Attending a play in a large, Broadway-sized theatre, the Coronet (renamed the Eugene O’Neill) say, which has a capacity of 1047 seats, puts most of the audience at some remove from the onstage action. Good actors in the old days put their training to good use projecting their voices off the back wall of the … Continue reading “All My Sons” at Pacific Resident Theatre
No matter what one thinks of the art of Andy Warhol, like for instance…”A tomato soup can? I could do that,” the fact is that, in his all too short existence, he upended conventional notions of what constitutes art, as so many artists did in the Twentieth Century—Picasso, Dali, Pollak, Rothko, and more. His … Continue reading “Andy Warhol’s Tomato” at Pacific Resident Theatre
Orson Bean’s career is extraordinary. Born in 1928 and baptized Dallas Frederick Burrows, he started performing as a child at home. After World War II, he became a magician, but soon morphed into a stand-up comic in the early 1950s. He acquired his unusual moniker after a nightclub piano player suggested some names that might … Continue reading “Alright Then” at Pacific Resident Theatre
Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, written in 1959, was produced on Broadway in 1961 with a powerhouse cast that included Eli Wallach, Zero Mostel, Anne Jackson, Morris Carnovsky, and Jean Stapleton. It garnered some glowing reviews and a few caveats. Many of us theatre types who went to college to become actors, directors and designers encountered the … Continue reading “Rhinoceros” at Pacific Resident Theatre
With its abundance of large, medium, small and tiny theatres, Los Angeles is a hotbed of brilliant, original performance, with playwrights writing, producers producing and directors directing, supported by the best designers and technicians anywhere. If an actor wants to do a show, he or she can write themselves a solo performance piece, get a … Continue reading “It’s Time” at Pacific Resident Theatre
It is always with anticipation that I look forward to a new staging of a play by Eugene O’Neill, especially one that is announced as “rarely produced.” A Touch of the Poet, written in 1943, was, according to Wikipedia, part of a projected cycle of eleven plays that would chronicle an American family starting in … Continue reading “A Touch of the Poet” at Pacific Residence Theatre
Paul Myrvold's Theatre Notes 