Ernest Kearney

HOW TO RAISE A DAUGHTER (AND YOURSELF) Woven from his essays featured in Cosmopolitan and O The Oprah Magazine, gay Armenian-American Haig “Hike” Chahinian recounts his humbling and oft-time hilarious adventures as he fumbles through fathering a bouncing biracial baby girl. A compassionate contemplation of all the hardships and hazards the heart is willing to endure for the joy of…

A DUPLEX THAT’S GOING TO THE DOGS Those who flocked to the “Sunshine State” during the population boom of the 1920s and ’30s, were mostly “easterners” who had only known tenement living, cut off from the world outside on the upper floors of some aging brownstone and reduced to the numbers of their apartment door….

A NEW MUSICAL HAS ARRIVED TO PUMP UP PATRONS FOR DECADES TO COME Allen Moyle’s 1990 film Pump Up the Volume starred Christian Slater as Mark, a graceless, socially awkward high school student in Phoenix, Arizona, a town so conservative that even the Saguaro cactus wore Bush/Quayle campaign buttons. Unable to fit in, Mark resorts…

PIPPIN GOES HOLLYWOOD Pippin, with music and lyrics supplied by Stephen Schwartz,  and book penned by Roger O. Hirson  (who was best known for writing the script to the war flick The Bridge at Remagen) may have been an oddity when it opened on Broadway in 1972, given the choice of the central character, but…

A REQUIEM FOR THE ERASED Written and directed by Soo Chyun, To Be Liberated is perhaps the most exquisite show the Hollywood Fringe has to offer. Running a mere half an hour, there is a clarity and brevity that complement each other while strengthening the production as a whole. It is August 15, 1945, the…

FIRE AND BRIMSTONE FATIGUE One must admire Antony Zioni for his aspirations with Tales of the Ancient East, which, regrettably, makes the failure of this production all the more lamentable. Tales of the Ancient East is a tribal experience. Entering the Hudson Guild Theatre one is confronted by an environment cloaked in a primitivism that…

A GAME OF HEARTS PLAYED FACE DOWN There is no question that Ann Noble is one of the most talented actresses gracing the stages of Los Angeles. There are moments in her bitter-sweet, two-person clown show 52 Pick-Up at the Broadwater Studio, where this shines through. However, the show itself does not work. At the…

ALL IN ONE AND ONE IN ALL With Except Myself at the Broadwater Black Box, playwright Drew Petriello has achieved a clever, slick, and absolutely entertaining deconstruction of the solo show concept. Using the template of the classic absurdist play Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello, Petriello has fashioned his own “five…

THE GOOD ANDREW BYRON CREATES A LONG AND WINDING RUSSIAN Andrew Byron frames his one man show The Good Russian within the historical context of 2018, when Sergei Skripal, a Russian expatriate who had worked as a double agent for MI6, the British Intelligence Agency, was found poisoned along with his daughter in his home in…

PULP FRICTION Reservoir Dolls is a witty, sharp satire of several sociological concerns currently occupying center stage in the cultural consciousness of both “tinsel town” and the nation: the exploitation of women in films and their limited access to roles in an image-driven industry; the institutional gender inequality and barriers facing women in the studio…

SHAKESPEARE GOES BRAT PACK The trouble with tribute plays is that not all audiences are necessarily as knowledgeable about the subject of the homage as the creators are.  In the case of Phil S. Gould’s faux Shakespearian The Club of Broken Fasts, the object of his retooling is the 1985 coming-of-age teen comedy-drama The Breakfast…

THE BIG SLEEP MEETS BIG QUESTIONS IN MR. BIG “Mr. Big” is the final entry in Woody Allen’s Getting Even (1971), his first published collection of 17 tales and essays, most of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. The main character in “Mr. Big” reflects a recurring motif for Allen: Sam Spade. Kaiser Lupowitz,…

NOT ENOUGH HEAT The Second Coming of Joan of Arc is the best-known work of American playwright, author, and lesbian feminist Carolyn Gage. Loosely based, scholars will tell you, “very loosely,” on the history of the teenage “Maid of Orléans,” who led the French armies to a series of victories over those of the English…

SEA WORTHY Wilds of Sea is an undersea adventure that will leave little ones wide-eyed and utterly captivated. But make no mistake—this all-ages puppet spectacle is as enchanting for the grown-ups as it is for the kids. Directed by Shannon Reagan, who also built the stunning life-sized puppets, Wilds of Sea follows a mischievous seal…

THIS SHOW NEEDS A LOTTA LENYA I always look forward to the shows of Shelley Cooper at the Hollywood Fringe. They are musical biographies of women who made history not only with their presence but with their voices as well; La Divina: The Last Interview of Maria Callas and Jenny Lind Presents P.T. Barnum were…

SQUEEZABLE THEATER Those dark days all seem so long ago. The face masks, drive-thru testing, fear of crowded indoor spaces, and some idiot assuring us, “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” Yes, I’m talking COVID-19, which in 2020 spread worldwide, causing global shortages in ventilators, vaccines,…

Unlike his previous shows at The Hollywood Fringe — Spank the Monkey and Shagadelic: The Origins of Slang Words for Doing It — Michael Blaha has shed his stage persona of Professor Richard Fondler and presents himself in the aptly named Mike Blaha: International Joke. In taking this step, Blaha has proven what was already obvious:…

FEMINIST CLOWNS COLLIDE WITH CAPITOLISM Clownish perfection poses a unique problem for reviewers in that the blend of Da-Da slapstick and rib-tickling existentialism tends to defy easy description, in that they tell stories that go beyond language. I’ve always suspected the reason for this is that in our evolution, “clowning†preceded language. Holy, Holy: The…