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“Bad Bobbi Bolingo & the Dinosaur Cave" and “Amelia Learns to Fly” at EdgeFest’s Future Project
Who Says:
Mark Share
Topic:
Theater Review
Place:
Downtown LA


10/20/2005
The 18 day Edge of the World Festival included four plays for children, grouped as the “Future Project,” designed to bring kids to the theater and show them that theater has meaning in their lives. The first part of the equation is problematic, because kids don’t get to the theater alone, so there must be some appeal to the grownups who pay (well, these performances were free), drive, and sit through the shows with them. The second part of the equation is even more problematic, because there’s no reason to suppose that kids are any more interested in having their entertainment weighed down with “meaning” than grownups are.

So, bringing three kids of various ages with me, I attended two of the shows. Bobbi Bolingo, created by the Towne Street Theatre, tells of a naughty girl who dreams that dinosaurs will eat her unless she stops being rude to her parents and physically hurting other kids etc. She awakes with a new-found sense of personal responsibility. The author has proclaimed that this show may prevent kids from becoming teen killers. Hmm. These are both low expectations of kids and high expectations of art. The actors, who hammed it up, kept the kids in the audience smiling and entertained. But this crude book of virtues with its message of behave or be eaten made little impression. Certainly, not as much of an impression on my test audience as the contemporaneous revival of Annie at the Pantages, with its musical story of the moppet rising from the bottom to the top, the very sort of entertainment that Future Project is trying to supplant with its “meaning.”

The second show, created by the MET Theatre, tells the entire life story of aviatrix Amelia Earhart in less than an hour, chronologically. The play was inspired by the statue of Earhart at the North Hollywood Public Library at the corner of Magnolia and Tujunga created by Ernest Shelton. I am a big fan of the sculpture, surrounded by a circle of propellers standing on end, as I spent much time at the house on Ben Avenue when I was kid while Shelton created it out of fiberglass (it has since been recast in bronze). I recommend taking kids to see the sculpture and then visiting the library. The play itself is probably not as educational or fun. Basically, a diluted play for adults, it reaches its heights in dramatizing Earhart’s transatlantic flights, and its low when the actor playing her father makes a maudlin confession – to the audience – that he was a drunk (the kids initially laughed thinking it was a joke), and virtually and misguidedly ignores her final Icarus-like flight around the globe during which she tragically and mysteriously disappeared, and became an immortal celebrity. I suppose that the author thought that dramatizing the last doomed trip would undermine the message that kids can do anything; there’s the message sinking the art again.

Amelia Learns To Fly
Pictured: Joseph Beck, Jamie Silberhartz
Photo by: Craig Wadlin




Bad Bobbi Bolingo & the Dinosaur Cave
photo courtesy Edgefest website


The really gripping and cautionary experience for the kids lies just outside the Los Angeles Theatre Center -- the short but adventurous transit down a graffiti-inscribed elevator in the adjacent parking structure, past homeless men kept at bay by uniformed guards, to the sanctuary of the theater doors.

Future Project at EdgeFest. October 15, 2005. Future performances as determined by the theater companies involved.

--Mark Share (mshare@eyespyla.com)



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Music in Los Angeles

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05/29/2006 - BURBANK by Mark Share: OKLAHOMO! AT THE THIRD STAGE. Only half a year after its premiere, Oklahomo! has returned, revised. What was said on this website last August still holds true, with a few happy improvements. The same performers (plus Julie Brown!) are on hand, but Tanner is now trim and Tad Coughenour has cut his hair short. Maile Flanagan and Mary Scheer are over-wound springs of comic hysteria. The formerly trudging opening now zooms along. It’s still about a disastrous show within a show, but which, unlike ......Oklahomo! - Revisited
Theater in Los Angeles

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04/28/2006 - WEST LA by Mark Share: If you have followed the trajectory of the Geffen over the years, from the first season’s motif of a naked man in each production, to years of decent shows interspersed with inconsequential plays and inconsistent productions, then you will be gratified to know that now, in the Spring of 2006, the stars have aligned and the Geffen’s presentation of Arthur Miller’s first popular and critical success, All My Sons, is a more perfect union of vital play and sensational production than you have ev ......ALL MY SONS at the Geffen Playhouse
Theater in Los Angeles

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04/21/2006 - HOLLYWOOD by Mark Share: EVERYMAN FOR HIMSELF AT THE UNKNOWN THEATER. Nearly a play without words, the wonderful new show Everyman plays like an updated Charlie Chaplin silent film, with our rumpled everyman (an outstanding Michael Gallagher) set upon by the arbitrary mechanics of our modern culture, and steering his own course and finding, despite all odds, romantic love. In place of dialogue (well there is some), the author, director and choreographer, Ameenah Kaplan, tells the story through music, movement, dance, a ......EVERYMAN FOR HIMSELF at the Unknown Theater
Things to do in Los Angeles

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03/31/2006 - UNIVERSAL CITY by Mark Share: KCRW’S SOUNDS ECLECTIC EVENING (March 26, 2006) at the Gibson Amphitheatre. The pun is gone—Mourning Becomes Electra to Morning Becomes Eclectic to Sounds Eclectic Evening—but the fun was there on Saturday night at KCRW’s annual low-key concert for grownups. A little higher ticket price gets you drinks and food at the after party or, for more money, even during the show. And much of the ticket price is tax deductible; if that doesn’t say “concert for grownups” what does? So that teens di ......KCRW’S SOUNDS ECLECTIC EVENING
Music in Los Angeles

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03/24/2006 - CULVER CITY by Mark Share: THE STONES at the Kirk Douglas Theatre Bad bored boys are the subject of this boisterous production that should more than satisfy the teen audience that the Center Theatre Group is reaching out to through its youth theatre program, called P.L.A.Y (Performing for Los Angeles Youth). This Australian import (that’s why the title is Stones and not Rocks) concerns a pair of boys, ages 13 and 15, and how they come to pitch rocks from an overpass, killing a motorist. The two actors (Joe Hernandez-Kol ......THE STONES at the Kirk Douglas Theatre
Theater in Los Angeles

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03/20/2006 - WEST HOLLYWOOD by Mark Share: THE ITALIAN IN ME at the Globe Playhouse. Dina Morrone fast engages the audience with her one-woman show; she’s likable and funny in her story of a sexy would-be starlet who ventures, from the care of her Italian immigrant grandparents in rural Canada, to Rome in search of stardom. In the year and a half since I saw Morrone in a workshop version of this show, she has wonderfully enhanced and connected the main scenes with themes dealing with fertility, mortality, and the Italian in her. Still ......THE ITALIAN IN ME at the Globe Playhouse
Theater in Los Angeles

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03/15/2006 - HOLLYWOOD by Mark Share: Preview of PILGRIM at the Ricardo Montalban Theatre (formerly the Doolittle and the Huntington Hartford). In a step forward for LA theater, a new musical is premiering at a major stage. Pilgrim, which is not about Thanksgiving, promises to be an over-the-top experience with song, dance, acrobatics, a martial artist on stilts, and a rolling three-story set. The setting is medieval fantasy. The music is pop rock. The show seems ready for Xbox 360. The producers proudly offered reviewers a preview ...... PILGRIM at the Ricardo Montalban Theatre
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