Saturday, Sep 20th 2014 ~ The Woody Guthrie Show

Visit http://www.theatricum.com for tickets

 

 

 

 

Click here to visit website

LEAR

“CRITIC’s CHOICE… Geer’s title role performance [rivals] the best male interpreters in intensity and heartbreak… Her harrowing storm scene traversing the front and rear of the venue is a high point in the staging’s spectacular use of its outdoor canyon environs.” — Los Angeles TimesFull Review Here“A revitalized statement on female authority, oedipal succor and the tragedy of enlightenment… the layers create a new tragedy as it plays out with subtle alterations…  a 360 degree swivel in your seat, visually entertaining ride… Ellen Geer at her best… King Lear is dead. Long live the Queen!”  — Eye Spy LAFull Review Here

“Striking.. Ellen Geer is formidable… the natural elements create an imposing presence in the usually peaceful glen.” — Shakespeare In LA
Full Review Here“BRILLIANT… In a society which is inching ever closer to race, religious and gender equality, not to mention equal pay for equal work, a female Lear just makes sense…this “Lear” stays true to the playwright’s intention, motivation and language mainly by staying true to itself… touch[es] on the human condition like a rainbow touches air.” – NoHoArtsDistrict.comFull Review Here“ENTHRALLING. the great performances heightened by the beauty of the venue… the gender reversal…  makes this production fresh and interesting, ”– Examiner.comFull Review Here

“Extraordinary… works brilliantly!…Theatricum’s production takes risks, yet stays within the bounds of Shakespeare’s original work. The theater, set outside in a wooded alcove, is spectacular.” — La La Scoop
Full Review Here

“STUNNING… intriguing, funny and ultimately, heartbreaking… A must-see!” –Topanga MessengerFull Review Here

“Extraordinary… inspired… a theatrical version of Cinerama — and it’s all in 3-D and living color! Lear’s madness scene on a rooftop is stunningly staged and there is plenty of swordplay onstage and gamboling through the woods” — Hollywood Progressive
Full Review Here

“A truly thrilling theater experience… this gender-reversed production is a feast for the body and soul… the entire cast is terrific!” — Reviewplays.comFull Review Here

 

“A must see… I found myself shaking my head in awe of how well it worked, this risk of shifting genders… the acting is superb. Ellen Geer gives an exceptional performance as Queen Lear.… come prepared for a lovely evening of theatre, woods, food, and fun!” —Life In LAFull Review Here

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

CRITIC’S CHOICE… upends preconceptions and provokes thought… centered by a never-better Willow Geer, whose supremely lucid Helena is an eloquent, self-actualized heroine for any era…“All’s Well” may not be a flawless work, but it nonetheless ends well here.” — Los Angeles TimesFull Review Here
“Magical!… a rarely performed work of the Bard’s that you may not have already seen a dozen times” —‘Will Call for Theaterfull review here
The perfect summer outing or date-night theater event… All’s Well is packed full of delightful one-liners and memorable quotes… The physical comedy makes this play soar…diverse casting lends a marvelous cultural depth and honesty” —Topanga MessengerFull Review Here“RECOMMENDED…a fun show.. It’s quick, slick, and provides a great opportunity to see one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays with a fine cast, a unique venue and to enjoy more than a few laughs along the way.” — Stage RawFull Review Here

Much Ado About Nothing

“A rollicking good time” — Los Angeles Times
full review here
“The story comes to life anew under the stars and sycamore trees…. convincing, compelling, funny.” — Life In LAfull review here 
“A standing ovation from the Theatricum Botanicum crowd, as they were treated to a sublime performance.” –  Living Out Loud Los Angelesfull review here
“Romantic and witty… harmoniously delivered… a wonderful evening under the stars.” — LA Splashfull review here
“Theatricum Botanicum has once again delivered a terrific bit of theater… [a] gem… I wholeheartedly recommend this production. — Stage Happeningsfull review here
“INCREDIBLY SATISFYING… impossible not to smile throughout.” — Mommy Blog Expertfull review here

