Las Vegas Spotlight: April 2009
There are lots of good music acts coming to the desert city in April. Gladys Knight will be at the Orleans April 3-5, and Debbie Reynolds will kick up her heels at the South Point Hotel and Casino April 10-12. Fall Out Boy and The Cure play the Pearl Concert Theater at the Palms on April 5 and April 17, respectively. Vegas’ own The Killers come home on April 17 to perform at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.
Abuse, incest, suicide, Boulder City cover bands … and that’s just the first play! A double bill of one acts, Bred by Erica Griffin and Terra Verde by Ernie Curcio (April 3-11), will be performed at the Katherine Gianaclis Park for the Arts on two consecutive weekends in April. Griffin and Curcio are playwrights in residence at the Park for the Arts and their combined efforts will provide one hour and 20 intermission-less minutes of entertainment for a suggested donation of $10.
Insurgo Theater will present Karel Capek’s 1922 work, The Insect Play (Onyx Theater, April 3-25), to be directed by Brandon McClenahan. The play follows a drunken young former soldier into an all consuming journey through an insect world. Tragedy gets the farcical treatment in Christopher Durang’s Titanic (April 3-12), playing in the Fischer Black Box at Las Vegas Little Theatre. Penni Mendez, Andrew Lalamas, Joe Hammond, Susannah Smitherman, Joel Wayman, and Scott Autrey play the passengers on that fateful voyage in the play, which displays Durang’s signature twisted humor and penchant for inspired silliness.
The College of Southern Nevada’s Performing Arts Center presents Edward Albee’s 2002 Tony Award-winning play, the barnyard love affair The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (April 17-26), about a married man who falls for a goat. (Really.) The production is directed by Erica Griffin and will play at the BackStage Theatre.
If you think your family is crazy, make a visit to the Las Vegas Academy and check out its production of the Kaufman & Hart classic You Can’t Take It With You (April 23-May 2), playing at the Lowden Theater for the Performing Arts. The madcap comedy, which first appeared on Broadway in 1936 and was made into a film by Frank Capra two years later, is about the oddball Sycamore family and the young man who wants to marry into it.
This month at the Reed Whipple Cultural Center, Rainbow Company children’s theater group tells the story of The Samurai & the Shadow Princess (April 3-12). The play is about a samurai who stops a rebellion, and is then offered any reward he wants from the emperor.
