Put a Little Drama in your Life
Pat Launer, Center Stage on KSDS JAZZ88 June 26, 2015 Anyone who thinks a 58 year-old musical won’t resonate should consult the daily news. There are still street gangs, and violent turf battles. One line in “West Side Story” says it all, chillingly. The hardened New York cop snarls at the Puerto Rican kid: “I’ve got the badge and you’ve got the skin.” Tell me that’s not relevant. Fortunately, love still crosses impossible boundaries and fosters Read More →
PAT LAUNER TIMES OF SAN DIEGO 6/22/15 Becky Shaw isn’t the lead character in the dark comedy that bears her name. But she may be the most enigmatic. Is she just a loser, an awkward, often inappropriate, sadsack single woman who’s seen more than her share of misery? Or is she a grasper (like Becky Sharp, the Thackeray character from “Vanity Fair” who inspired her), a con artist and consummate manipulator? Even the ambiguous final moment doesn’t provide Read More →
Pat Launer, Center Stage on KSDS JAZZ88 June 19, 2015 “Welcome to the Rock!” That’s how The Islanders spread their arms to you in the first moments of the magnificent new musical, “Come From Away.” It’s the same open-hearted spirit, that small-town sense of community and proud survival at “the edge of the world,” that the residents offer to all those non-locals who ‘come from away.’ Gander is an airport outpost on the island of Newfoundland, which was Read More →
PAT LAUNER TIMES OF SAN DIEGO 6/16/15 If you wanna get “All Shook Up,” you’ll have to hightail it over to Vista, where hips are swiveling and forbidden love is blooming. “All Shook Up” is a 2005 jukebox musical (with an actual jukebox onstage!) that borrows 25 songs from Elvis’ films and recordings. As usual in these cases, a story is uncomfortably grafted onto the music (book-writer Joe DiPietro won a Tony for “Memphis”). Here, slipped into the mix are Read More →
PAT LAUNER TIMES OF SAN DIEGO 6/14/15 There’s text… and there’s subtext. Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” is all subtext. On the surface, the conversations seem terse, minimalist, a series of trivial near-non sequiturs. But the real drama is roiling underneath: layers of deception and multiple levels of disloyalty. Beneath those quotidian lines, within those famous Pinterian pauses, are all the real feelings, the genuine emotions: the rage, the disillusionment, the fear of loss or change, the self-doubt, the sour hopelessness. This Read More →
PAT LAUNER TIMES OF SAN DIEGO 6/14/15 Billie Holiday had a right to sing the blues – though she considered herself a jazz singer. At least that’s what she tells us in “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill,” Lanie Robertson’s 1986 biographical concert/play that’s set in a seedy South Philly club in 1959. This was her final performance; Billie died three months later. Her early (and later) life was something of a disaster, as she relates in 85 Read More →