USTheater is devoted to plays, operas, and performances, American and international, performed and published in the United States. We also are open to new plays by playwrights. All materials are copyrighted as noted. The blog is edited and much of it written by Douglas Messerli
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
Juan Gabriel singing "Amour Eterno"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgKqxLAhRKE
尾崎豊 僕が僕であるために(87年 有明コロシアム Ozaki Yutaki song [link]
Another song my popular Japanese pop singer Ozaki Yutaka: go here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUL2tXHDxM0
Monday, August 29, 2016
Douglas Messerli | "Asking Questions" (on Tom Jacobson's Captain of the Bible Quiz Team)
Jacobson’s play, with the major role of Landry Sorenson alternating between four actors (two of them women, one black male, and white male; the performance I saw was with Mark Jacobson, no relation to the playwright) takes place in a number of Lutheran churches throughout the city (the performance I saw was at Jacobsen’s own church, the gay friendly Lutheran Church of the Masters in Los Angeles) with a real organist, a program that mimics Sunday Church bulletins, and with the audience itself serving as interactive congregants. Like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, some audience members were asked ahead of time to take on small roles throughout the play, and at the end, each attendee was named and asked to stand in a final act of unexpected support for the young preacher—not yet ordained as a full pastor—who has just declared he has lost his faith.
I am what you might describe as a cynical non-believer (I too, however, was brought up as a Lutheran before my family turned to the Presbyterian Church—which I am sorry to say took even longer than the Lutherans to accept the LBGTQ community). I didn’t even bother to attend the Jello-mold party next to the church at play’s end—although I did sing along with the well-known hymns before each sermon.
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Peter Allen | "I Go to Rio" [link]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCYxTg6svXg
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Douglas Messerli | "Going Nowhere" (on David Greenspan's "Go Back to Where Your Are")
going nowhere
by
Douglas Messerli
David
Greenspan Go Back to Where You Are / Los Angeles, Odyssey Theatre
Ensemble, the performance I saw was on Sunday, August 14, 2016
Indeed, Bernard begins the play commenting, as the playwright, “This is
kind of a weird play”; and throughout characters, as in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange
Interlude, take time out to speak asides to the audience. Some figures
stand in frieze while others come and go. And one character, improbably sent by
God from ancient Greece, who admits to the uncontemporary moniker of Passalus
(John Fleck), also transforms himself from time to time into an elderly female
actress, Mrs. Simmons, allowing for the actor to quick switch personas and
demonstrate his acting skills. Fleck was excellent in the role, but I would
have loved to have seen Greenspan himself, one of New York’s very best actors
who has often done female impersonations on stage, act the role as he did in
the 2011 Playwrights Horizons production.