Saturday evening, I wrote:
Next up on the theatre calendar: The Last 5 Years at the Pasadena Playhouse on July 29th; “The Music Man” at Cabrillo Music Theatre on August 5th; Curtains at the Ahmanson on August 26th, and Fences (starting Laurence Fishburne and Angela Basset) at the Pasadena Playhouse on Sept. 23rd. I thought about tickets for Lucky Stiff at the Fullerton Civic Light Opera, but we can only do a Sunday matinee on 7/23, and that’s not on Goldstar (only the 7pm performance). I also am thinking about tickets to Dirty Rotten Scoundrels in Orange County in early September, but that might not pan out either (it depends if Goldstar puts them up). We might see something on vacation, depending on what is in the Sacramento or S.F. Bay area on Goldstar. Is anyone aware of half-price ticket outlets for Sacramento, as Goldstar doesn’t cover that area?
Well, thanks to Goldstar, I have another to add to the mix: Black Comedy and The Real Inspector Hound at the Rep East Playhouse in Santa Clarita on Sunday, 8/6 at 2pm.
The Real Inspector Hound is a short play by Tom Stoppard. The story line follows two theatre critics that are watching a ridiculous set-up of a country house murder mystery, in the style of a “whodunit”. By accident, they become involved in the action causing a series of events that parallel the play they are watching. It is a parody of the stereotypical “whodunnit” thriller as well as of the critics watching the play, with their personal desires and obsessions interwoven into their bombastic and pompous review.
Black Comedy is a one-act play by British dramatist Peter Shaffer (Equus). The play is a farce set in a London flat during an electrical blackout, and is written to be staged under a reversed lighting scheme: that is, the play opens with a dinner party beginning on a darkened stage, then a few minutes into the show “a fuse blows”, the stage lights come up, and the characters are seen shambling around apparently invisible to one another. The play is, suitably enough, a black comedy in which the effect loss of light would have on a group of people who all hold things from each other is explored; as such, its title is a pun.
Busy, busy, weekends.
