Hollywood Gothique

Plays, musicals, and other live performance pieces in Los Angeles.

So, you’re Halloween high has ended, and you feel your morose soul descending into the abyss of withdrawal. The zombies have returned to their graves. The vampyres have fled to where the ghouls and Afrits rave. The restless spirits have shuttered up their haunted house. The cannibal crazies have disappeared into the maze of the backwoods. The delusions have disappeared, and the ghosts ships have all set sail. What is left? What is left?

Location: Whitmore-Lindley Theatre Center, 11006 Magnolia Boulevard, North Hollywood, CA 91601
Dates: Fridays & Saturdays, February 11 to March 19
Link out: Click here
Description: The Visceral Company presents the West Coast premiere of the play by Scotrt T. Barsotti. When a violent uprising of the undead forces two couples into hiding, infected spouses take a turn for [...]

Location: The Warner Grand Theater, 478 West 6th Street, San Pedro, CA 90731
Dates: December 21-27; no show Dec 25.
Link out: Click here
Description: The Relevant Stage returns with its “…annual holiday family tradition…”, based on Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol. A first-rate cast, carolers singing old English carols and intriguing staging bring this ultimately uplifting [...]

Location: The Warner Grand Theater, 478 West 6th Street, San Pedro, CA 90731
Dates: December 11 at 7pm, December 12 at 2pm
Description: The San Pedro City Ballet performs Tchaikovsky’s Christmas classic.

Planning your Halloween Weekend? Wondering What to do with these final days of October? Looking for something new and different? With the opening of the Theatre 68 Haunted House this past Friday, all of Los Angeles’s professional Halloween haunts are in full swing, leaving the Halloween yard haunts to dominate the concluding weekend of October, along with various horror movie screenings. Here is a rundown of Halloween events and attractions opening around Los Angeles this weekend.

Dates: October 21-31, 8pm
Location: Mountain View Mausoleum and Cemetery, 2300 Marengo Ave, Altadena, CA 91001
Description: Wicked Lit presents three short plays, based on classic literature and performed live inside an actual cemetery: THE CHIMES, THE UNAMABLE, THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO

Location: Million Dollar Theatre, 307 South Broadway, Los Angeles, 90013
Dates: October 22-23, 29-30 at 7pm
Link out: Click here
Description: The Astra Dance Company invites you to join them for this October for the debut of this new piece, which promises “a vivid performance of dance and music, telling the story of two lovers trapped by an [...]

Location: El Rey Theaer, 5515 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, 90036
Date: October 31, Halloween Night
Link out: Click here
Description: The Astra Dance Company invites you to step back in time and experience the world of Edgar Allan Poe, returned to life. They will perform “Astra,” their waltz ballet in three acts, followed by a turn-of-the-century burlesque show, [...]

Location: Westchester Playhouse, 8301 Hindry Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90045
Final Performances: Friday & Saturday, October 15 & 16 at 8pm
Description: With Halloween just around the corner, why not pop over to the Westchester Playhouse for the final performances of the Kentwood Players production of Dracula, the classic vampire play dramatized by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston? The play is billed as “fun for the whole family, suitable for ages 10 and up.” The production’s official description reads thus: “Dracula is a chilling and spooky tale about a bizarre illness fallen upon Lucy Seward, daughter to Dr. Seward, owner of an English Sanatorium in the early 1900s. Dr. Seward and Lucy’s fiancé, Jonathan Harker, call in the help of Professor Van Helsing, an expert in the macabre. Their search for answers leads them deeper and deeper into the terrors of the unknown and the unthinkable. Could a vampire be the answer to this chilling mystery?”

Ticets are $18. There is a $2-discount for students, seniors, and servicemen.

Location: The Comedy Store, 8433 Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood, CA 90069
Dates: October 8, 15, 22, 29 at midnight
Last night, the Comedy Store offered up the debut of a new attraction for Halloween 2010: Haunted Midnights, a combination of video, live performance, and a nocturnal tour of the premises. This is not a standard Halloween attraction, with a maze and monsters. The pitch is that the Comedy Store is one of the most authentically haunted locations in Los Angeles, at least in part due to its association, decades ago, with some high-profile organized crime figures, who may have rubbed out the occasional victim on the premises; the evening promises seances, paranormal research, haunted tales, and proof. Skeptics will not be surprised to learn that you do not receive the last item, nor is there a seance. Nevertheless, Haunted Midnights turns out to be a fun and fascinating piece of late-night entertainment that (if all goes well) promises to become a traditional Halloween event for years to come.