 

2014 Season Productions

 

REVIEWS 2013The Taming of the ShrewLos Angeles Times “Critics Pick”Edge Los AngelesShakespeare in LASplash Magazine Los Angelesexaminer.comanother review form the examiner

“CRITIC’S CHOICE! This rip-roaring take on William Shakespeare’s ever-popular romantic comedy opens the 40th anniversary season at this incomparable outdoor venue with marvelous forward momentum… [a] riotous, delightfully fun-filled romp.” — Los Angeles Times

“FIVE STARS!… every aspect of this production is remarkable… wild and perfect.” – L.A. Performing Arts Examiner

Boisterous, bawdy and big fun, Theatricum’s ‘Shrew’ is a must see” — LA Theater Examiner

“A brilliant production full of mirth, mischief and above all love…  Theatricum Botanicum delivers in a big way.” — Culver City News

“A gleeful production … This beautiful theater hidden away in the hills of Topanga and its skilled cast breathe new life into this old story.” — EDGE

“Organized mayhem… [a] naughty, bawdy, rowdy farce.” — LA Progressive

“A wonderful rowdy comedy…  Shakespeare at its best in the fairytale setting of Topanga Canyon” — LA Splash

“FUNNY! Geer’s screams of frustration are believable… Gerald C. Rivers is hilarious as Christopher Sly.” – Examiner.com

“Delightful… A fast-paced comedy that charms and delights the audience the perfect date play for -summer” – Topanga Messenger

“Fast-paced- and acrobatic, with enough music, movement, and silly sound effects to keep whole families entertained from start to finish… the rustic, idyllic setting can convert the pickiest picnickers to fans of the bard..” – LA Mommy Poppins

 

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A recent article in W Magazine says it all:

