July | Center Theatre Group

Marc Jacobs named a bag after her. Todd Oldham called her a total original,” and Isaac Mizrahi said Edie Beale's look goes beyond fashion. It’s the true meaning of the word style. Like her cousin, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Little Edie Bouvier Beale was an American woman of particular tastes who became a fashion icon....

Little Edie—‘Grey Gardens’ Fashion Icon

When we first developed our Boyle Heights programming three years ago, we laid what would become the foundation of our work at a community engagement strategies brainstorming session. One of the many lists we made was titled “Barriers of Participation,” alongside another list of solutions for said barriers. One of the first items we listed was...

Making Sure No One Gets Lost in Translation

Watching theatre is one thing. Taking a performance to the next level and truly interacting with it is another. Anyone attending the Young Producers Circle Disgraced event on June 24, 2016 definitely partook in the latter....

Young Producers Circle Attends (and Interacts with) ‘Disgraced’

Set against the backdrop of a crumbling home in East Hampton, New York, Grey Gardens focuses upon the mother-daughter relationship between the reclusive Edith Ewing “Big Edie” Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Little Edie. Big Edie is the opposite of a stage mom—at least according to Little Edie, she dashed her daughter’s showbiz dreams&m...

5 Musicals Showcasing ‘Stage Moms’

Disgraced is a play that everyone seems to be talking about across the country, from my family in Chicago to many friends here in L.A. I had heard about how the play dealt with contemporary faith and religion head-on. So when I received an email about Center Theatre Group’s Youth Theatre Forum for Disgraced on June 17, 2016, I got excited. Who do...

Students Discuss Faith, Identity, and ‘Art Activism’

In 1975, a reclusive mother and daughter—the aunt and cousin, respectively, of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis—living in a dilapidated Long Island mansion became American icons. The Maysles brothers’ documentary Grey Gardens is now considered a cult classic that has spawned numerous pop culture tributes, including Grey Gardens—The Mu...

Welcome to ‘Grey Gardens’

According to Center Theatre Group (and playwright Ayad Akhtar) Disgraced is a play in one act. But for cast members, our Concierge staff, and hundreds of patrons every night of the play’s run at the Mark Taper Forum (which closes on July 17, 2017), a second act began after the curtain call. The post-show Stage Talks we have held after every perfo...

Stage Talks Bring Audiences Together After ‘Disgraced’

A writer exposes the anger and pain underlying his ethnic community’s post-war American experience through deeply flawed characters and cutting humor—bringing him equal parts adulation for his work and criticism for his portrayal of his people. This is the story of Ayad Akhtar and Disgraced, the most produced play in the country, which is o...

Ayad Akhtar Exposes Cultural Cracks

We offer all of our free community workshops in and around The Shop, Center Theatre Group’s costume and prop shop in Boyle Heights, in Spanish and English. At any given workshop we host, at least three quarters of the participants are Spanish-only speakers, and almost everyone is bilingual.

Teaching Artist and Prop Master Extraordinaire Merrianne Nedreberg

In the midst of Act II of Grey Gardens—The Musical, Big Edie celebrates her adolescent friend, Jerry, and his fervor for her cooking—specifically the canned corn she cooks for him, which he chows down with delight: “I boil it on the hot plate / Till all the juice is gone / Bless his soul / He knows which side my corn is buttered on.” Bu...

10 Musical Tributes to Food: A List Inspired by ‘Jerry Likes My Corn’

On a Thursday afternoon in early June, an anonymous Downtown L.A. conference room was transformed into a 1920s recording studio on Chicago's South Side filled with music executives, musicians, a legendary blueswoman, and her entourage. The room’s walls had been covered in lists of images and ideas about theatre, music, and American history, and i...

L.A. Educators Immerse Themselves in August Wilson