Beginning on Tuesday, December 22, the Relevant Stage continues its annual tradition of offering The Christmas Carol, a stage adaptation of Dickens’s classic story “A Christmas Carol” to families in December. Written during a time of decline in the old Christmas traditions, Dickens’s original book played a critical role in redefining the importance of Christmas [...]

NEVERMORE – an evening with Edgar Allan Poe, featuring “Prose, Poetry and Perversion” – has had its run at the Steve Allen Theatre in Hollywood extended yet again. The originally scheduled performances (ending on July 31) sold out weeks in advance, so the play was extended to August 29, then into September, and now until October 31. See below the fold for details.

Early this week we got one of two performances of iGhostat the NoHo Arts Center in North Hollywood. Although billed as a “new” musical, this updated adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s story “The Canterville Ghost” has actually been knocking around for a few years, at least according to one announcement made before the performance. The performance at NoHo was a staged reading, without sets or costumes – which is a bit disappointing, because one of the joys of the Arts Center (one of the best local theatres in Los Angeles) is the clever way they utilize their limited space (as in their production of Dracula earlier this year); however, the major of the story is conveyed through song, so even without the theatrical trappings, the cast managed to bring this ghost to life.

Star Jeffrey Combs, writer Dennis Paoli, and director Stuart Gordon – the men behind the classic horror film H.P. Lovecraft’s REANIMATOR – reteam to present this one-man play – subtitled “Prose, Poetry, and Perversion – inspired by the author of “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Raven,” and “The Black Cat.” Previously, Combs, Paoli, and [...]

Brian D. Bradley, Lisa Frerickson, Kelly Holden-Bashar, Edi Patterson, and Steve Purnick star in this revival of the 2005 musical-comedy, directed by Joel McCrary, with music by Allen Simpsno, book by Kelly Holden-Bashar & McCrary, and lyrics by “everybody.” The LA Weekly gave the original production their nod for best musical of the year and [...]

Los Angeles gets a chance to experience this eccentric production, which earned kudos during its run in New York. Offering a modern sci-fi interpretation of “La Didone,” the Worster Group takes Francesco Cavalli’s 17th-century opera, with a libretto by Francesco Busenello, and combines it with sets and costumes suggested by Mario Bava’s 1965 sci-fi horror film [...]

This is the last weekend to see the Boston Court Theatre’s premiere production of Courting Vampires, a play by Laura Schellhardt. I mentioned the play previously because I moderated a panel after the Thursday, May 21 performance, which featured guests David Ska (V is for Vampire) and Del Howison (Dark Delicacies). If you haven’t made it out yet, you really should give this one a chance.

Count Dracula is not the only vampire haunting the stage in the Los Angeles area. If you’re looking for something more modern than the old Hamilton Dean-John Balderstone play (currently wrapping up its final weekend at the NoHo Arts Center), you might be interested in this world premiere of a new play by Laura Schellhardt, [...]

Los Angeles audiences must love the undead – the NoHo Arts centered has extended their run of DRACULA once again, this time until May 17. This is a “graphic and sexually charged” staging of the classic play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, which is kind of the missing link between Bram Stoker’s novel and the Bela [...]

Since the NoHo Arts Center has extended their stage production of DRACULA until April 26, I wanted to bump up my review of the production for those who haven’t seen it and are still considering whether to attend. This is a revamped version of the old play by Hamilton Dean and John L. Balderston – [...]

 
We try to focus on events in and around Hollywood (this is Hollywood Gothique, after all), but Orange County is close enough for most Los Angeles residents to make the drive if there’s something they really, really want to see. For those who have yet to see a live production of THE PHANTOM OF THE [...]

One of our favorite haunts in 2003 was “Experiment in Terror,” a fairly unique Halloween attraction in the form of a scripted tour of a haunted house, complete elaborate mechanical effects far beyond those seen in most haunted mazes. What was nice about the show was that it was almost an interactive play, with actors [...]

Well, after watching the very first public performance of the stage musical version of THE GHOST AND MRS MUIR (reviewed here), I made the experience a perfect circle by catching the very last performance at the NoHo Arts Center this afternoon.
Most of the tiny flubs I mentioned in the initial review had been fixed: Mrs [...]