California Dreamy
A new generation of crunchy creatives has moved into L.A.’s perennially hippie-chic Topanga Canyon.
June 25, 2014 9:00 AM | by Susan Morgan
As you drive up the Pacific Coast Highway from Santa Monica, the shoreline curves around the bay and the mountains tip downward into the sea. Five miles past the city’s amusement pier, with its carousel and neon Ferris wheel, other emblems of Southern California start to appear: the Getty villa—a model of an ancient Roman country house—crowns an oceanfront cliff; and the Malibu Feed Bin, a rustic red barn selling chicken feed and livestock sundries, hunkers down at the mouth of Topanga Canyon. Turn right here.
The village of Topanga (population 8,289) has long functioned as Los Angeles’s bohemian Brigadoon. Surrounded by Topanga State Park, the largest wilderness area within a city limit in the United States, it’s accessible by just one route: Topanga Canyon Boulevard passes through chaparral-covered hills and steep outcrops of rock, winding along for 12 miles from the ocean to the San Fernando Valley. Since the early 20th century, a scattering of businesses—a rotation of general stores, taverns, spiritual centers, community galleries, and cozy cafes—have come and gone along this main drag. Perhaps emblematic of the latest wave of creatives: The old Bruno’s Dead Dog Saloon—a biker bar nicknamed the Stop and Fight—was recently transformed into Topanga Fresh Market, featuring organic, locavore fare and pressed juice. But some things don’t change. The Inn of the Seventh Ray, a terraced creekside restaurant that opened in 1973 touting “angelic vibrations,” is still festooned with fairy lights and continues to rate as a romantic destination—celebrity trackers report Leonardo DiCaprio, Channing Tatum, and Fergie as regulars. The French-born Museum of Contemporary Art director, Philippe Vergne, and the curator Sylvia Chivaratanond, who are the L.A. art world’s It couple du jour, were married there.
“When you turn off PCH and head up into the canyon, all you can see are those beautiful cliffs and trees,” says the filmmaker Alexander Payne. “You roll down the windows, smell the smells, and I think your blood pressure lowers about five points.” Since 2005, Payne, a devoted Nebraskan, has been dividing his time between a condo in downtown Omaha and a 1930s Topanga retreat boasting fruit trees, live oaks, and spectacular mountain views. “In the little city, I live as though I live in the big city,” he points out. “And in the big city, I live as though I live in the country.” The Topanga commercial attractions do have that down-home feel. Locals dig in to the breakfast special on the porch at Pat’s Topanga Grill, sip margaritas at Abuelitas Mexican Restaurant, and buy black radishes and fig yogurt at the farmers’ market on Fridays. But at the same time, one has the opportunity to practice yoga alongside models like Angela Lindvall and Sibyl Buck.
The artist and filmmaker Meredith Danluck and her husband, Jake Burghart, the director of photography for Vice Media, spent six years shuttling between New York and L.A. before happily settling in Topanga four years ago. “We both surf, so being five minutes away from the ocean has been amazing,” Danluck says. “The air here has its own story. Every day it’s something different: citrus blossoms, fireplaces, night-blooming jasmine. And I love watching the Pacific fog roll into the canyon like a slow white river.”
Topanga’s artistic roots date back at least as far as the McCarthy era, when Will Geer—a blacklisted actor and trained botanist—fled Hollywood and bought a parcel of canyon land. With his family, he established a large, working garden and an open-air theater, where Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott performed. In the ’70s, when Geer gained new fame on the hit TV show The Waltons as Grandpa and his children had grown up to be actors, the family created Theatricum Botanicum, now a venerable woodland venue for performances and workshops.
George Herms, a peripatetic beatnik who infuses visual art with a free-flowing jazz sensibility, arrived in Topanga in 1965 for an eight-year sojourn. “It was a creative community unlike anyplace I’d been a part of before—or since,” he says of his circle, which included the late Wallace Berman, one of the West Coast’s most enigmatic and influential artists; and former child actors Dean Stockwell, Billy Gray, and Russ Tamblyn. The artist Peter Alexander arrived a few years later, in 1970. He was living in downtown Los Angeles when land at the top of Tuna Canyon—located on the Malibu edge of Topanga, with a view straight out to the ocean—became available. He and his then wife, the painter Clytie Alexander, and their two small daughters camped out there, planted a garden, and eventually built a house out of timber scavenged from a demolished Union Pacific Railroad building. From their ridgeline, there was only one other inhabited place in sight: Sandstone Retreat, a nudist colony. “We could see little pink things running back and forth,” Alexander remembers. “But what was vivid was a particular sound wave that penetrated the canyon: ice rattling in cocktail glasses.”
Music has long reverberated through the canyon. Although the Topanga Corral, a roadhouse on Horseshoe Bend, burned to the ground in 1988, its musical history has grown mythic. In the hippie heyday, the local band Canned Heat pounded out their anthem “Going Up the Country” there; Neil Young, having left Buffalo Springfield to go solo, played; and Taj Mahal delivered the blues. “I remember my dad going to hear the Flying Burrito Brothers in ’68 or ’69,” recalls Wallace Berman’s son Tosh, a writer, who spent a chunk of his childhood in Topanga. “The only people in the audience were my dad and the Rolling Stones.” The musician Jennifer Pearl, of the noirishly psychedelic L.A. band VUM, says that she and her partner in love and music, Christopher Badger, “were magnetically attracted to Topanga’s ethereal forests, musical history, and strange, burnout-’60s-misfit culture.” In 2011, Pearl and Badger emigrated there from L.A.’s Eastside and settled into an apartment that had been the recording studio where Neil Young wrote and produced his 1970 LP After the Gold Rush. Embracing “a hideout, hermit lifestyle,” the couple wrote Laura Palmer/Are You Animal?—an album produced by their own label, Secret Lodge Recordings.
It’s not hard to understand what draws so many artists to Topanga: wild, wide-open spaces; enforced solitude; and an atmosphere that teeters between insular and inspiring. Perhaps the most dramatic creative compound belongs to the artists Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins, who bought a tract of land atop a mesa in 1981 and, over the years, have acquired an 80-acre spread made up of a modest house, capacious studio buildings, and a vast collection of airplane parts, vehicles, and architectural salvage that they use to create their sculptures and installations. Three years ago, the artist Sam Falls and his wife, Erin, a director at Hannah Hoffman Gallery, in Los Angeles, landed in Topanga after moving from New York. For Falls, whose process-based work often employs natural elements—rainfall, river water, sunlight—the prospect of working outdoors was a big appeal. The couple soon recruited their friend and former housemate, the artist Joe Zorrilla, who found a tiny cabin on a large property nearby. Zorrilla, who maintains a Mid-City studio, now has what he calls an “outdoor office”—a table where he sits to draw and read. “When I left New York, I wanted to slow things down,” he says. “In the canyon, there are things you couldn’t change even if you wanted to—there’s only one way in and one way out.”
Living within one’s own vision of paradise, Payne says, is central to the Topanga vibe. “Each house in the canyon is an entirely different universe,” he observes. “The only thing that unites them is a sense of creativity, of having your house reflect you in some way. I think that people who live in Topanga have two attitudes going on. One being, I love to be part of a community like this. And the other being, leave me the hell alone.”
SEE MORE Alexander Payne Angela Lindvall Art

