You'd think that with 7 or so shows a week, I'd get enough theater in my diet, but as I'm clipping the news each morning for ATW, I generally have something on in the background. In the past few days, it's not been music or the morning news (love my BBC World News), but instead, it's been a couple of plays. Yes, the good folks at L.A. Theatre Works have just released two of their newest titles, and I've been savoring a new American work (that has yet to make it to New York) and a German classic.
The former is Melinda Lopez's Sonia Flew, which has been seen regionally, and is a touching look at a woman who's coming to grips with having left Cuba as a girl, even as her son joins the U.S. military in the days following 9/11. The show's gotten some pretty incredible reviews along the way, and from the recording from LATW, you can understand why, particularly with performances from the likes of Philip Casnoff, Hector Elizondo and Elizabeth Peña.
The other show that I've enjoyed over the past couple of days is a new translation of Bertolt Brecht's The Life of Galileo. The new English text comes from David Hare and film and stage actor Stacy Keach plays the title role in this classic. "Galileo" features a large company of performers and the action tends to be a bit sprawling, which could make it somewhat difficult to translate to a purely aural experience. Wisely, director Marvin Jarvis employed himself as a narrator for the production, making the action of the piece completely lucid on this often thrilling two-disc set.
QUICK LINK: http://www.latw.org/
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