Friday, July 18, 2014

HOLLYWOOD FAÇADE …Hollywood



Take your favorite numbers from successful musicals, use them as the songs for a contemporary love story and voila! You’ll have a musical of your own. Wrong. It doesn’t work that way. The dynamic songs from Jekyll & Hyde, Cats, Les Miserables, Sunset Boulevard, and others, will drown out a tepid book with their passion and power. However, all the performers chosen to act out this modern love story are powerful singers and actors who are clearly ready and able to perform in these chosen musicals. 


Cynthia Caldwell
Jonathan Colunga
The love story by Randall Gray, who also directs, concerns a former Broadway star moving to Hollywood with her son, her meeting a famous film director with a daughter, the two love affairs that ensue and the question of what we sacrifice for a career. It’s a simple and familiar tale that requires songs to match not show stoppers such as these. 


Forget the loose thread that tries to make sense of these marvelous songs. They stand alone, starting with Cynthia Caldwell’s beautiful rendition of Memory, through Jonathan Colunga’s dynamic Sunset Boulevard, and then his raging duet with Beth Goldberg in It’s A Dangerous Game. Then enjoy Courtney Daniels and Michael Marchak’s delicate love duet, The Last Night of the World, and be challenged fore and aft with the entire company dramatically facing us in full voice with the rousing Façade.

Courtney Daniels
Michael Marchak

Presented by Stages of Gray Theatre Company, and produced by Mike Abramson, with superb musical direction by Denise Fuller. At Hudson Theatre, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles. Through August 24. 
Beth Goldberg

Tickets: (323) 960-7776 or online at www.plays411.com/HollywoodFacade

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