I am currently working with two buyers from the East Coast – both of whom are n the middle of the freezing winter and making the  move to Sunny CA!

The polar vortex, bringing record-breaking low temperatures to large swaths of the country, is prompting more house hunters to search for homes in warm-weather climates, according to a Trulia study based on home searches on the real estate site from Dec. 1 to Jan. 21.

With every 10-degree drop below 41 degrees Fahrenheit, Web home searches in metros with warmer climates rose 4.4 percent, and searches for homes in warm vacation spots surged 5.5 percent. The highest increase in searches were in the South and West.

Data from realtor.com® supported these findings. While cities like Chicago and Detroit — both facing polar grips this winter — remained in realtor.com®’s top 10 cities with the most home searches in December, their month-over-month searches declined 4.95 percent and 4.04 percent, respectively. Cities with warmer climates, such as Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, and Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Orlando in Florida, rounded out the top 10 list. Other cities in Texas, Florida, and California saw increases of up to 1 percent in home searches in December.

The following metros from the Trulia study topped the list for home searches in that timeframe:

Miami: home searches rose 7.3% for every 10-degree drop in temperatures
Phoenix: +6.9%
Jacksonville, Fla.: +6.4%
Orange County, Calif.: + 6.4%
Lakeland-Winter Haven, Fla.: +6.3%
Sacramento, Calif.: +6.2%
New Orleans: +6.2%
Vacation areas — where vacation homes account for 25 percent of the housing stock — got the biggest boost in traffic as temperatures plunged. The vacation areas with the biggest increases in home-search traffic were along Florida’s coast, the study found.

Source: “Cold Spell Heats Up House Searches in Warm-Weather Markets,” The Wall Street Journal (Jan. 27, 2014)

Friday October 26th – join the fun at the annual Theatricum Boo-tanicum –

Visit the website: http://www.theatricum.com

Happy Haunting!

http://www.youtube.com/tanyashouses

While we have several homes in escrow (one with an approval from the lien holder) we will continue to market these properties until they are sold. As a result it is not uncommon to find buyers who desire to purchase in your neighborhood and are willing to wait until the next opportunity arises. With that in mind, we’re reaching out to all homeowners as we currently have pre-approved buyers who are looking to purchase now.

If you have been thinking of selling or if you are facing a challenge and need to consider your options, we encourage you to contact us for a confidential meeting. With over 50% of Americans ‘upside-down’ in their property, this is a very challenging time. Knowing and understanding your options will help you be able to affectively deal with today’s real estate issues and address them accordingly. Please contact us today for your confidential, no-obligation appointment.

The Topanga Messenger launched their new online website! Visit them at:

http://www.topangamessenger.com

In addition to http://www.onetopanga.com we now have our local newspaper only a click away.

Tell your friends! Share the link!