Wisteria Theater Company makes it five hits in a row with their zestfully entertaining take on Douglas Carter Beane’s 2005 Broadway treat Xanadu, itself a textbook example of how to turn a movie lemon into multiple Tony-nominated lemonade.

The Olivia Newton-John/Gene Kelly flick may have been a critical and commercial bomb, but that was before the writer who gave us the movie To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar and the Tony-nominated The Little Dog Laughed took pen to paper, and Wisteria audiences now get to see what all the Broadway buzz was about.

 Cult movie fans will recall how Newton-John’s ancient Greek muse Clio traveled forward through time to the year 1980 in order to inspire frustrated artist Sonny Malone to greatness.

And ‘80s music fans will tell you that the movie featured a quintet of songs (“Magic,” “Xanadu,” “All Over The World,” “I’m Alive,” and “Suddenly”) which went on to become Top 20 Hits for Livvy and/or ELO.

 For his Broadway stage adaptation, Beane blended the movie’s wisp of a storyline with plot threads from 1981’s Clash Of The Titans to create a campy, deliciously self-aware script filled with laughs galore.

Not only this, but he found Jukebox Musical ways to interpolate the movie’s songs into the dialog while adding ELO’s “Strange Magic” and “Evil Woman” and Newton-John’s “Have You Never Been Mellow” to the film’s eleven songs, giving Xanadu one of the most recognizable and “sing-along-able” Broadway scores of the past twenty years.

 Xanadu The Musical introduces us to Greek muses Melpomene (Hadiyyah Noelle Smith) and Calliope (Lisa Dyson), jealous sisters plotting against Zeus’s youngest child Clio (Lexi Collins) by tricking her into breaking one of the Greek gods’ cardinal rules (“A muse is forbidden to fall in love with a mortal”), and failing that, by having Eros (that’s Cupid in Roman mythology) shoot Kira (the name Clio picks for her ’80s incarnation) and Sonny (Connor Bullock) with his love arrows.

Meanwhile, as in the movie, Sonny teams with mogul Danny McGuire (Kelby Thwaits) to bring an abandoned auditorium back to life, though Broadway Sonny’s dream is for “Xanadu” to become not only a center for the arts but also … a Roller Disco!

Xanadu the movie may have been a case of inadvertent campiness, but comedy wizard Beane makes this camp entirely intentional, and the more knowledgeable you are about 1980s pop culture, the more you will relish the downright hilarious book he has written for Xanadu.

Just as he did when directing and video designing Wisteria’s inspired take on The Wedding Singer, Brayden Hade has clearly done his ‘80s homework, as has costume and props designer Annie Claire Hudson, and combined with Hade’s vibrant rear projections, audiences will find themselves transported back in time to the days of leg warmers and roller discos with an occasion hint of film noir giving this Xanadu its own decidedly distinctive look.

Following star turns in such diverse roles as Cabaret’s Cliff, Avenue Q’s Princeton and Rod, and Little Shop’s Orin Scrivello D.D.S, leading man Bullock is hunky, himbo perfection as Valley Boy-voiced Sonny.

Collins, meanwhile, reveals screwball comedy chops (and a deliberately over-the-top Australian accent) as the muse of his dreams.

 Thwaits gives Danny both billionaire bombast and a big booming baritone, Smith makes for a divinely divalicious Melpomene, and SoCal musical theater treasure Dyson is a wisecracking firecracker as the sassy Calliope.

Last but not least, supporting triple-threats don’t get any more fabulous than muses Trae Adair (Thalia), Christina Jardine (Euterpe), Danielle Johnson (Erato), and Chris Thume (Terpsichore), who like Smith and Dyson several additional roles each, with special snaps to Adair for his showstopping dance turn as Young Danny and to Thume for donning an extra pair of equine legs thanks to Centaur designer Taylor Renee Castle.

Choreographer Madison Mi Hwa Oliver has the entire cast pulling off plenty of pizzazzy moves (with Corinne Santoro and Dylan Maloney serving as roller skate coaches) and Nolan Monsibay earns multiple music direction points, in particular for girl group harmonies that recall two sets of singing girl siblings, the 1940s Andrews Sisters and the Pointers of 1980s fame.

Xanadu is produced by Renee Wylder. Hudson is stage manager and swing. Josh Collins is technical director. Tanya Cyr is scenic painter. David French designed the Greek columns and Hade designed just about everything else.

Like this past spring’s The Wedding Singer, Xanadu is the kind of musical that regional theaters jumped at when it first came out but not so much in recent years, making it yet another perfect choice for a fresh new theater company that keeps on combining quality with quantity show after show after show. (Wait another month and Into The Woods will be debuting, with even more productions planned for the fall.)

I thoroughly enjoyed Wisteria Theater’s Xanadu, laughed my head off, mouthed the words to each and every song, and even shed a tear or two Sonny and Kira duetted “Suspended In Time.”

Simply put, I had a Xanadoozy of a good time!

Wisteria Theater, 7061 Vineland Ave, North Hollywood.
www.wisteriatheater.com

–Steven Stanley
July 11, 2025

Visit www.theatreinla.com/nowplayingrs.php for a review roundup of what’s now playing in theaters around Los Angeles.

Tags: Douglas Carter Beane, Los Angeles Theater Review, Wisteria Theater Company