3:30pm | Editor’s Note: This is an expansion on our print coverage of the Best of Long Beach. Given our limited print space, we wanted to further share our experience at these amazing businesses via the many photos we took. We feel it not only allows the reader to better understand why each place was chosen, but provides the chance to spotlight local businesses visually. We will do one business every day until all 30 winners have been covered. Enjoy.
Best Family Outing: The All-American Melodrama
Family-style American fun is not the easiest of endeavors. You have the cranky youngins, the withdrawn teenager, and the parents attempting to mediate not only the tension between themselves following a heated debate about Obama versus Romney but between their children as well following a row about who gets to sit where.
Dawn Stahlak and Ken Parks – whom Dawn kept insisting was the brainchild of the undertaking – have somehow managed to achieve this endeavor. And all through theatre. Melodrama theatre to be specific – well, appropriated melodrama, where they take contemporary narratives from film and television and turn them into melodramatic, laugh-inducing mockeries.
This is, in other words, not the kind of place where you sit quietly in your seat and watch quietly. No, no. The cabaret-style seating should tell you otherwise.
“We’re proud that we have a grandmother coming in,” explains Dawn, “her 8-year-old AND teenager tagging along, and they’re all happy. We’re proud that a 16-year-old wants to his have his birthday party here. We’re proud a middle-aged couple can have a night out. We’re proud we’re in the family category because that’s what we aim for: something for everyone.”
So you know what? You boo the villain. You cheer the heroine. This is all-American and by-God-we-will-WIN entertainment, the kind that makes the teenager actually laugh with its facetiousness, the toddler laugh at its slap, and parents relish in its off-brand mockery of family melodrama. And, come hell or highwater, it’s something that Long Beach should – MUST — be immensely proud to partake in!
All American Melodrama Theatre | 429 Shoreline Village Drive | (562) 495-5900
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