Speaking of talented people I know…
You're probably sick of me telling you about Frank Ferrante, who miraculously turns himself into everyone's favorite comedian and stars in An Evening with Groucho at theaters around the country. He was in San Bernardino last Friday and in this post, I told all my fellow Angelenos that that was about as close to our city as he ever performed.
Well, I lied. He will be slightly closer to us the evening of Friday, May 7 when he performs at the Fox Performing Arts Center in Riverside, California. That's about a one hour drive from the heart of Los Angeles if there's no traffic. On a Friday late afternoon/early evening, there will be traffic so I don't know how long it'll take…but I think a band of my friends and I are going to go and find out. This is, I've heard, a wonderful old theater that has just undergone a full restoration to become a wonderful new old theater. What's more, Frank's performance will be preceded by a screening of Duck Soup.
Consider the courage of this man. We're going to sit there and watch the real Groucho in (arguably) his best movie and then this Ferrante upstart is going to come out after that and do his whole show, impersonating Groucho Marx, right after we've seen the genuine article. The nerve! The chutzpah! With plenty of chutz! Well, if anybody can go head-to-head with Rufus T. Firefly, it's Frank.
Details and tix can be obtained at this site. At the moment, the page there only says they're running Duck Soup and doesn't say anything about Frank performing after. This (I believe) is because for contractual reasons, Frank couldn't be advertised until after his San Bernardino engagement…so Riverside put up the announcement without him and someone hasn't gotten around yet to updating the page. If you'd like to make a dinner/show evening of it, there's an Old Spaghetti Factory about a half-mile away from the theater and I suspect that's where many of us will be converging beforehand to converse and eat old spaghetti. Then we'll go get a double dose of Groucho.