often overlook. ... It gives people a chance to look a little bit deeper into the case. ... We try not to make it this model character, but a man, going through what everyone else would be going through during a trial, having that possibility of going to prison.

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Tessie Navarro

L.A.'s Gay Pride Festival (2012 edition pictured above) is one of the many festive options for Angelenos this week.

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*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*Our Latest Theater Reviews

Feeling the need to get out and do something different? Perhaps with large swaths of similarly-interested people? L.A. is going positively festival-crazy this week, with three different fests set to begin -- and none of them are of the musical variety.

Whether you're happiest with a wine glass in your hand, a theater geek, proud to be LGBT or all of the above, you're likely to love what L.A. is serving up this week. After hitting up a festival or three, take in some hip-hop dance theater or curl up with a few new books you just found on sale to relax.

5. A Jug of Wine (and Thou?)
A glass of wine goes well with many things: food, heartbreak, good company and, most of all -- more wine. Test your love for the glorious liquid at LAWineFest, a two-day event with wine, food trucks, craft brews and more. Expect L.A.'s usual roster of hipsters and foodies, along with oenophiles old and new. Between sips, boost your knowledge about everything from wine-and-cheese pairings to what it takes to own a winery, straight from California winemakers. Each year wine lovers can learn about significant wine locales -- this year it's the Rioja region in Spain. Saturdays fill up more quickly, but either day you will get the most out of the festival if you park yourself right outside the gates before they open: You know you want first dibs on everything. Raleigh Studios, 5300 Melrose Ave., Larchmont; Sat., June 8, 2-6 p.m.; Sun., June 9, noon-5 p.m.; seminars free (seating limited), admission $85 singles, $155 couples, $20 designated drivers. lawinefest.com. -- Eva Recinos

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Craig Schwartz

The ensemble of The Scottsboro Boys -- a minstrel show about the Jim Crow era

Kander & Ebb's musical The Scottsboro Boys, a Broadway-import minstrel show about Jim Crow, rolled into the Ahmanson and grabbed this week's pick. Good notices also for Zayd Dohrn's immigration saga Long Way Go Down at the Art of Acting Studio, and for the silly Aussie import Priscilla Queen of the Desert at the Pantages.  See below for all the latest new theater reviews and local theater listings.

This week's theater feature takes a newsy look at how the fledgling real estate boom has lowered the boom on two Hollywood theater companies that may soon to be homeless: Open Fist Theatre Company and The Celebration Theatre. The culprit: rising rents that are increasingly unaffordable for even our most established smaller theater companies.

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Jim Cox

Tim Martin Gleason and Chandrea Lee Schwartz

"I'm not a stalker," trills Annie (Chandra Lee Schwartz) in Sleepless in Seattle: The Musical, after she's flown across the country to stand outside the houseboat of widowed father Sam (Tim Martin Gleason), whom she's never met. Debatable. But to cut down on the creep factor, Jeff Arch, Ben Toth and Sam Forman's several-years-in-production adaptation of the classic Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan romance (inspired by its spirit animal An Affair to Remember, which was in turn a riff on 1939's Love Affair) has made several small tweaks to the script.

No longer is Annie a swoony romantic who falls for Sam after hearing his son call into a national advice show to find his dad a wife. Now she's a sensible reporter thrust on a plane by her boss/best friend (Sabrina Sloan), who demands she track down the story -- and go on a date with the guy. Ladies, if your single, meddling, unlucky-in-love-herself BFF insists that dumping your fiancé for a stranger "doesn't sound crazy at all," she's nuts.

This year, Sleepless in Seattle turns 20. Flirtation has changed. Today, Annie and Sam -- and especially Sam's obsessive son, Jonah (a bold Joe West) -- would have Googled each other in five minutes and Sam's radio nickname #SleeplessInSeattle would be a trending topic on Twitter. When Annie watches Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember and sighs, "You can't make this movie today," she could be talking about the one she's in.

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NASA

Lisa Nowak on top of the world

"I've come to believe that all theater is 'experimental theater,'" declares Los Angeles stage auteur Joseph Tepperman. "But I don't know -- there's a problem with using that word because then people expect Robert Wilson, they expect something avant-garde with a capital A, capital G."

Tepperman and his friend, collaborator and composer, David Dominique, are sitting before Son of Semele Theater's bare stage, attempting to describe the indescribable. Which is to say, they are talking about Starcrosser's Cut, their latest foray into a dramatic topology of philosophy, political history, recent news headlines and music all stamped with a sophisticated irony and surrealism that has become the pair's most recognizable signature.

"We're going to be up there," Dominique says, pointing to a low-ceilinged curtained loft above the upstage wall. "That's the plan, at least. We're going to try and set that up on, I guess, that's tomorrow. So this curtain that you see up there will be half-drawn and I'll be conducting from the closest corner there."

It frankly seems unlikely that in the next two weeks, a show of Starcrosser's Cut's intellectual scope and aesthetic ambition will somehow spring to life with rehearsed actors and musicians and a fully realized production design in time for the scheduled opening. But the pair has pulled off more spectacular challenges in the past.

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Bill Raden

Moving Arts' Sara Wagner & Lee Wochner

Theater is ephemeral. No matter how transformative or transcendent or thrillingly hair-raising a particular production might be, unlike a TV show or a movie or a YouTube clip, once the final curtain has been rung down on a live performance, nothing remains but a program, a few faded production stills and perhaps a handful of wistful memories.

You simply had to be there. Well, almost.

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Moving Arts Theatre is giving Los Angeles stage audiences the unique opportunity to experience 20 original plays that the company produced as world premieres over the past two decades. Called 20/20 Vision: Selected Plays, the ambitious retrospective season launched two weeks ago with director (and the season's artistic producer) Sara Wagner's highly praised revival of The Size of Pike, first produced by the Silver Lake-based company in 1996.

Written by Moving Arts' Founding Artistic Director Lee Wochner, Pike is merely the first of 20/20's ambitious slate of 15 full productions -- both onstage and in various site-specific shows around town -- and five fully rehearsed and directed staged readings that have been selected by Wagner as a one-of-a-kind, season-length portrait of the company's remarkable artistic legacy.

L.A. Weekly recently sat down with Wagner and Wochner, who spoke about the ambitions behind both 20/20 and the company that the season represents.

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