Dara Weinberg

Vonessa Martin, James C. Leary and Katie Davies The Furious Theatre Company is the luckiest little ensemble in town, having snagged a residency at the Pasadena Playhouse's balcony theatre at a time when companies are losing their spaces left and right. They've adventurously chosen to use their good fortune to explore a risky undertaking: a new adaptation and re-staging of seventeenth-century dramatist Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West, Parts I & II....

Actress and comedian Andrea Lwin puts up her one-woman show, Slanted, tonight at the Matrix Theatre in West Hollywood. Slanted is another installment in Lwin's performance series about her childhood as a Chinese Muslim girl in Florida and her struggles with her mother. The LA Weekly wrote this about her previous one-woman show, Dancing Lady: "Determined to fit into the blond beach-bunny society of 1970's Fort Lauderdale, preteen Lwin absorbs Grease, names her dog...

L to R: Janet Dulin Jones and her dog Warren, Charles Dickens, and Paul Lazarus. Writer Janet Dulin Jones has been working on a screenplay, now a play, about the life of Charles Dickens since 1990. Director and co-writer Paul Lazarus has worked with her for the past 3 years. Now they've collaborated with the Antaeus Company, Los Angeles's classical theatre ensemble (Pera Palas, Mother Courage, Chekhov x 4) to bring Dickens to the...

"I think people can be very territorial about opera and musical theatre and what they want from the respective genres. A lot of music theater people want their musicals to be in the standard form of Damn Yankees or a Rodgers and Hammerstein type musical. But if you really think about it, the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows were extremely risky and daring and are as close to being American operas as you got in...

Photo by Ibarionex Perello Bookblogger Laila Lalami of MoorishGirl will be reading from her new book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, tonight at 7:30 pm at Beyond Baroque in Venice. Lalami, although currently a SoCal expat, lived in Los Angeles for many years. She wrote this on her blog about coming back for a Duttons' reading yesterday: "I hadn't been back in Los Angeles more than an hour when a Land Rover honked at...

It's the end of October and it's time for gore. If you haven't made your Halloween plans yet, look no further - Gorey Stories, the creepy musical based on the works of macabre illustrator Edward Gorey, has been extended at the Sacred Fools Ensemble through Nov. 13. A is for Amy who fell down the stairs B is for Basil assaulted by bears C is for Clara who wasted away D is for Desmond...

Los Angeles playwright John Glore is the author of The Company of Heaven and On The Jump, among other works. His most recent piece, Preludes and Fugues, is currently playing at the Son of Semele ensemble theatre in Silver Lake. (Laist reviewed it here.) Preludes and Fugues explores the pathological, bizarre and beautiful dreams of four frustrated musicians the night before a concert. Glore has had his plays produced nationally, including at South Coast...

The Son of Semele ensemble is one place where Los Angeles theater audiences can always expect the unexpected. We were prepared for physical theatre, innovative sets, political statements, sex and poetry, when we went to see John Glore's new play Preludes and Fugues at SOSE last Monday. We didn't know we would have already seen part of the production! Glore is the author, among other works, of a strange and beautiful one-act play, What...

The 75-year old British playwright Harold Pinter, noted for the extreme brutality of his characters and the extreme pacifism of his politics, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pinter is the third playwright the committe has honored in the past 10 years. Dario Fo and Elfriede Jelinek were the other two. Pinter is the author of 29 plays. His most famous works include The Homecoming, The Caretaker, Betrayal, and The Birthday Party. The...

Just exactly what was Algernon, dapper hero of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, doing when he claimed to be off in the country "Bunburying"? According to L.A. playwright Tom Jacobson (The Orange Grove, Ouroboros), he was meeting up with his gay lover Bunbury, a character who never appears in the play. Jacobson has taken this idea and run with it to create an entire play around those less-than-famous offstage characters: Bunbury, Rosaline...