Live Performance

Mention the words “The Laughing Cow” and most people think of a cartwheel of tasty, mid-priced soft cheese. But presently, at least through May 20, this is also the name of a play being performed at the Meta Theatre on Melrose.

Hollywood Patch guest editor James F. Mills caught up with the work’s author, Jessica Abrams. Formerly an assistant on the Disney lot, she sourced her experiences at the Mouse House for a comedy set at fictional Gurnsey Studios, where a gay attorney gets in trouble for writing a pamphlet:

“I first got the idea when working at Disney,” said Abrams, a New York City native who was raised in Chapel Hill, NC. “I was walking back to my car and this idea came to me. I felt like it was a way to express a lot of the frustration I had working there and the weirdness all around.”

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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

KCET is back on the national radar for the first time since going rogue and breaking away from the PBS umbrella. The station just announced that Your Turn to Care, hosted by Holly Robinson Peete, has landed a national syndication deal with American Public Television–the first major syndication deal of KCET’s solo era. The show, which focuses on the true life stories of baby boomers caring for elderly family members, will be seen on more than 70 stations throughout the country.

In case you were out, here’s Jimmy Kimmel‘s monologue from the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

How do you think the ABC late night talk show host did? There were some awkward moments at times but Kimmel pulled no punches.

Politico.com’s Patrick Gavin traveled to LA this week to talk to Jimmy Kimmel ahead of the talk show host’s weekend assignment as MC of the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

Kimmel says he checked in with several of the event’s previous hosts including Seth Myers and Stephen Colbert. Everyone has told him that the key to success is getting the President to laugh. As goes the POTUS, so goes the crowd.

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One of the great things about Jason Reitman‘s “Live Read” series for Film Independent at LACMA is that the all-star sessions are never filmed or recorded for Internet posterity. It’s all about the audience surrendering to a live-performance moment. To bring that point home last night, curator Elvis Mitchell donned a pair of sunglasses and jokingly warned that anyone caught using a Smartphone in the audience would get a painful, personal visit from Laurence Fishburne.

Fishburne (pictured), seated center stage, was riveting as Mr. White, cranking out the first pair of Reservoir Dogs reading highlights: the injured-partner-in-the-car scene with Mr. Orange (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and the soulful significant-others discussion with jewelry store heist organizer Joe (Chi McBride). Bookending the all-black cast last night was Reitman, stage-left, who reads the script scene set-up info, and his Young Adult co-star Patton Oswalt, stage-right, who donned several comic relief hats as a radio DJ, policeman and more.

Terrence Howard put his own, seductive spin on the role of psychopath Mr. Blonde, played so memorably in the film by Michael Madsen. He also got one of the biggest laughs of the night when he came to page 59 and, in response to Reitman’s stage direction, told the audience, “I wasn’t ready to die yet.” Reitman quickly adjusted, expanding Quentin Tarantino‘s words to indicate a longer, drawn out death scene.

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On February 5, stand-up comic, actress and reality TV personality Suzanne Whang will open her one-woman show Cracked Open: Let Go & Let Gook at Beyond Baroque in Venice. As is customary with these sorts of things, she is trying to drum up some excitement and ticket sales with an advance press release that includes some heady praise:

Jim Vallely, co-executive producer and writer of Arrested Development: “This is the most powerful piece of theatre I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Tom Bergeron, Dancing with the Stars and America’s Funniest Home Videos: “Bold, funny, and committed on stage. Actually, she should probably just be committed.”

Tracy Newman, founding member of The Groundlings: “Here’s how funny, beautiful and smart Suzanne Whang is: She has cancer and I’m jealous of her.”

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Fun story today in Texas regional newspaper The Monitor by Brandon R. Garcia.

His subject is former local Tanya Saracho, who went on to garner acclaim as a playwright in Chicago and whose work El Nogalar is about to open in LA. Garcia recounts how Windy City folk thought Saracho was “loco” to turn down an opportunity four years ago to to meet with west coast reps for a major cable network, to discuss writing for a TV series.

Instead, Saracho held firm that she needed to continue working on her writing in Chicago. Only her tarot card reader was with her, and four years later, it has all lined up with as predicted:

“My señora told me, ‘Don’t worry … it will come back around again,’ said Saracho. Last week, Saracho left McAllen-Miller International Airport after a holiday stay in the [Rio Grande] Valley on a plane bound for Los Angeles, where she’ll be for at least the next few months…

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Last Friday, LA Weekly city chronicler Dennis Romero posted a preview item about “Occupy Skid Row,” a free Sunday concert event in downtown LA organized by Public Enemy.

In his piece, Romero noted that the event lacked proper permitting for a concert performance and also questioned the happening’s confusing connection to the broader Occupy movement. Supporters of PE front man Chuck D, as well as D himself, did not take kindly to the tone of the article. This afternoon, after six updates to the original article, various reader comments and some angry back-and-forth tweets, Romero sums up the brouhaha that ensued and this final Twitter volley:

After Chuck D accused me of being a tool of corporate media, I had to point out that he had hired a lying corporate publicist and is, as far as we can tell, a member of the so-called 1 percent of American income-earners that are the ire of the Occupy nation.

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We already knew about the imminent opening of a third Laugh Factory in Chicago later this month. But FishbowlLA had no idea just how expansive the future plans of owner Jamie Masada (pictured) are.

Per a USA TODAY article about the healthy resurgence of comedy across all media, Masada is aiming to soon be bi-coastal and international with his brand-name stand-up comedy franchise. Along with the original Sunset Blvd. location, opened in 1979, and a Long Beach branch christened in 2008, here’s what the comedy entrepreneur has up his sleeve:

Masada has constructed a humor empire that’s embraced magazines, radio, TV, films and cyberspace. But his focus is on bricks-and-mortar comedy clubs, with plans to open a Laugh Factory in Las Vegas, Boston and Boca Raton by year’s end, followed by ventures in other U.S. cities, Great Britain, Australia and India.

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When Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood honeymooned in 1957, they traveled by train to the Atlantic Ocean community of Stuart, Florida, where they planned to go fishing. But as the actor recalls in his 2009 autobiography Pieces of My Heart, it was a bust.

“Stuart was terrible, totally unromantic,” he writes. “We were there only a couple of nights; then we got on a train and went to New York, to the Sherry-Netherland.”

Next week, Wagner will be back in Stuart for “A Conversation with Robert Wagner,” a special December 13-15 retrospective series organized by Lyric Theatre executive director John Loesser. To promote his first public appearance since the Wood drowning investigation was re-opened, the actor chatted via email with the Treasure Coast Palm newspaper.

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